Supermarkets and the Small Irish Producer

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS JUST A MIRROR SITE AT THIS STAGE. MY CURRENT BLOG IS HERE!

One of the biggest challenges for the small Irish food producer is to negotiate and deal with supermaket chains. Inevitably they have all the power, and since you are small, you are very much at the mercy of their whims. Whether you remain on their shelf or not is of little interest to them, no matter how much they like to tell eveyone how important the Irish producer is to them. "Irish" is a good selling point for getting customers in the shop and feeling good about it, but inevitably Irish specialty lines will not perform as well as the huge multinationals. I don't know how many zeros you would have to add on to our marketing budget to bring it up to the level of Haagen Dazs/Diageo (not to mention Ben&Jerrys/HB/Unilever), but it would be many indeed. It will be a long time before we shift as many tubs out of a shop as they do!

Bord Bia can be helpful to some degree at least in terms of information, but anyone going down the supermarket route must be wary. In our own case, we decided to avoid the big chains because we've heard the stories of specialty producers who think they've hit the lotto when they're listed, spent a fortune ramping up production for the huge orders, and then a year later go bust when they are unceremoniously dropped.

We decided to go into Superquinn as a supermarket trial, and have been in their shops for about a year. Yesterday, they threatened to de-list us. I don't know if it's a ploy to try to hammer us down on price, or if it's that the new frozen food buyer wants to get rid of all lines except the very best sellers, which is standard practise when they want to optimise sales per square metre. For us, being dropped would not be the end of the world, as we are only in a few of their shops and it's a small percentage of our overall sales. However, it's very frustrating in so far as many of our best customers are in areas served by Superquinn, and we know that they are delighted to be able to buy our ice cream without having to travel.

The point of all of this is not to complain about things being unfair. We drop products all the time in our own shops for a whole variety of reasons. It's that I hope that eventually this site will be a better way to keep in touch with customers than mail and our website. That it also can be a way to mobilise customers in circumstances like these. Right now we have hundreds of customers who buy our ice cream in Superquinn every week, and they have no idea that it's quite likely that buying the ice cream will soon become a lot harder (at least we have many other accounts in the Dublin area, but it's too much to expect customers to regularly go out of their way). If we could generate 100 or more emails to Superquinn from Superquinn customers, they would have to pay attention (at least I hope they would). I know that if even three customers begged us to keep a product we had dropped from our own shop we would stock just for them.

I would love any feedback or suggestions.

A great (though depressing) reference on how supermarkets work is Joanna Blythman's book Shopped. Also, Conor O'Neill has written a great article about small producers and blogging.

Technorati tags: ice cream, supermarkets, food, books, artisian, Irish

Coffee at Home and Crema

Copernicus over at Midnight Court wrote in a comment here about having trouble getting good crema on his espresso using a little stainless steel espresso pot at home. Given that he said he spent time working in Italy, I assume he means one like that shown above. Practically everyone who has had a meal in someone's house in Italy would have seen these. My grandmother, who lived on the Lago Maggiore used hers religiously every day.

I can only get very inconsistent crema myself making coffee made by this method. However, I think that the importance of crema is overstated in terms of home use. In fact, it's only a guide (though a good one) even in a cafe. There is a excellent article on Virtual Coffee in which the author says that while he believes crema is important, the mere presence of crema does not mean that the espresso is a good one, and that an espresso with great crema can be burnt and bitter.

A friend in Dingle is so fixated on crema that he has ordered a La Pavoni pump machine like the one above after I have him a loan of mine. It's a beautiful machine, and it's probably the best possible option for making espressos at home, but frankly it's a bit fussy for my taste.

When I stagger downstairs and into the kitchen in the morning, I want a coffee that tastes good, and I don't need it to look perfect. In a restaurant or cafe, it's a different story, and I expect both. That's the standard for our own shops. But if my morning coffee doesn't have any crema, I'm not going to worry as long as it tastes as I expect it should.

