by zix » Sat Feb 16, 2008 9:27 am
Bren_D - how are you doing?
It would be fun if you would be able to improve your roasts - if you haven't lost all hope by now.
How did you roast? Fan assisted? Usual convection (over+under heat)? Grill heat? Or are you using a gas oven?
First time off is usually a miss. As with most food, you need to get to know how it reacts first. Once familiar with the process and your tools, your results will improve.
This said, some ovens seem to be *very* hard to control and/or with very uneven heating.
I will put up my "oven roasting 101" on the TMC wiki soon, this is the intended place for it anyway, it just hasn't happened yet for various reasons.
I just now did the very first try with our new, fan equipped oven. First time ever fan assisted roast for me!
I let the oven heat up on the common "over+under heat" setting. During the roast I tried out three of the settings:
the Grill(over heat)+fan setting,
the usual over+under heat setting, and
fan + under heat setting
The immediate observation is that fan assisted roasting yields faster roasts. LOTS faster. I usually expect to spend around 15 minutes roasting in the oven. This time it took less than 10 minutes.
This is consistent with the usual description of fan ovens needing slightly lower temp settings than what the cookbook says, and giving shorter cooking time.
It is well known that hot air is a very efficient way of transferring heat, so this is completely logical, and also consistent with the rule of professional roasters: fluid bed/hot air roasters give short roast times, indirect heating roasters take longer (25 minutes not uncommon).
To avoid too fast roasts - I don't like half of my beans reaching first crack after less than 3 minutes, which they did this time - I think I will start my roasts on common over+under heat, and change to one of the fan settings when I want to ramp up the heat profile. Shorter roast times is fine - as long as the beans are given enough time to reach first crack.
The fan assisted oven roast actually seems to conduct heat to the beans much the same way as the hot air gun + bowl method does. The beans react the same up until first crack, it seems like each bean wants to reach 1C individually, as opposed to convection heating where they all reach 1st C more or less the same time. And the roast evens out during the time between 1st C and 2nd C, just like with the hot air gun. End result looks great.
‹• Bezzera B3000AL • Strietman ES3 • Chemex • Cona C size • Aeropress • Vev moka • Bialetti Brikka • Espro • Cezve • Bacchi Espresso • Arrarex Caravel •
• HG-1 • Lido 1 & E-T • OE Pharos •
• oven • hot air gun • Behmor •›