Saturday, June 8, 2013
A Taste for Lean? A Role for the Senses in Weight Control
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Being overweight is not simple. Lest anyone say "just eat less" you have my permission to punch them in the arm (gently, or maybe not so much: use your discretion).
Being Overweight: Complex Interactions. When we get overweight a whole lot of complex interactions happen to make it harder to lose weight.
One of the factors seems to be we become increasingly, hormonally and sensually numb. By hormonally numb, we can think about things like insulin resistance, chronic fatigue, sometimes not being able to feel full, not being able to concentrate (here's an overview of what hormones are).
Sensually numb can be that our awareness of any of our five senses get diminished. At the extreme end, if we think about certain stages of type II diabetes, often associated with obesity, feet losing sensation is a not uncommon side effect.
PLASTICITY: we can be BETTER. The happy thing about our bodies is that they are incredible resilient; we can recover our sensitivity, and often, our sensitivity comes back on line as we get our weight under control. The inverse may also be true. In other words, helping our senses come back on line might just help us modulate our behaviours around food and so help us get our weight back in line with where we'd be happier.
Making Taste work for Lean Advantage:
Knowing more about how we can get at our weight via different pathways can be a great way into addressing fat. In this piece we're going to look at some work connecting smell awareness and obesity, and propose a way to tune that sense up to our advantage for fat loss.
A recent paper proposed a correlation (not causation) between obesity and taste perception. It seems that obese kids and teens had a lessened taste acuity compared with their non-obese peers [1]. Sensitivity to salty, umami and bitter were particularly low for the obese, but sweet was not great either.
TASTE IS COMPLEX. The authors don't go into why some folks have better taste discrimination than others, but the interesting thing? They note that taste sensitivity is multifactorial, that is there are many components at play that inform taste acuity. Culture is one factor: consider what tastes do we encounter? what quality?
Hormones are also influential. Leptin seems to have a taste influence. Intriguingly leptin acts to give a the shut off signal to the brain (the hypothalamus) to say "don't need to eat now."(Nice research overview of Leptin in [2]; lay overview of Leptin here).
WHITE FAT TALKS TO US Leptin is a really intriguing switch because of where this hormone is generated. It is produced in adipose tissue (white fat). Most of us tend to think of fat as rather innert squishy stuff. On the contrary: there's a lot going on in this live tissue, including hormone production. The relationship of leptin secretion to fat is seemingly simple: less fat, less leptin circulating.
Go on a weight loss program, leptin levels decrease as fat goes away. Great that fat goes, but might feel hungry for more reasons than well, hunger. Depending on the speed of the fat loss created, the body may scream a little louder as it rebalances hormonal sensitivity perhaps. Hence the goal of slower, steady fat loss perhaps rather than rapid - which puts more hormonal and emotional stress on the body (and aside: once again, time needed to drop fat and adjust hormonally may help explain why set point theory is crap)
Leptin and Taste: The consequence of this loss of fat/lower leptin levels seem to be an increased taste awareness -- especially (and perhaps not surprisingly) for Sweet tasting stuff - that would be stuff that is usually high in fast energy sources, like sugar, and sugary starchy carbs [3]. On the plus side again, it seems the sharper our senses of taste, we see from the research sited about that we're (a) likely leaner and (b) possibly leaner because sharper tastes which mean not needing to eat of a sweet taste to get a satisfying hit from taste. We can potentially perceive the sweetness better in more nutrient dense calorie lighter foods. Indeed, one researcher argues that if we upped not so much the sweet, but the savory/umami flavour of foods, we'd get better nutrient balanced meals, and better regulation of food intake [4].
But what about when we have a cold, and can't taste anything or smell anything? It may be tastes are muted because less combined with the smell bits and strong associations of smells with tastes (remember taste is multifactorial)- BUT - it may also be the cold simply affecting our taste buds.
According to Brainfacts, when taste and smell come together, we get flavour. Now you know.
Fasting and Heightened Smell Awareness. You may have noticed that if you fast for any period of time, your sense of smell goes up. Recent research [5] suggests this is not us hallucinating from lack of food. When you think about it, it almost makes a kind of sense: hunger may sharpen precision for detecting sources of nutrients. How about that as a story? Love that smell of a bakery in the early morning before one's first coffee? That may be us on the hunt, and keen to source out our Carb Prey.
Another part of getting systems back online is to activate the nerves that communicate with those systems. Taste is a physiological system. Our systems are plastic (overview of what that means): we are use it or lose it systems. The more we practice something, often the better we get at it.
Since taste is multifactorial - influenced by a variety of factors - we can practice of taste as a skill. Consider Chefs who deliberately practice discerning tastes of various kinds of items that are very different and very similar. Or likewise there are various tasting clubs for everything from olive oils to wines to chocolate.
Something more immediate as a practice tool may be to stimulate the nerves that are engaged in taste.
There are three big nerves in the head (cranial nerves) that are involved in taste: cranial nerves VII, IX and X - by convention the nerves are labelled with Roman numerals. You can see how these nerves map on this list.).
Without going into too much detail, these nerves are mapped to parts of the face, to a lot of swalliwing and well, gagging (the epiglotis has taste receptors on it). So we can actually excite taste buds by association of triggering those nerves.
To activate the facial nerves, we can blow up our cheeks as big as possible. Take a look in the mirror and see if one side semms like it's better able to do it than the other - this may indicate a place where we could practice to get better symmetry.
Swallowing is another thing we can check. With our tongue tip pressed to the roof of our mouth, see how many times we can swallow in a row before we have to quit. If after the second swallow we need a break or it's hard, that may indicate that those nerves don't get much work. Practice can be a real benefit.
Swallowing is really important to the brain, too. At some point we can talk about central pattern generators. But for now, if you find that swallowing repeatedly doesn't get better with practice, think about checking in with your doc.
To check effect, we need to do a pre and post assessment. Remember salty, umami, bitter and to a lesser degree, sweet, were the tastes found affected. So, before doing the exercises, try checking something with one of these tastes - in any individual one taste may be more "numb" than another.