I think my grandmother would have stared blankly at any mention of "crema" regarding her coffee pot, as would probably most Italians making coffee by this method. They would probably say, "If you want crema, go to an espresso bar. If you want a good coffee, stop babbling nonsense, and I will serve it to you."

So if you're happy with your coffee, be happy - crema or no crema! If not, switch beans. If you're still not happy, try making coffee by another method.

If you want to try the cafetière method, it's cheap and easy, but the coffee will be less like espresso than the above method. I bought the one below in Roches, and I even get a decent crema! Use good coffee and let the water cool slightly after boiling. If you want a French-style café au lait, use a dark roast ground medium-fine, make the coffee strong, warm the milk (don't scald it) and combine about half milk and half coffee. Bring on the croissants!

Technorati tags: cafe, cafetiere, Italian, coffee, crema, Irish

Apologies

I haven't had the time to post because I've decided to move house (host). The lack of categories in Blogger has been making me crazy, and this is just early days for me...

With suggestions from the very helpful Conor O'Neill, I have been brave and got a proper host and domain.

I'm much better at ice cream than html, but here is what will be soon the new home of

Ice Cream Ireland

I guess I'll keep both of them going for the moment.

Let me know what you think!

Kerry Cow and Agritourism

I mentioned the Kerry cow in an earlier post, and this afternoon I braved the lashing rain to visit the Dingle farmer with whom we've been working toward using the milk in our ice cream. One of his cows had twins last week, and that means the some Kerry cow milk will be coming our way again soon!

I apologise about the quality of the photos, as the rain made it hard to get a clear shot, but hopefully you can see that the Kerry cow is different from the Friesian (Holstein) cows that you usually see about the place. It is an indigenous breed that is smaller, hardier, and generally much more alert and healthy looking.

I can't wait to try making ice cream again with it!

What really excites me is that I think projects like this (i.e. farmers working with artesian food producers) can be one way that small Irish farmers can survive in the future of deminished or abolished subsidies.

Another way would be agritourism. It certainly seems that more Irish farmers should be looking at it, especially in Dingle or other places that are lucky enough to have a good flow of tourists.

They are mad for it in Italy, where people pay a fortune to pick olives, and in the US even movies have been made about city boys paying to round-up cattle at a dude ranch. Farmers gain income by offering lodgings and meals and can not only avoid having to hire help at harvesting time but get people who pay handsomely for the privilege. What could be bad about that?

Perhaps the problem here is that so many Irish people couldn't wait to leave the farm themselves and move to the city to try to make a better living (my own family included). Perhaps the farmers who are left are so used to this state of affairs that they can't see why anyone would want to come back, even as a tourist. But many city people see a week on a farm as a way of bringing balance back into their lives, and I think this trend will grow.

In fairness, agritourism does exist in this country in various forms, and even in Dingle with its pet farms and corn maze. There are other Irish farms at it including Sweetbank in Wicklow with its sublime fruits and farm shop/cafe, which an excellent example of how it can work...

Technorati tags: agritourism, ice cream, farm, cow, Kerry, Dingle

Honey Chai Ice Cream

One of the best and most rewarding trips I've ever taken was to India. From the tea plantations in Darjeeling to the beaches of Goa to the Ganges and colours of Rajisthan, it's an amazing country.

The eating was fantastic (as long as you do as they do and avoid meat) and the drink of choice, outside of Goa with it's exotic fruit drinks, was chai. Served up in cans by chai wallahs (vendors) it was sweet (they use lots of condensed milk) and fragrant.

Feeling nostalgic for the warmth of India in this seemingly endless winter, I made a chai ice cream today, and decided to add a bit of honey for additional sweetness. I also tossed in some (but not too many) dark chocolate chips because I wanted some kick!

To the right is what the finished product looked like...

If you want to try it, the recipe is below. You'll notice it's almost identical to the recipe for Honey Lavender ice cream from a previous post.

