A few years ago I paid for a lesson from a coffee professional.  She had a recipe she had perfected and she taught it to me.  When it was time to ladle out the coffee beans, I didn’t see a scoop.

“Where’s the scoop?” I asked her.

“You can just use your hands,” she said.

Now, this made it no less precise.  We were using a scale to measure exactly how many grams of coffee were going into this (it was the kalita wave technique, by the way).

So for the past two or three years, I have been using my hands.  Getting a handful, then controlling whether they poured out one by one or by the dozen.  My hand would get dirty.  I guess coffee is oilly.  I would have to wash it immediately afterward.

This Christmas my little sister got me a hand made wooden coffee scoop.  It was too cute not to use so I began measuring the grams, only using the scoop, and I realized that three slightly heaping scoops were almost exactly to the gram as much as the recipe required.

So for the past eight days I have been using the scoop, and I put away the scale.

This got me thinking.  It’s nice to work blind, but would it be as satisfying if I didn’t know scientifically that within a certain margin of error this was exactly how much coffee I wanted?  Yet I know, over time, I’m going to start using less, or more beans from scoop to scoop and I won’t go back and measure it later.  Plus, now I’m using it for the french press I got for Christmas, and that requires a completely different measurement.

I am a Computer Scientist.  That means I have a scientist’s brain but I like shortcuts.  Apparently it applies to coffee as well.  It doesn’t hurt that I am also an artist.  I like to improvise.  How can one ever reconcile these opposing forces?

I think the secret is to alternate.  Measure, plan.  Then throw it away.  Then take it out of the trash and compare.  Measure again.

In cooking, I learned from the very precise measurements of Maangchi, but most Koreans of the older generation (and my husband) don’t cook with measurements.  I started with Maangchi, memorized her recipes, and now I am adding flavors of my own.

After all – I want to be a astrophysicist.  After all that mathematics, they still take a picture of the sky, do they not?