Here are some blends (pdf here for more) for preparing some taste tests.
An approach to test salty for instance might be, taste the salty, rinse the mouth out with water; do one of the exercises for about 5 reps; re-taste. Any difference? If not, try the next exercise; re-test. Take a break, come back try another taste.
If one of those movements helped improve taste, think about incorporating it into your daily activities. Do it throughout the day; do some more reps before you eat.
If NONE of the movements help your taste buds, check out how your diet is in terms of zinc foods, and think about upping these for at least two weeks consistently, and retest.
In this post, the suggestion is: let's see if nudging taste may also help with moving towards better awareness, and perhaps therefore better satiety that leads from better appreciation of food in the mouth. IT's easier to enjoy food more mindfully if we can appreciate the nuances of its taste (about mindful eating).
On another high point: there's no down side to practicing the activation of those cranial nerves targeted by swallowing or blowing up our cheeks: doing so stimulates many associated Good Things in our brains. Likewise, zinc is really important in our diet and often quite low.
No matter our body comp, therefore, using nutrition and movement to affect our brains and bodies to help us move towards optimal wellbeing is a Good Thing.
If you try the above tests, please let me know how your taste improves.
You can post here, to @begin2dig on twitter or begin2dig on facebook.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Being Overweight: Complex Interactions. When we get overweight a whole lot of complex interactions happen to make it harder to lose weight.
One of the factors seems to be we become increasingly, hormonally and sensually numb. By hormonally numb, we can think about things like insulin resistance, chronic fatigue, sometimes not being able to feel full, not being able to concentrate (here's an overview of what hormones are).Sensually numb can be that our awareness of any of our five senses get diminished. At the extreme end, if we think about certain stages of type II diabetes, often associated with obesity, feet losing sensation is a not uncommon side effect.
PLASTICITY: we can be BETTER. The happy thing about our bodies is that they are incredible resilient; we can recover our sensitivity, and often, our sensitivity comes back on line as we get our weight under control. The inverse may also be true. In other words, helping our senses come back on line might just help us modulate our behaviours around food and so help us get our weight back in line with where we'd be happier.
Making Taste work for Lean Advantage:
Knowing more about how we can get at our weight via different pathways can be a great way into addressing fat. In this piece we're going to look at some work connecting smell awareness and obesity, and propose a way to tune that sense up to our advantage for fat loss.
Taste Awareness and Weight Management
 |
| The many hormonal interactions of hunger (image source) |
TASTE IS COMPLEX. The authors don't go into why some folks have better taste discrimination than others, but the interesting thing? They note that taste sensitivity is multifactorial, that is there are many components at play that inform taste acuity. Culture is one factor: consider what tastes do we encounter? what quality?
Hormones are also influential. Leptin seems to have a taste influence. Intriguingly leptin acts to give a the shut off signal to the brain (the hypothalamus) to say "don't need to eat now."(Nice research overview of Leptin in [2]; lay overview of Leptin here).
WHITE FAT TALKS TO US Leptin is a really intriguing switch because of where this hormone is generated. It is produced in adipose tissue (white fat). Most of us tend to think of fat as rather innert squishy stuff. On the contrary: there's a lot going on in this live tissue, including hormone production. The relationship of leptin secretion to fat is seemingly simple: less fat, less leptin circulating.
 |
| white adipose tissue (image source) |
Leptin and Taste: The consequence of this loss of fat/lower leptin levels seem to be an increased taste awareness -- especially (and perhaps not surprisingly) for Sweet tasting stuff - that would be stuff that is usually high in fast energy sources, like sugar, and sugary starchy carbs [3]. On the plus side again, it seems the sharper our senses of taste, we see from the research sited about that we're (a) likely leaner and (b) possibly leaner because sharper tastes which mean not needing to eat of a sweet taste to get a satisfying hit from taste. We can potentially perceive the sweetness better in more nutrient dense calorie lighter foods. Indeed, one researcher argues that if we upped not so much the sweet, but the savory/umami flavour of foods, we'd get better nutrient balanced meals, and better regulation of food intake [4].
Aside: Amusing facts about Smell vs Taste
Smell and Taste? Taste just to be über clear is something more separate from smell than most of us think. These senses are separately wired in the brain. Smell has its own dedicated cranial nerve in the brain (CN I). Taste, however, is fed by several of these cranial nerves. So the brain shares taste accross several important information channels.But what about when we have a cold, and can't taste anything or smell anything? It may be tastes are muted because less combined with the smell bits and strong associations of smells with tastes (remember taste is multifactorial)- BUT - it may also be the cold simply affecting our taste buds.
According to Brainfacts, when taste and smell come together, we get flavour. Now you know.
Fasting and Heightened Smell Awareness. You may have noticed that if you fast for any period of time, your sense of smell goes up. Recent research [5] suggests this is not us hallucinating from lack of food. When you think about it, it almost makes a kind of sense: hunger may sharpen precision for detecting sources of nutrients. How about that as a story? Love that smell of a bakery in the early morning before one's first coffee? That may be us on the hunt, and keen to source out our Carb Prey.
How Boost the Taste for Lean?
Whether or not putting scent crystals on food to tun on smell and so reduce intake actually has about zero research support. Taste on the other hand, as we've seen above, does. There does seem to be a relation between taste perception and dietary intake, where better taste awareness seems to be associated with leanliness. So might their be some value especially if we're overweight in attempting to boost taste perception?
 |
| zinc (and copper) foods |
ZINC CHECK One observation in the literature is that poorer taste acuity is associated with low levels of zinc [6]. Get zinc at healthy levels, both taste AND cognitive function improve. Double win. Just 30mg a day seems to make a taste-y difference. A list of "top ten" zinc foods is here. These include oysters, veal liver (other types of liver have it too), peanuts, and of course, dark chocolate.
Movement Based Taste Assists
Fuel is super critical to our wellbeing. Getting the right nutrients, like Zinc, more of the time takes care of a worls of ills.Another part of getting systems back online is to activate the nerves that communicate with those systems. Taste is a physiological system. Our systems are plastic (overview of what that means): we are use it or lose it systems. The more we practice something, often the better we get at it.