Murphys Honey-Chai Ice Cream

1 Cup (237ml) Sugar
5 Egg Yolks
1 1/8 Cups (266ml) Cream
1 1/8 Cups(266ml) Milk
6 Chai teabags
2 Cups (475ml) Water
1 tablespoons liquid honey
A handful of dark chocolate chips.

Yield: 6 Servings

1. Boil the chai in the water until the water has reduced to 1/10th of the volume.
2. Remove from the heat and strain. Stir in the honey.
3. Beat the sugar and egg yolks together until thick and pale yellow.
4. Bring the milk to a simmer.
5. Beat the milk into the eggs and sugar in a slow stream.
6. Pour the mixture back into pan and place over low heat. Stir until the custard thickens slightly (around 70C). Use a thermometer, as at 75C the eggs will scramble!
7. Allow the custard to cool.
8. Mix in the lavender/honey and chocolate chips.
9. Whip the cream.
10. Gently fold in the custard.
11. Freeze using a domestic ice cream machine, or cover and place in the freezer.

Notes: 1. I suggest you use a simple, liquid honey. Darker or more complex honeys will have a very strong flavour, so in that case use less!
2. If you can't find chai in your supermarket, you'll find it in the tea section of your health food shop. I used organic Clipper chai (see top photo).

Technorati tags: chocolate chip, chai, honey, ice cream, recipe

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Since we were a little shy of cake in the Dingle shop, I went baking. Nothing fancy, just some yummy chocolate chip cookies.

I like my cookies dense not fluffy, and these make a perfect combination with vanilla ice cream, if you want to try them.

Here's the recipe:

Murphys Chocolate Chip Cookies

135g plain flour (no rising agents)
115g butter
75g sugar
90g light brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
150g 50% good quality chocolate chips or chunks

1. Preheat oven to 190C.
2. Combine sugar, and brown sugar and melted butter and beat until light.
3. Beat in egg.
4. Slowly add flour, mixing all the time.
5. Add vanilla.
6. Stir in chocolate morsels.
7. Spoon onto a lightly buttered baking tray.
8. Bake 5 min.
9. Remove tray, rap on counter.
10. Bake another 4 minutes.
11. Transfer to wire racks to cool.

Yield: 7 large cookies

As always, good chocolate and vanilla will make all the difference in how these taste.

The photo with the mixer is a triple recipe, so don't worry if your mixer doesn't look that full!

Let me know how it works for you!

Technorati tags: chocolate chip, cookie, chocolate, ice cream, recipe
File as: Recipe1

Cafetière vs. Caffè Americano

With apologies to Markham and others who have given up coffee for Lent, I am going to return briefly to the subject, because I think we've made a break-through. It's not anything earth-shattering, but still I think worth talking about.

For the last years we've been struggling with making a simple cup of coffee. It might seem a humble option in a board full of caramel lattes, and affogato al caffès, but still I feel it's like vanilla ice cream - a bench mark. If I go to an ice cream shop, I often taste their vanilla because often the simplest flavours are both the hardest to do and the easiest to judge.

In our shops, we've been serving Caffè Americanos when people ask for "coffee." The Americano is perfect for the many people who like it, but it's not perfect for all coffee drinkers. Although many people think it's a strong coffee because it comes from an espresso machine, the name means quite the opposite. Italians called it "Americano" years ago because it tasted like American coffee to them, the kind you still find in US diners. In other words, it was very weak to their palates.

After a lot of tasting, we've decided on the French-style plunger, or "Cafetière," for our regular coffee. We've chosen an organic, fair-trade bean from Maher's and grind it quite fine. The result is a deep, rich flavour for those who like their coffee very strong. For everyone else, there's still of course the Americano.

Technorati tags: caffe, cafetiere, americano, coffee, latte, Irish
File as: ccof

Killarney, Nephews and Playgrounds

Today my brother and I left Dingle to spend a Sunday working in the Killarney shop. It was a pleasant affair, with a lot of regulars and many new customers in, mostly from Cork. I worked the espresso machine, my brother scooped, and Misha did most everything else.

