Well, what some of you may or may not know is that for the last two plus years, my 'day job' has been as an Account Executive with Lamill Coffee. My job is to maintain a base of about 70 clients, and grow business by gaining new clientele. It's cool because I have relationships with some of the best restaurants in LA, have met some great people, and I can honestly say that for the most part, I love my job. (my clients include: Providence, Boa, Katana, Sushi Roku, Hyde Lounge, Katsuya, Bastide, The Foundry on Melrose and my favorite pub, The Village Idiot).
One cool thing is I get lots of hookups at places, or at least I'm never short of a good dining recommendation.
Well, at Lamill, we've just opened our first retail venture in Silverlake. The Lamill Coffee Boutique is a fusion of a high-end restaurant and a coffee shop. We prepare the world's best espresso, coffee and tea beverages and we also pair it with food items from a kitchen helmed by a Michelin starred chef, Michael Cimarusti, from Providence. It's not cheap...but it's not just a cup of joe and a muffin either.
What I'm basically getting at is that we're doing very innovative and cool things with coffee and tea in terms of preparation, recipes, available items, etc...and one of them, I wanted to get all nerdy about in this blog.
One of the things our R&D department (that's you, Eton) is doing is creating out-of-the-box ideas for beverages. One current idea is coffee spheres. The basic premise is to take a beautifully refreshing organic iced tea and actually put tiny spheres of coffee in the drink (think: boba, but smaller...and totally different) so you can enjoy a burst of coffee taste in the tea...this could extend to so many different things. At Providence restaurant, they do it with a trio of cocktails: Gin & Tonic, Greyhound, and Mojito...all these in a sphere that you put in your mouth and then it EXPLODES with flavor and taste.
Now, here's where I get nerdy. The process is very scientific. You take a sodium alginate and add it to the coffee to create a jelly of sorts. You then take that liquid-jelly and add it to a calcium-water solution and when the two come in contact with other, it forms a polymer, or a skin, around the outside of whatever liquid you've used. The end result in this case, is a little coffee droplet, which when handled delicately, measured accurately and prepared meticulously, can then be added to almost any other beverage for a burst of flavor, taste, complexity, etc.
So, here's what I'm talking about:
The coffee on the right, the sodium alginate bath in the back, and the wash in front.
The coffee and sodium alginate is then spooned through tiny holes, creating droplets of coffee that drop into the calcium liquid.
Those spheres are then ladled out of the mixture and washed in the water bath.
And then you have an organic iced tea, complimented by little caviar sized coffee spheres for a burst of flavor.
Pretty damn nerdy, right!
Oh, and for those of you who want to check out the Lamill Boutique, it's located at 1636 Silverlake Blvd LA, CA 90026 7am-7pm Tues-Sunday. It's worth a visit for lunch one day, or an amazing place to go for dessert after dinner (not yet..but ultimately we'll be open until about 11pm).