Since taste is multifactorial - influenced by a variety of factors - we can practice of taste as a skill. Consider Chefs who deliberately practice discerning tastes of various kinds of items that are very different and very similar. Or likewise there are various tasting clubs for everything from olive oils to wines to chocolate.
Something more immediate as a practice tool may be to stimulate the nerves that are engaged in taste.
 |
| CNVII aka Facial Nerve (source) |
There are three big nerves in the head (cranial nerves) that are involved in taste: cranial nerves VII, IX and X - by convention the nerves are labelled with Roman numerals. You can see how these nerves map on this list.).
Without going into too much detail, these nerves are mapped to parts of the face, to a lot of swalliwing and well, gagging (the epiglotis has taste receptors on it). So we can actually excite taste buds by association of triggering those nerves.
 |
| The Master of Facial Nerve Symmetry, Jazz horn impresaro, Dizzy Gillespie (Is the left side higher than the right?) Image Source |
Swallowing is another thing we can check. With our tongue tip pressed to the roof of our mouth, see how many times we can swallow in a row before we have to quit. If after the second swallow we need a break or it's hard, that may indicate that those nerves don't get much work. Practice can be a real benefit.
Swallowing is really important to the brain, too. At some point we can talk about central pattern generators. But for now, if you find that swallowing repeatedly doesn't get better with practice, think about checking in with your doc.
Pre / Post Taste Test
Here's the thing: it's great to do these exercises, but even better to check their effect. We can see a difference pretty immediately.To check effect, we need to do a pre and post assessment. Remember salty, umami, bitter and to a lesser degree, sweet, were the tastes found affected. So, before doing the exercises, try checking something with one of these tastes - in any individual one taste may be more "numb" than another.
Here are some blends (pdf here for more) for preparing some taste tests.
- Sweet: table sugar: ½ teaspoon dissolved in 2 tablespoons water
- Salt: table salt: 1/8 teaspoon dissolved in 2 tablespoons water
- Bitter: coffee, brewed or made from instant:
An approach to test salty for instance might be, taste the salty, rinse the mouth out with water; do one of the exercises for about 5 reps; re-taste. Any difference? If not, try the next exercise; re-test. Take a break, come back try another taste.
If one of those movements helped improve taste, think about incorporating it into your daily activities. Do it throughout the day; do some more reps before you eat.
If NONE of the movements help your taste buds, check out how your diet is in terms of zinc foods, and think about upping these for at least two weeks consistently, and retest.
Concept: Better Taste Sensation, More Alive to Food Flavour, Head to Leaner Being?
The authors of the study we started with did not offer a functional application of their findings; they simply noted the correlation between taste and body composition.In this post, the suggestion is: let's see if nudging taste may also help with moving towards better awareness, and perhaps therefore better satiety that leads from better appreciation of food in the mouth. IT's easier to enjoy food more mindfully if we can appreciate the nuances of its taste (about mindful eating).
On another high point: there's no down side to practicing the activation of those cranial nerves targeted by swallowing or blowing up our cheeks: doing so stimulates many associated Good Things in our brains. Likewise, zinc is really important in our diet and often quite low.
No matter our body comp, therefore, using nutrition and movement to affect our brains and bodies to help us move towards optimal wellbeing is a Good Thing.
If you try the above tests, please let me know how your taste improves.
You can post here, to @begin2dig on twitter or begin2dig on facebook.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Research Cited
- Overberg J, Hummel T, Krude H, & Wiegand S (2012). Differences in taste sensitivity between obese and non-obese children and adolescents. Archives of disease in childhood, 97 (12), 1048-52 PMID: 22995095
- Harris RB (2013). Direct and indirect effects of leptin on adipocyte metabolism. Biochimica et biophysica acta PMID: 23685313
- Harris RB (2013). Direct and indirect effects of leptin on adipocyte metabolism. Biochimica et biophysica acta PMID: 23685313
- Mouritsen OG (2012). Umami flavour as a means of regulating food intake and improving nutrition and health. Nutrition and health, 21 (1), 56-75 PMID: 22544776
- Cameron JD, Goldfield GS, & Doucet É (2012). Fasting for 24 h improves nasal chemosensory performance and food palatability in a related manner. Appetite, 58 (3), 978-81 PMID: 22387713
- Tupe RP, & Chiplonkar SA (2009). Zinc supplementation improved cognitive performance and taste acuity in Indian adolescent girls. Journal of the American College of Nutrition, 28 (4), 388-96 PMID: 20368377
PDF
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Eat meat, why not eat beast complete? Explore offal (like liver)
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Do you eat meat? Ok, let's assume you've got the grass fed/free range thing down. Now, do you eat Liver? How about kidneys, heart, related giblets?
If not why not? Bad childhood aroma memories? Time for a taste sensation re-education.
After being vegetarian for a long time, and dealing with some health issues about 18m ago i think i started eating meat. It's not till this last month and reading T.C. Luoma's Zombie Diet article that i began to explore organ meat in the diet - memories of early childhood not withstanding.
What on earth has been keeping people away from this stuff? It's amazing!
If you're gonna eat meat, be complete. If you're gonna eat an animal, dam it EAT THE ANIMAL.
As Luoama writes in Zombie Diet about the nutritional value of liver, just for instance:
I was in Paris at a conference when i started exploring this space. There is pretty much literally a butcher on every corner there. So getting liver - calves liver in particular [nutrition info]- and one shop was quite open about only having horses liver (!) - is pretty much simple. That's grass fed, too, natch.
Soaked in milk a few hours, sauted rare with tons of onions and shallots (and maybe some bacon), served with fresh greens and sweet potato, lots of spices, it's amazing. Super super tender, and so just oddly satisfying this is just not your mama's liver.