Toward the end of the day my nephew showed up, and he and I headed off to the new playground in the National Park. It's opposite the cathedral, and I highly suggest it to anyone with kids. It's really a big step up in terms of sophistication from most of the playgrounds around with multiple climbing contraptions, swings, slides, but all on a bigger scale than usual.

The children (and parents) all seemed delighted, and I had to practically rip my nephew away at the end of an enjoyable hour.

There definitely are some treasures in the park besides the landscape and wildlife!

Tomorrow it's back to making ice cream...

Technorati tags: Killarney, Dingle, national park, playground, Ireland

St. Patrick's Day in Dingle

A few photos from the parade in Dingle, which is a pleasant and very local affair. There was a great turnout in spite of the cold day, and of course the Dingle/An Daingean controversy played its part...

I'm too busy in the shop serving coffee and ice cream to write more!

Technorati tags: coffee, Dingle, St. Patrick, parade, saint

Belgian Chocolate

One of the best things about being in this business (besides ice cream) is that many days you have treats such as coffee and chocolate arriving in the door, making for happy eating and drinking.

Today, one of our great customers, the mysterious Lady K from the greater Dublin area, dropped in a gift of some Pierre Marcolini chocolate she had picked up from their store in Belgium. It's truly delicious. What a treat! For those interested, they also have a boutique in Kensington and New York.

Then a salesman arrived in from Nairobi coffee, and it was double espressos all around. I don't think we'll switch from our current supplier, but it certainly gave the afternoon a good buzz!

Technorati tags: coffee, chocolate, ice cream, Belgian, London

Return to Chocolate and Sugar

Today in the factory, JP and Neill were busy making ice cream in preparation for the St. Patricks day crowds-to-be in the shops. Since they needed some help, and I'm happy for any excuse to procrastinate from paperwork and administration, I went making hot chocolate.

Going through the process yet again, I thought I'd add that if you want to make our hot chocolate, (or the chocolate sauce recipe), make sure you follow the instructions about heating the milk and adding it to the melted chocolate. It really is the only way to get a good emulsion, and your sauce or hot chocolate will be smooth, glossy and professional-looking.

For anyone interested, I learned almost everything I know about chocolate by taking the chocolate course offered by Valrhona (courtesy of our distributor Odaios), and there are many worse ways to spend a few days!

Finally, with the news of the closing of the Mallow sugar plant, it occurs to me that it would be a great business opportunity for someone to buy the plant and make organic sugar. Keep the jobs, keep the farmers happy, and go some way to redressing the huge organic trade deficit in this country. It would be one less thing we would have to import!

Technorati tags: sugar, sauce, recipe, chocolate, ice cream, Ireland

Sauce, Ice Cream and Decoration

After passing on the recipes for chocolate and caramel sauce, I thought perhaps it might time for a brief mention of dessert decoration.

Now I am not a dessert chef but an ice cream man, and I tend to think in terms of quality of product, not quality of presentation. It is inescapable, however, that good presentation not only impresses your customers or dinner guests, but it also actually makes the dessert taste that little bit better.

The cool thing about a bit of decoration is that you can take something as simple as a scoop of ice cream and get a certain "wow" factor from the lucky recipients with a tiny bit of effort.

Since not everyone has access to cream dispensers, chocolate cups, sugar sticks, and other tricks of the trade, here's a dead simple tip. Go down to your local shop that sells basic kitchenware and invest in one or more little plastic ketchup/mustard bottles. Make sure they have a narrow tip.

Fill them up with your sauce(s) and you can decorate away to your hearts content, basically drawing patterns! I'm sure you can come up with cooler designs than me!

A bit of fresh fruit and cream would dress it up even further, and with two different sauces you really can go wild.

If you use a big plate as your palette, the dessert will look better. Also, a white plate probably shows off your artistry best.

By the way, our chocolate sauce recipe has so much chocolate that it will go hard when it gets cold. You will need to reheat it, and the easiest way is to stick the bottle in a cup of hot water...

