dwelltime

Jun

Closing early Thursday, June 14th

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We will be doing a full staff training and meeting Thursday night. Please pardon the early close while we brush up and tune our espresso service.

Our espresso service currently offers three grinders of choices for espresso plus a decaf. Some days you will have all three options and some days (particularly late in the day) we will cut the offerings. We needed to set aside time for training because our coffee bar can present a big challenge working on the island. Part of it is that you have so many things going on from all sides and nowhere to hide. The other is how technical it can get. Luckily we have an incredible machine. The La Marzocco Strada EP allows us to have independent temperatures on each group to really get each coffee coming out at it’s peak. The EP also allows us to do unique pressure profiles. It essentialy means we can control the pressure we brew our espresso at the same way you adjust the dimmer switch on a light but with a nifty record and playback feature.

We hope the early close won’t be an inconvenience for our regulars and look forward to showing off some new skills aft er the session.

Jun

Lunch service updates

By dwelltime|food, hours, lunch

Lunch will continue to be from 11:00am to 3:30pm as we test out potential service hours. Several requests have been made to extend lunch hours but at this time the desire to keep our portion controlled items fresh, prepared properly in the kitchen, and also meet the level of quality we desire is driving the current structure. We have had requests for more breakfast items such as eggs and bacon but our kitchen is not set up to handle grease so we will not be able to pursue this. We had pre-opening requests from neighbors not to install any equipment that would produce noticeable external odors and a grill/hood would do just that.

We are looking forward to our chance at completing our seating expansion from the current City mandated limit of 20 seats to potentially more than doubling that capacity. Once we get extra seats in the empty space, our lunch service and complete style will change to meet the capacity we designed the shop layout for. We will be offering a limited service style lunch that some of our regulars have experienced as we’ve done multiple test runs in preparation.

Our limited seating capacity has been a major hindrance, interfering with both our ordering flow and service. Once the bar was built and floor plan laid out, there was no way to scale it for half capacity and full capacity. We built it for full capacity knowing that we’d have issues with the empty space and confusion but that there was little we could do. We are looking forward to presenting the shop fully complete after the hearing in late June. We’d like to thank those who have been sympathetic and supportive in the multitude of obstacles we’ve faced getting to this point. It’s been quite a long journey from when we originally took on this massive restoration project to then opening the coffee bar to this point of completing the space.

The support we’ve received is humbling and we are very grateful for it (see the founder’s writeup about this on barismo next week). Though the support has also at times been rather overwhelming in the sheer number of people that came through our doors the first month as we’ve been quite stretched in our staffing to keep up. Luckily, this pre-summer lull presents us with a good down time to get reset. We will occasionally be closing early to do training sessions for ‘shot camps’ and ‘customer service camps’ over the next two weeks. We ask for your patience during these shortened days. We will announce those dates days in advance so as to least inconvenience our regulars next week. Thanks for your support!

Jun

New pastries

By dwelltime|bake shop, food

This upcoming week, we’ll have a few new items from the bake shop.

Orange-Cranberry brownies, peach almond tarts, and goat cheese strawberry tartlett with a balsamic glaze. The Rhubarb crumble was amazing but we’ll be winding it down next week but we’ll add chocolate banana cream puffs to the case shortly!

Our very popular french macarons will feature the popular Coffee (we can tell you the estate used if you ask) and Cocoa Ganache macaron. We will also revive the strawberry mint macaron this week.

You are now up to date.

Jun

Sweet Potato Fu Fu and the Short Rib Sandwich

By dwelltime|food, lunch

Our Fu Fu is a curried sweet potato, plantain, raisin, and chick pea patty rolled with croissant crumbs. We add a house made remoulade, cilantro, house pickles(carrot, onion, dikon), and serve it on sourdough. This new sandwich has been our most popular item on days when the weather has been warm and we expect it to be a summer favorite.

The other newer item is our port and cherry braised beef short rib sandwich. The ribs are paired up with a house made herbed cream cheese, house pickled onions and carrots, on sour dough bread.

May

KAFFA Sunday!

By dwelltime|coffee, events

A gentle reminder that from 9am until we run out of this coffee or close, we’ll be pulling shots of guest espresso KAFFA from Oslo, Norway. Available as straight espresso only, limited quantities on a first come first served basis. They inspired us, we hope this espresso inspires you.

Next… the Guatemala Buena Esperanza preview event will be Tuesday 3-5pm. More to come later.

May

Pastries by the box

By dwelltime|food, lunch

We are now offering pastries in larger quantities for preorder. This could help with family visiting over the holidays, breakfast setups at the office, or small parties. Drop by for an order form in shop.

Please keep in mind some items have a long lead time in preparation (croissants in particular). Plan ahead and reserve early.

We will be offering lunch for offices as well in the near future so keep an eye on that. We’ve had many requests for both pastries and catered style lunchs but are working to meet the demand as quickly as we can.

May

Serving up Cambridge Cold Brew

By dwelltime|coffee, cold brew

We currently have the Guatemala Acatenango Valparaiso and the Tanzania Nitin Estate on tap as iced coffee. The Valparaiso is more on the heavier bodied side and the Nitin is lighter and fruited. The next batches of Valparaiso and the new Burundi Gatare (which should be a powerful berried fruit cup as iced) will be up this Saturday.