Today, rather than liver, it was lamb's heart (high in iron) and sweetbreads (high in vitamin c) (this is the thymus/pancreas, not brains) [nutrition info]. Wow. That was lunch. and again, after eating this uber fast and lovely and easy to prepare food, i felt incredibly restored AND energised. And that without a morning shot of joe. What's in this stuff?
What's not to like? Fat? Cholesterol? Misinformation?
TO folks who are concerned about cholesterol and saturated fat: suck it up. No really, it's ok. Let us liberate ourselves from our "fat is evil" place and understand Balance. The move to liver being safe again - indeed healthy again - shows how our understanding of fat and food is improving.
First, eating dietary cholesterol doesn't increase cholesterol in our blood, and saturated fat is not bad. Saturated Fat does many good things. It's all about balance (overview on balancing fats here). If you're curious about cholesterol, take a peak at this article on cholesterol doing low carb eating.
I'm one with Michael Pollan about "eat less; mostly plants" - and if eating animals, let me add by extension, eat the healthiest types possible like free range & grass fed, and eat as much of the beast as possible. That includes the squishy bits. As Alison Ford writes
If you eat meat, be complete: Give Liver and Offal a try
CAVEAT: winner winner chicken liver - not - While chicken livers [nutrition info] have much to offer nutritionally (and also lower on vitamin a, which is perhaps important if considering od'ing on liver - just remember to get as much vitamin d) I have had one poor experience with a recipe suggesting chicken livers could be cooked rare, like bigger animal liver. Do NOT take that advice.
- or go ahead, try it, and see how long before you hit campylobacter -- you know how we have to cook chicken so it's not pink? same apparently with chicken liver. Here's a recipe that gets them cooked for about 5-7 minutes total (there's two times into the pan). You can also use a thermometer to make sure the innards are at a safe piping temperature (>70C).
If ya don't take this care, Let me tell ya, it's a very special type of reaction - great taste - horrible experience post eating. Again, maybe you'll be lucky and find undercooking chicken livers is grand. Me? i think i'll be making pate with well cooked chicken livers and go rare with other critters. Pate Recipes Here's a Mark's Apple version of chicken pate. And better (as it's blender based) a chicken paleo inspired version or two. irony: chickens are domesticated, so perhaps not paleo beasties? i'm just saying.
Cooking is FUN and CHEAP. This stuff is really straight forward to cook. It can all be done in a pan. A cast iron one if you like (i like).
Where else get this kind of vitamin and mineral and nutrient profile for this price? I'm shocked.
If you eat meat: why not get in on this amazing value - on every level of the term value: taste, nutrition, price, satiety and energy.
Feeling Groovy?
If you've started doing liver and associated organs and you feel jazzed and energised and satisfied after eating this stuff, please let me know. It would be great to understand why this is such an effect - assuming it's occurring in more than just me.
Related Posts:
Tweet
Follow @begin2dig
If not why not? Bad childhood aroma memories? Time for a taste sensation re-education.
What on earth has been keeping people away from this stuff? It's amazing!
If you're gonna eat meat, be complete. If you're gonna eat an animal, dam it EAT THE ANIMAL.
As Luoama writes in Zombie Diet about the nutritional value of liver, just for instance:
Choline is another good nutrient for the brain, recommended especially for pregnant gals, and beef and chicken liver is high in this. More goodness.Look at this comparison between the Vitamin C content of 100 grams of apple, 100 grams of carrots, 100 grams of red meat, and 100 grams of beef liver.
one may see "ox liver" as interchangeable with beef liver
The apple has 7.0 grams of Vitamin C, the carrots have 6.0 grams, the red meat has 0 grams, and the beef liver has 27.0 grams.
Let's do the same thing with Vitamin B12.
The apple has no measurable B12 and neither do the carrots. The red meat has 1.84 mcg., but the beef liver has 111.3 mcg.
It's no contest.
And it's not much different when you look at other nutrients like phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, iron, zinc, copper, Vitamins A, D, and E, thiamin, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, folic acid, biotin, and Vitamin B6 – beef liver beats them all almost every time. (bold emphasis mine - mc)
I was in Paris at a conference when i started exploring this space. There is pretty much literally a butcher on every corner there. So getting liver - calves liver in particular [nutrition info]- and one shop was quite open about only having horses liver (!) - is pretty much simple. That's grass fed, too, natch.
Soaked in milk a few hours, sauted rare with tons of onions and shallots (and maybe some bacon), served with fresh greens and sweet potato, lots of spices, it's amazing. Super super tender, and so just oddly satisfying this is just not your mama's liver.
Today, rather than liver, it was lamb's heart (high in iron) and sweetbreads (high in vitamin c) (this is the thymus/pancreas, not brains) [nutrition info]. Wow. That was lunch. and again, after eating this uber fast and lovely and easy to prepare food, i felt incredibly restored AND energised. And that without a morning shot of joe. What's in this stuff?
What's not to like? Fat? Cholesterol? Misinformation?
TO folks who are concerned about cholesterol and saturated fat: suck it up. No really, it's ok. Let us liberate ourselves from our "fat is evil" place and understand Balance. The move to liver being safe again - indeed healthy again - shows how our understanding of fat and food is improving.
First, eating dietary cholesterol doesn't increase cholesterol in our blood, and saturated fat is not bad. Saturated Fat does many good things. It's all about balance (overview on balancing fats here). If you're curious about cholesterol, take a peak at this article on cholesterol doing low carb eating.
I'm one with Michael Pollan about "eat less; mostly plants" - and if eating animals, let me add by extension, eat the healthiest types possible like free range & grass fed, and eat as much of the beast as possible. That includes the squishy bits. As Alison Ford writes
Although some people are still squeamish about eating offal, it provides legitimate social and environmental benefits, as well as the nutritional ones. Eating offal shows respect to animals, discourages waste, and fosters a more understanding and intimate relationship between an eater and his food. Plus, as many chefs have pointed out, much processed commercial meat—including ground beef, hot dogs, lunch meat, and sausage—is of indeterminate origin, but offal is impossible to fake—while it can be hard to know exactly what’s in a hot dog, there’s no mistaking that a kidney is a kidney, so you always know exactly what you’re getting.It feels GRRReat! Three things about liver and related offal: taste is awesome; nutrition profile is incredible - in fact unbelievable - but the biggest and most consistent surprise so far has been energy. I have not probed far enough into the goods to get why there is such satisfaction that's incomparable - stake doesn't do it; neither does carrot cake. What is with this stuff? Have you had that experience? we know there's saturated fat, true, and saturated fats seem to be higher in satiety (see this 2013 paper, for example) than other kinds of fats - especially monounsaturated, but heh, i've done high fat coffee and it doesn't have this feel. you know? So what's the nutrient profile that's doing this happy joy post prandial delight? Maybe its shock that offal is so un-offal.