Thanks to Dan for his hand and design in the top photo!

Technorati tags: caramel, sauce, recipe, chocolate, ice cream, decoration

Ode to Sugar and Caramel Sauce

As we've been refining our caramel recipe, it occurs to me again that sugar is amazing. Especially as Irish sugar production is dwindling, it seems like a little paean of praise is in order.

You have this white, hard substance that dissolves into a clear liquid, sweetens everything it touches, turns into candy when cooked to a certain temperature, and it can be spun, pulled, and hardened. In all its various forms, it provides happiness to people every day. There might be health concerns and visits to the dentist, but we still have dessert at the end of a meal because it makes us feel good, and that's not a bad thing at all.

The crusaders brought the first sugar back to Europe (and it got to the Mid-East from Polynesia via India, Persia, etc.) along with numerous enlightening discoveries learned from the Arabs. I am happy that they did, and surprised and grateful that they didn't eat it all on the long trip back home. Otherwise, we'd be working with honey, and you can't make caramel sauce with honey!

Here's a recipe if you want to try it. Good luck. It's not the easiest thing to make. Please take care, because melted sugar is dangerously hot!

Murphys Caramel Sauce Recipe

Ingredients:
200g Sugar
100ml Water
250ml of Milk
100ml of Cream

1. Put the sugar in a large saucepan and evenly pour water over it.
2. Place over medium heat without stirring, until the sugar solution turns a deep amber colour, and most of water has evaporated.
3. Take off the heat and add the milk.
4. Immediately add the cream and stir vigorously. (If you don't add it immediately, the sauce will go lumpy).
5. It may be necessary to reheat in order to fully dissolve the ingredients.

Note: If you have problems cooking the sugar evenly and it starts to brown only at the edges, you can use a whisk to stir it, but you might have to pass the finished sauce through a sieve as it tends to make the sugar clump...

By the way, I know that not everyone can eat sugar, and regarding diabetics, I'm still on the frustrating search for a natural way to make diabetic ice cream. If anybody has any ideas...

Finally, thanks to Conor O'Neill for providing this link regarding chocolate and health. It helps with my chocolate is not a sin argument!

Technorati tags: caramel, sugar, recipe, sauce, ice cream, Irish
File as: Recipe1

Coffee Rant Number Two

OK, I know I might be getting a little repetitive and negative here as I've already ranted about coffee on this blog, and I promise to sweeten things up with the next post.

However, after going in for a couple of coffees in an un-named cafe in Kerry, ordering a cappuccino and latte, and being served watery, scalded drinks that were identical except the cups, I have to ask again, how can so few people care about their coffees, especially when the Irish coffee-drinking culture is exploding?

At the very least, baristas could be trained in basic definitions of the drinks and know that a cappuccino and a latte are not the same. It's not a guarded secret! The information's out there. Lavazza Training Centre and Espresso Planet are two of about 1,900,000 sites that came up when I typed "Espresso terminology" in Google.

The crazy thing is that I do not at all consider myself a coffee expert. It's just that I can't understand how people can't inject a greater level of care in what they do...

By the way, in the other coffee post, I wrote a tip for making a good espresso. One way to tell if it's a decent one is that an espresso should look like a mini Guinness, and an espresso without crema is like a pint without a head. You wouldn't serve it.

If you're in the business or have an espresso machine at home, pull an espresso (above) and/or an americano (right) into a glass, and if it's a good one you will see that it even settles like a freshly-pulled pint, turning from a bubbly brown into black!

Technorati tags: espresso, Kerry, cappuccino, coffee, latte, Irish

Information Overload and the Kerry Cow

Even before my recent introduction to blogging, I was suffering from information overload. I have at least five books half-read, from "Leonardo da Vinci" to the interesting and disturbing "Shopped." I just managed to finish Tim Richardson's excellent book Sweets, (see right) so at least I can put that aside, but the stack of books either being read or waiting to be read is alarming.