Local coffee/tea industry pioneer and founder of MEM teas, Mark Mooradian came by the other day and tasted some teas, coffees, and our iced coffee from this fancy refrigerated bar mounted beer style tap. He had some overall insightful commentary but one thing he advised that we are going to stick with, don’t call this iced coffee ‘just cold brew.’ We agree, because it’s not the same as regular toddy (aka cold brew) offerings and the cup profile is completely different. Compared to ‘flash brewed over ice’ and the North Carolina invented ‘Japanese Iced’ methods, this holds up better than traditional toddy style ‘cold brew’. The complexity you would see in a hot coffee shows through equally in our Cambridge iced.

So that’s it, we’ve decided to stop calling it cold brew and start calling it Cambridge Cold Brew or Cambridge iced coffee. Much like there is Memphis barbecue and Texas barbecue, it’s a regional variant. Since there are only a handful of shops in the nation doing the exact same finely filtered and brewed truly cold iced coffee (that all happen to be in Cambridge), we thought it makes sense to make the change.

May

Thursday tasting flights

By dwelltime|coffee

Every Thursday we will begin having a tasting flight available from 3pm -5pm weekly hosted by one of our staff or the green coffee purchaser at barismo. It will range from industry style coffee cupping, to samples of pourovers, multiple brew methods side by side, some cold coffee samplers, and then even some new teas.

Next week (31 May 2012) the Thursday cupping will be about new teas from Taiwan, specifically from Shin Fong. Shin Fong is a farm that barismo works with in Taiwan. It’s also where our Fulu Red Oolong that we use for iced tea comes from. These are fresh off the harvest but there is limited supply and limited space so come by early.

Oh, and it’s free… until we run out of tea.

May

Pork Belly and the Su Ya

By dwelltime|food

Two signature items on the lunch menu to pay attention to are the soy braised Pork Belly and the soy braised Tofu skin aka ‘Su Ya’. These sandwiches fall under Red Cooking style (as it’s known is Eastern China) typified by its reliance on braising or slow cooking for tender flavorful meats. Red Cooking may be a traditional style but our chef has modified it with a European influenced flare to create these signature sandwiches.

Braised Pork Belly

The Su Ya in particular is a different take on the vegetarian tofu sandwich. Instead of prepackaged deep-fried tofu, Chef Hong chose to take it to a different tack that keeps with the made in-house policy of our food program. She took inspiration from a dish served cold known as ‘tofu duck’ for both it’s presentation and seasoning style. It derives from a layered tofu skin that is seasoned and braised with diced mushrooms to create a wholly new base for our Su Ya sandwich that’s quite tasty.

Su Ya

As always, all our sandwich options are available as a salad on mixed greens and lunch is available from 11am-3pm daily. Lunch hours will remain the same through the summer while we determine the lunch demand in the neighborhood and have a chance to rethink those hours relative to staffing.

May

First guest coffee: Kaffa (Oslo, Norway)

By dwelltime|coffee, events

We’re launching our guest coffee program at dwelltime this weekend, and want to give an introduction to the concept. The idea is to feature a small batch roaster or pay homage to other roasters that have influenced us going forward. Our first guest will be a limited timed offering with an almost event like feel. The first three roasters we feature will be about paying homage to early influences for those of us who started barismo and dwelltime. The guest program is not about comparing or playing to whoever the hot new trending roaster is, it’s based on a thoughtful process for us that focuses on a particular theme around how those roasters source or the details that go into the roasting that makes them unique.

Given that 75 – 80% of our house coffees in the coming year from barismo are going to be direct trade, that means higher prices paid to the farm, more information, and better transparency. We plan on doing more events and information series as things settle in shop and we complete more training with staff — we even have a guest or two from barismo’s producer lineup planning to show up. The sourcing and roasting quality bar has already been set high, so any roaster we feature needs to step up and match it.

It should be no suprise that our first guest roaster is exemplary in transparency and sourcing. While recently in Guatemala, Jaime ran across Bjørnar Hafslund, who was down in Antigua hanging around one of the mills we source through. Senor B, as they were calling him, has been roasting with Kaffa in Oslo and meeting up with him inspired the first round of choices for our guest program.

From the Kaffa website on our first guest espresso!!!:

Caffé CRESCENDO contains pr. January 2012:

COSTA RICA, Solis, Villa Sarchi
PANAMA D Wed Pepe, typica
COLOMBIA Cerro Azul, G eisha
Ethiopia Sidamo, Schilcho

“The beginnings of coffee as a career for me began with my first espresso experience that really sparked my imagination about the potential for superior espresso blends. It all started with a shot of Crescendo. It comes as no suprise that we began to emulate some of those ideas at barismo (when it later opened).

Listing of ingredients, and nice ones at that, really sparked our imagination as a roastery. So many of the local roasters had been doing these (as we began to call them) black box blends. You had no idea what was in them, how the components were sourced (directly/fair trade/brokers), or if anyone in the process who grew/picked/processed the coffee was getting paid for quality work. The running joke was that roasters were throwing the kitchen sink at us and calling it gold. For all we knew, the ingredients in that golden espresso could have come at the expense of a lot of others in the production chain. So when we started barismo, it began with the idea that we’d give full transparency down to the % of contents whenever we could give any detail no matter how minute. This was a direct nod to Kaffa’s labeling, if not also our love of white bags as well. It was once we started roasting that we began to push for lighter roasted espresso with much better quality ingredients, but that’s a whole other discussion.” – Jaime van Schyndel (Founder of barismo)

The Crescendo has shipped and will be on our bar this weekend. We will post a specific time for service on twitter. Since it’s an expensive coffee to get air freighted overseas right off the roast, these shots will be more pricey. Of course, how often do you get a chance to taste this without a plane ticket and a translator?

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coffeebar and bakeshop