If you eat meat, be complete: Give Liver and Offal a try
 |
| free range chickies (source of image) - good to the last giblet |
- or go ahead, try it, and see how long before you hit campylobacter -- you know how we have to cook chicken so it's not pink? same apparently with chicken liver. Here's a recipe that gets them cooked for about 5-7 minutes total (there's two times into the pan). You can also use a thermometer to make sure the innards are at a safe piping temperature (>70C).
If ya don't take this care, Let me tell ya, it's a very special type of reaction - great taste - horrible experience post eating. Again, maybe you'll be lucky and find undercooking chicken livers is grand. Me? i think i'll be making pate with well cooked chicken livers and go rare with other critters. Pate Recipes Here's a Mark's Apple version of chicken pate. And better (as it's blender based) a chicken paleo inspired version or two. irony: chickens are domesticated, so perhaps not paleo beasties? i'm just saying.
Cooking is FUN and CHEAP. This stuff is really straight forward to cook. It can all be done in a pan. A cast iron one if you like (i like).- Lamb liver - two servings on special - 19p.
- Free range chicken liver, 400g, £2.39 400g is just less than a pound weight.
Where else get this kind of vitamin and mineral and nutrient profile for this price? I'm shocked.
If you eat meat: why not get in on this amazing value - on every level of the term value: taste, nutrition, price, satiety and energy.
Feeling Groovy?
If you've started doing liver and associated organs and you feel jazzed and energised and satisfied after eating this stuff, please let me know. It would be great to understand why this is such an effect - assuming it's occurring in more than just me.
Related Posts:
Monday, May 20, 2013
International Coaches Day Today
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Today is in the b2d universe, and perhaps it will go beyond, International Coaches Day.
Well why not?
Just taking a moment to celebrate the folks who have helped inform our practice, shape our experience. Some of them we've met and worked with; others we know through their work, but feel like it's had a personal impact.
Why not give them some space? Let's have some time just to remember who they are and what
specifically we think they've done to help shape our practice or our thinking about practice?
As i just wrote on the begin2dig page at facebook:
We've never met or connected, but yup Bass is plainly who i think of as similar goals for what i'd like to have b2d be able to offer for folks. Thank you very much Clarence Bass for walking the talk for decades, and showing that folks from any profession can ask good sound questions, develop expert practice and help others in the process.
Happy International Coaches Day, all.
Share this Coaches Day Tweet on Twitter coaches day post on twitter, and @ckshowalter suggests, use the tag "#coachesday"
Who are you celebrating today, this year? Are there two excplit things/reasons/ways you can think of that are aspects of what puts this person on your Coaches Wall?
Keen to hear. let's celebrate.
-mc
Related Posts
Coaching Approach: 9S
Remembering Shane Autry Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Well why not?
Just taking a moment to celebrate the folks who have helped inform our practice, shape our experience. Some of them we've met and worked with; others we know through their work, but feel like it's had a personal impact.
Why not give them some space? Let's have some time just to remember who they are and what
As i just wrote on the begin2dig page at facebook:
in physical culture, in terms of influence, i can think of a couple - including folks i've not met. A core is Clarence Bass.This guy was into lean and ripped for "normal" people way before it was cool; when John Berardi was thinking about Grad School, this guy had books for people wanting to be healthy, recovery well, feel good (look good). He was also there on the web with a treasure trove of articles before most folks were thinking about their business model to create value with good content before asking someone to buy something. By all means look through his site. You'll see he's the guy (for good or ill) who introduced the community to the Tabata protocol - the real one.
What i admired about this person is that he trained as a lawyer but treats his body and being lean as a sane and steady life progress. He steps up to compete, to self-test, and he engages both the literature and the people behind the literature. I wouldn't have encountered Pavel Tsatsouline without Clarance Bass. He's a kind of role model as well in terms of how he writes about his experience and practice in physical culture. Never met. That's cool, too...If you haven't encountered him, he's the guy to whom pavel dedicated Beyond Bodybuilding.
We've never met or connected, but yup Bass is plainly who i think of as similar goals for what i'd like to have b2d be able to offer for folks. Thank you very much Clarence Bass for walking the talk for decades, and showing that folks from any profession can ask good sound questions, develop expert practice and help others in the process.
Happy International Coaches Day, all.
Share this Coaches Day Tweet on Twitter coaches day post on twitter, and @ckshowalter suggests, use the tag "#coachesday"
Who are you celebrating today, this year? Are there two excplit things/reasons/ways you can think of that are aspects of what puts this person on your Coaches Wall?
Keen to hear. let's celebrate.
-mc
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Coaching Approach: 9S
Remembering Shane Autry Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Friday, May 17, 2013
Calling Something Easy or Hard: the Transfat of Teaching
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Have you ever had someone try to teach you how to do something and then say (perhaps through gritted teeth) something like, "I'm trying to make this as easy as possible for you." Did that work? Have you ever had a teacher say "look this is really easy" or a coach offer a technique drill and say "here's the really simple way to tie this knot." How did you feel? Perhaps you only noticed if you found that that explanation wasn't experienced as particularly simple, or easy or fun? What about the corollary where someone asserts "this stuff is hard" - and you thought, um, no, it's boring, tedious and unengaging, but it's not "hard."