Then there's the Irish Times, which we get every day in the shop, the food magazines such as Food and Wine that I could read all day, and my chronic addiction to the New Yorker.

I won't even get into to trying to descripe the alarming stack of papers, leaflets and booklets on everything food and ice cream that is balancing in a huge pile in my inbox.

Add to this the wealth of available blogs, not to mention excellent Irish blogs, and I think my brain will crack! You could spend a lifetime trying to get through it. I think I need to get away from it all and just make some ice cream!

By the way, with the weather warming up and the cattle back on the grass, we should be able to get back to working with a local farmer here who has some Kerry cows.

The milk from this indiginous breed is fabulously smooth and creamy, and the preliminary tests we did last year with our ice cream were extremely positive.

We'll be going out to the farm in the next couple of days...

Also, Clodagh McKenna just told me she has a cookbook coming out in November and has included one of our recipes. There's a heap of Christmas gifts sorted, and it's only March!

Technorati tags: ice cream, Kerry, milk, books, cookbooks, Irish

Chocolate and Lent

We are into Lent, which is a sad time for us. Customers come in looking a little mournful, and you try to cheer them up talking about the exciting new organic chocolate from Valrhona that's just arrived and is truly excellent. They look even more desolate and say, "I've given chocolate up for Lent." Yes, chocolate and Lent are anathema in Ireland.

As you know, chocolate is very dear to my heart, and the point of this certainly is not to undermine Lent. You might also think I'm just being greedy in a holy time, which is not the case at all. In fact, we more than make up for any loss of chocolate sales with lots of coffee (or even more tea, if customers have also given up coffee), chocolate-free cakes and ice cream. I guess people have to make up for that empty chocolate part of their soul.

Which makes me digress and think of my grandmother Kitty, who had a pub in Cork. She dreaded Lent because all the fellows gave up the drink. Mind you, they didn't give up her pub, which did a flying trade. They gave up the porter, and for the whole period before Easter, got more sloppy drinking sherry, port, etc. than they ever would have done if they stuck with their usual pints.

No, what I question with this giving up of chocolate, and you might find this a bit literal, but as far as I know the concept of fasting had to do with meat. Look at the pre-Lenten festivals - "Carnival" means "Farewell to meat" in Latin. I've never heard of "Chocolate-val." People who took a more stringent line on the fasting would also give up wine, and the real penitents would shun all animal products and basically become vegan. However, being vegan means you can eat natural bittersweet chocolate, which shouldn't have milk in it.

In fact, I found this snippet in the Catholic Encyclopedia in reference to fasting during Lent: "...the custom has been tolerated of taking a cup of liquid (e.g., tea or coffee, or even chocolate) with a fragment of bread or toast in the early morning..."

"Hold on!" you might say. "What about chocolate eggs at Easter? Shouldn't we undertake a penance for all the chocolate we will devour?" That's good thinking, but perhaps such a fast is better suited to children.

If you study the history of Easter, the chocolate egg is a recent phenomenon, and the whole "eggs as renewal" metaphor was pagan anyway, as was the Eostre holiday. The druids certainly didn't have any chocolate with which to cheer themselves up (or give up).

"But it's an unhealthy sin! You should give up fags, drink and chocolate!" Is it unhealthy? The other two have serious health consequences, but there have been numerous studies to the contrary about chocolate. Check out CNN, Newsday, BBC, and the Irish Examiner to name just a few sources.

Now I couldn't really say, "Eat chocolate, and do away with meat!" as I don't eat meat anyway, and so Lent is a breeze. Besides, I feel in my heart for local butchers, who have a terrible time with the multiples squeezing them out of business, and forty days of lost sales would be more than any retailer could handle.