I'm going to suggest that this easy/hard thing is the transfat of the coaching/teaching world: developed with the best of intentions, it's still a cheap substitute for the real thing and yes, increasingly considered harmful. I'm going to propose that, on the "considered harmful side" specifically that describing concepts to be learned in a lecture or coaching session or seminar as easy or hard does not help learning. Indeed, it may even inhibit it.
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I'll warn you ahead of time: i've found no research in pedagogy directly to say that framing something as easy or hard is problematic, but i hope you'll walk through the arguments with me and perhaps consider the value of exploring an alternative framing to easy/hard. I'll propose that below, too.
By way of context, two things, first, why talk about this subject on b2d? Since so many of us reading b2d either coach, teach, or find ourselves in learning contexts around health, fitness, wellbeing, it seemed appropriate to situate this particular exploration here at b2d. Second, the easy/hard description itself. It's very difficult (dare i say hard?) to look at any kind of challenging situation, perhaps quite a bit in athletics, and not see the space framed as hard or easy. We all, it seems, have an easy vs hard meter running in our heads. Perhaps this meter has something to do with safety/threat response and protection.
When it comes to teaching, however, I question the value of framing a learning concept as easy or hard when presenting it to learners. There's a number of issues i'm going to work through below, but by way of context, calling something easy or hard out of the box asserts that a concept, a priori, has almost a set learnable state. Is that really ever the case? Consider the existential assessment of Math Class by Barbie circa 1991 (video below and CBC overview video here - check out the "did you know" tab - what's great are the girl math students' responses to this - story ends at 1:42 but the whole thing is historically interesting. anyway...).
To unpack easy or hard in a teaching context, let me unpack an example that i heard repeatedly the other day when observing grad students give a guest lecture to undergrads. The number of times i heard "i'm making this as easy as possible" felt legion. And each time i heard it i got more and more distressed - though i didn't have a clear sense of why at the time.
So what's wrong with "i'm making this as easy as possible for you" - Here's just a few possibilities. It seems that framing has two particularly negative impacts on the learning experience for the student (though it probably feels great for the teacher):
On the personal side:
The Personal: Self rather than Student as focus of attention?
There are all sorts of noble reasons to say "i'm making this as easy as possible for you"
There are likely at least two positively motivated intensions and one unforced error in this "easy/hard" framing - we'll take them in turn:
Back to our case. While the material may have been a challenge for the given presenter to summarise effectively, it may actually not be that problematic for the class or at least some of the people in the class - especially if prep'd right for that group. So who might we insult with our presumption? Especially if our prep hasn't been bulletproofed? In other words, someone might be having a "hard time" with the material as presented because the presentation isn't as clear as we assume it to be. Oh dear.
One other tick that was hideous to experience was the guest lecturer rushing through material by seeming to engage the class: "what's X" the teacher asks. Two people give an answer. "Right" says the instructor "super easy; piece o' cake...ok what's Y..." same thing. I'm watching a bunch of students going er, no, not a piece of cake - i don't even know what you're asking. What was interesting to observe was the next part of the analysis by students now not focusing on the material because they're derailed. Some thought the instructor was a git; others thought the problem was with them. In either case, the students were no longer engaged in the material.
If what we present actually results in students feeling confused or slow, and we've just called it easy, what have we done by asserting this is as "easy" as it gets? That the student is just stupid? Or conversely that we are idiots? What might either do to students' sense of engagement and commitment? Is it facilitated or inhibited?
Is there, therefore, any pedagogically valuable reason to assert that material being presented for students to learn is a priori easy or hard?
3. The Rookie Unforced Error "Teaching is Tough!"
The unforced error i saw a lot of today was really a rookie mistake: a less experienced teacher/coach may fall into feeling, wow trying to find a way to convey this hard stuff so it's easy for you is really hard, but i did it - i must totally rule! you are so lucky to have me as your teacher today.
Dude, that's just teaching. That's your JOB. As teachers/coaches, we're supposed to make the path clear to learn what needs to be learned at that time and in that place. And yes, that's what the best teachers do every class, every lecture, every talk, every coaching session.
It's work and there are skills - skills make certain parts of the task less challenging (dare i say easier) so other bits can be attended: just ask any starting out prof how long it takes to prep a course the first time they do it vs the fifth time (i did not say the second third or fourth).
It's this self-consciousness, this drawing a group's attention away from the material and to our process - this meta-teaching, that kept being expressed in the classes yesterday, that painted the big ROOKIE sign that reads: 1) haven't had to do this teaching thing too much (rookie) (2) i like teaching (awesome! need more great teachers) or (3) i think i succeed in here because i make people like/appreciate me.
But is that meta-teaching where the learning we want to happen at?
Flow vs Hard/Easy
As an alternative to framing something as hard/easy, we might want to check if we have helped students achieve Flow.
Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and colleagues developed the notion of Flow based on work to explore the propoerties of task or process engagement, (overview). The attributes of Flow are based around skill and challenge:
"Easy as possible" would be placed potentially at low skill, low challenge. According to Csikszentmihaly's research, that condition results in apathy. So is striving to make things as easy as possible an optimal strategy to create engagement for learning?
Finding Flow
I've thought sometimes it's not always possible to find flow when learning something new: sometimes we just have to suck it up and do the reps. But i've come not to believe that: that there is skill and flow in each rep if we give those reps the appropriate attention to wrestle from them what we need to learn.
If we go to the problems with a target, so we know what we plan to discover from each bit, we can get pretty flow-ish. The challenge there is that that kind of process takes time and attention, and sometimes we're in a hurry to get IT whatever the It is.
What i've found in my own practice is that if i'm too tired to bring that kind of attention to a learning task, i need to reenergise and maybe do something else, and come back. Rarely does rote dogged determination result in an "ah ha" But that's another topic - just suggesting that in my own practice flow can be developed for our path choices when we learn how to break something down for deliberate practice. This point as i've written about before is where a coach can really help with that process of assessment for attention.
Teaching for Flow
This isn't the place to go into pedagogical methods. Suffice it to say that good, experienced teachers have many reps at finding a good flow state in a class. They have taken time to reflect on pedagogy however and to explore techniques for engaging with students. Pedagogy is a considerable field of enquiry. They learn new skills. While some folks wing it, some folks actually consider formally what techniques help progress learning. They treat teaching as a professional practice and as an evolving approach. As pedagogical scientists they consider variables from room condition to gender to preparation to social background to the subject itself. Complex, eh?
The result of their diligence, however, is that students stay engaged. When they leave the classroom, the students are not thinking what a bravara performance by the teacher, but what they can do now that they couldn't do before.
It takes more work from the teacher to figure out how to do these things, but what we see watching their work is that words like easy and only if ever rarely used to describe the learning process, and few will draw attention to themselves instead of the material.
If you're interested in learning teaching techniques, talk with your favorite teachers, as you would seek out coaches; look to journals of same. There are so many models that challenge the notion of a lecture itself for optimal learning, for instance, that if we're in a lecture setting, we need to ask why: whose interests for what ends is it serving (universities are still largely lecture based). And i'm not even talking about all these bits. Just about one phrase in a learning context. So let's get back to that.
Falling into Easy or Hard: Warning Signs for Confidence and Self-State
Despite the many variables of pedagogical practice, for the specific example of "i've made this as easy as possible for you" there are a few heuristics we've looked at that challenge the value of ever saying anything about easy or hard in any teaching environment. In particular the key idea that would be "hard" to debate is simply that when teaching, the focus is the material, the students, the uptake, not us and how hard we've worked to deliver what people are paying us to deliver, eh? Given that, and given the assumption that most of us teaching actually want nothing but the best for our students, we might be able to use falling into Easy or Hard as warning lights for our own practice
In other words: if i feel i'm having a "this is hard" moment on anything - i know to check how rested, fuelled energised i feel. IF i'm saying this is now easy, or "as easy as possible" (big "hard" undercurrents there), i need to check in what i'm trying to achieve by making this claim at this time.
OVERALL: reducing if not eliminating the transfat of teaching.
The question this post is asking beyond teaching is, in the main, to consider the concept of Hard and Easy. As the song about war goes, what good is it - in teaching, in life in motivation? Yup, i suggest that Hard/Easy is the transfat of education - it's the cheap substitute for finding the Real Deal of Challenge, Engagement, Confidence, Security, Mastery. A little crap in our diets is probably not horrible, and given our lives, is from time to time perhaps inevitable but i hope i've made the case for why reducing it (if not all out eliminating it) may lead to far better results.
Thoughts?
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ps this is not a perfect essay - it's been written in fits and starts as i can grab time - but was keen to get it out - which is the advantage of a blog over a formal research piece: it's a great place to put work in progress.
Related Posts
Tweet Follow @begin2dig
 |
| is the interface of the piano easy or hard? (question paraphrasing bill buxton on design) |
I'm going to suggest that this easy/hard thing is the transfat of the coaching/teaching world: developed with the best of intentions, it's still a cheap substitute for the real thing and yes, increasingly considered harmful. I'm going to propose that, on the "considered harmful side" specifically that describing concepts to be learned in a lecture or coaching session or seminar as easy or hard does not help learning. Indeed, it may even inhibit it.
FOLLOW B2D on TWITTERI'll warn you ahead of time: i've found no research in pedagogy directly to say that framing something as easy or hard is problematic, but i hope you'll walk through the arguments with me and perhaps consider the value of exploring an alternative framing to easy/hard. I'll propose that below, too.
By way of context, two things, first, why talk about this subject on b2d? Since so many of us reading b2d either coach, teach, or find ourselves in learning contexts around health, fitness, wellbeing, it seemed appropriate to situate this particular exploration here at b2d. Second, the easy/hard description itself. It's very difficult (dare i say hard?) to look at any kind of challenging situation, perhaps quite a bit in athletics, and not see the space framed as hard or easy. We all, it seems, have an easy vs hard meter running in our heads. Perhaps this meter has something to do with safety/threat response and protection.
When it comes to teaching, however, I question the value of framing a learning concept as easy or hard when presenting it to learners. There's a number of issues i'm going to work through below, but by way of context, calling something easy or hard out of the box asserts that a concept, a priori, has almost a set learnable state. Is that really ever the case? Consider the existential assessment of Math Class by Barbie circa 1991 (video below and CBC overview video here - check out the "did you know" tab - what's great are the girl math students' responses to this - story ends at 1:42 but the whole thing is historically interesting. anyway...).
some may remember the 1991 Barbie Recall for the infamous "math class is tough"
To unpack easy or hard in a teaching context, let me unpack an example that i heard repeatedly the other day when observing grad students give a guest lecture to undergrads. The number of times i heard "i'm making this as easy as possible" felt legion. And each time i heard it i got more and more distressed - though i didn't have a clear sense of why at the time.
So what's wrong with "i'm making this as easy as possible for you" - Here's just a few possibilities. It seems that framing has two particularly negative impacts on the learning experience for the student (though it probably feels great for the teacher):
On the personal side:
- for good or ill, the "i'm making this as easy as possible" puts the focus of attention on us and our sense of personal greatness and "teacher as star" rather than on the material at hand and the students' needs. Look at what we've done.
- related to the above, surely it's our job to make material accessible to the audience to whom we're delivering it - at all times. So why draw attention to our struggle? Are we looking for praise? we want to be loved? need a hug? right then? because dam it getting this lecture cost us, boy.
On the Content side:
- is being "easy" a plus? easy can be boring
- what if the person doesn't get what you think is the "easy" explanation? does that mean the problem is with them?
Let me drill into a few of these a little more
There are all sorts of noble reasons to say "i'm making this as easy as possible for you"
There are likely at least two positively motivated intensions and one unforced error in this "easy/hard" framing - we'll take them in turn:
- One is: please be aware of how important this topic is; i wouldn't have put all these cycles into crafting this experience if i didn't think it was valuable - so please, really pay attention.
- The other thing going on is a kind of faux empathy: boy i sure had a hard time with this so i'm going to make it easier for you so you don't go through what i went through.