Still, I feel chocolate really is getting rough and perhaps mis-guided treatment... Might I suggest some sort of middle ground? The following list mixes penitence with a complementary feel-good factor:

List of Things to Give Up for Lent:

1. Chocolate with zero cocoa content
2. Pre-packaged meats from supermarkets
3. Tinned prawns
4. Wine in gallon jugs
5. UHT milk and cream
6. Processed cheeses
7. Non-free-range eggs
8. Anything with food colouring
9. Instant coffee
10. Fast food

Technorati tags: ice cream, Lent, chocolate, Ireland, cork, Irish, sin

Hot Chocolate for a Cold Day

I shouldn't be in the office on a Saturday, but it's snowing outside, and besides the plumber and refrigeration guy have come to try to fix our water chiller, showing such diligence on a Saturday, that here I am.

A couple of days ago, I found a blog called The Big Drought that made a mention of this site, and he talked about the hot chocolate he drank in our shop. Given the weather, and given the fact the fellow's off drink for the year, I thought I'd give up the recipe for our bittersweet hot chocolate.

It's thick, rich, and not for the faint-hearted!

The ingredients are simple, but the process is important if you want a smooth result.

Murphys Bittersweet Hot Chocolate

125 g chocolate (good quality 70%)
500 ml milk
45 gm sugar (2 tablespoons + 1.5 teaspoons)

1. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or microwave.
2. Heat the milk and sugar together to about 45C and make sure the sugar is dissolved.
3. Add the warmed milk to the melted chocolate in small parts, mixing all the time, to create a smooth emulsion.
4. Warm to drinking temperature (55C).
5. Garnish with grated chocolate and/or whipped cream and enjoy!

Four servings.

Notes:

1. The quality will really depend on the quality of chocolate that you use. I suggest Valrhona, Callebaut, or Lindt dark chocolate.

2. The amount of sugar will vary depending on the chocolate. Obviously you can add more if you want it sweeter. Adding less won't necessarily make it more "chocolate-y" as the taste buds need some sweetness to bring out the flavour of the chocolate.

3. See also Chocolate and Chocolate Sauce

Technorati tags: hot chocolate, chocolate, hot, ice cream, recipe
File as: Recipe1 Chocolate1

Snow in Dingle & 5 Ways to Improve Coffee

Today, with quite a bit of work and stress, we managed to get the Dingle shop back open. It was an odd thing to open an ice cream shop with snow all about Dingle. What an impressive sight first thing in the morning, although the snow melted quickly everywhere except the mountains.

There are so many bits a pieces after four months of being closed, that you end up running around for days collecting, cleaning, buying.

However, it's a great feeling to having the shop back in operation, and it's a wonderful thing to have the espresso machine up and running. My day certainly improved with a double caffe moccha!

Now, please forgive a rant... What astonishes me is the dreadful quality of coffee most places in Ireland. So many of us have become coffee drinkers, but somehow quality hasn't followed as quickly as I would have thought. We're travelling to countries that serve decent coffee, and most Irish people know the difference between good and bad, so why aren't more baristas about the place upping their game? It takes relatively little effort to make decent espressos etc., and I'm amazed that more people don't do it.

Here are five ways to instantly improve coffee drinks:

1. Run an espresso shot to 1 oz. Anything longer will bring in a watery taste and bitterness.

2. If you're making a latte or cappuccino, don't overheat the milk! There is a reason that in Italy you will never burn your mouth on a latte. There is as reason that you're supposed to simmer milk, not boil it. Over 65C, the milk proteins change and the fat separates out. We have such great milk in this country. Why ruin it?

3. Get the grind right. If it's too fine and packed too tight, you will get a burned taste. If it's too coarse, the shot will be watery. A good shot should have a head like a pint of porter without being burned.

4. Filter the water coming to the espresso machine.

5. Grind your beans fresh! It's amazing how quickly ground coffee can taste stale.

There are lots of places to learn about coffee. Bellisimo is one of a million helpful sites.

Finally, I have to thank Pauline, one of our customers-who-have-become-friends, who rang to let us know that our ice cream was poorly displayed in Superquinn - Sundrive. It's an amazing thing to have customers looking out for us, especially now that we're selling through a distributor and have less contact with the shops than we used to. How can we thank them?

For now, just... Thanks!