- Maybe it's just inexperience.
Drawing Attention to the Performer's Process - example. To paint a big picture, consider a grade two teacher teaching students in math how to carry the one in addition. What would we think if the teacher said to the students "it's taken me two years to really figure out how to teach you this cool way to build up numbers ... i've finally figured it out how to make it as easy as possible for you" Would we find that inappropriate? After all, if that was such a challenge, perhaps this is not the best person to be doing this job?
Or similarly, would we be surprised if Hilary Hahn in the middle of a magnificent performance said now, i really want you to get that i'm making this next bit as easy for you to hear as possible because it's full of difficult changes that you might miss if i don't enunciate these special parts. And oh yeah, this wasn't easy for me, either. It took my 6 months of practice to get this just right - so - i really want you to appreciate it. Maybe, on a DVD of the performance, that kind of discussion would be great in voice over, but do we expect it during the performance? What makes the DVD voice over appropriate and the performance not?2. Supposed Empathy and the cost of mis-predicting?
Back to our case. While the material may have been a challenge for the given presenter to summarise effectively, it may actually not be that problematic for the class or at least some of the people in the class - especially if prep'd right for that group. So who might we insult with our presumption? Especially if our prep hasn't been bulletproofed? In other words, someone might be having a "hard time" with the material as presented because the presentation isn't as clear as we assume it to be. Oh dear.
One other tick that was hideous to experience was the guest lecturer rushing through material by seeming to engage the class: "what's X" the teacher asks. Two people give an answer. "Right" says the instructor "super easy; piece o' cake...ok what's Y..." same thing. I'm watching a bunch of students going er, no, not a piece of cake - i don't even know what you're asking. What was interesting to observe was the next part of the analysis by students now not focusing on the material because they're derailed. Some thought the instructor was a git; others thought the problem was with them. In either case, the students were no longer engaged in the material.
If what we present actually results in students feeling confused or slow, and we've just called it easy, what have we done by asserting this is as "easy" as it gets? That the student is just stupid? Or conversely that we are idiots? What might either do to students' sense of engagement and commitment? Is it facilitated or inhibited?
Is there, therefore, any pedagogically valuable reason to assert that material being presented for students to learn is a priori easy or hard?
3. The Rookie Unforced Error "Teaching is Tough!"
The unforced error i saw a lot of today was really a rookie mistake: a less experienced teacher/coach may fall into feeling, wow trying to find a way to convey this hard stuff so it's easy for you is really hard, but i did it - i must totally rule! you are so lucky to have me as your teacher today.
Dude, that's just teaching. That's your JOB. As teachers/coaches, we're supposed to make the path clear to learn what needs to be learned at that time and in that place. And yes, that's what the best teachers do every class, every lecture, every talk, every coaching session.
It's work and there are skills - skills make certain parts of the task less challenging (dare i say easier) so other bits can be attended: just ask any starting out prof how long it takes to prep a course the first time they do it vs the fifth time (i did not say the second third or fourth).
It's this self-consciousness, this drawing a group's attention away from the material and to our process - this meta-teaching, that kept being expressed in the classes yesterday, that painted the big ROOKIE sign that reads: 1) haven't had to do this teaching thing too much (rookie) (2) i like teaching (awesome! need more great teachers) or (3) i think i succeed in here because i make people like/appreciate me.
But is that meta-teaching where the learning we want to happen at?
Flow vs Hard/Easy
As an alternative to framing something as hard/easy, we might want to check if we have helped students achieve Flow.
Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and colleagues developed the notion of Flow based on work to explore the propoerties of task or process engagement, (overview). The attributes of Flow are based around skill and challenge:
 |
| flow state as challenge vs skill (source) |
Finding Flow
I've thought sometimes it's not always possible to find flow when learning something new: sometimes we just have to suck it up and do the reps. But i've come not to believe that: that there is skill and flow in each rep if we give those reps the appropriate attention to wrestle from them what we need to learn.
If we go to the problems with a target, so we know what we plan to discover from each bit, we can get pretty flow-ish. The challenge there is that that kind of process takes time and attention, and sometimes we're in a hurry to get IT whatever the It is.
What i've found in my own practice is that if i'm too tired to bring that kind of attention to a learning task, i need to reenergise and maybe do something else, and come back. Rarely does rote dogged determination result in an "ah ha" But that's another topic - just suggesting that in my own practice flow can be developed for our path choices when we learn how to break something down for deliberate practice. This point as i've written about before is where a coach can really help with that process of assessment for attention.
Teaching for Flow
This isn't the place to go into pedagogical methods. Suffice it to say that good, experienced teachers have many reps at finding a good flow state in a class. They have taken time to reflect on pedagogy however and to explore techniques for engaging with students. Pedagogy is a considerable field of enquiry. They learn new skills. While some folks wing it, some folks actually consider formally what techniques help progress learning. They treat teaching as a professional practice and as an evolving approach. As pedagogical scientists they consider variables from room condition to gender to preparation to social background to the subject itself. Complex, eh?
The result of their diligence, however, is that students stay engaged. When they leave the classroom, the students are not thinking what a bravara performance by the teacher, but what they can do now that they couldn't do before.
It takes more work from the teacher to figure out how to do these things, but what we see watching their work is that words like easy and only if ever rarely used to describe the learning process, and few will draw attention to themselves instead of the material.
If you're interested in learning teaching techniques, talk with your favorite teachers, as you would seek out coaches; look to journals of same. There are so many models that challenge the notion of a lecture itself for optimal learning, for instance, that if we're in a lecture setting, we need to ask why: whose interests for what ends is it serving (universities are still largely lecture based). And i'm not even talking about all these bits. Just about one phrase in a learning context. So let's get back to that.
Falling into Easy or Hard: Warning Signs for Confidence and Self-State
Despite the many variables of pedagogical practice, for the specific example of "i've made this as easy as possible for you" there are a few heuristics we've looked at that challenge the value of ever saying anything about easy or hard in any teaching environment. In particular the key idea that would be "hard" to debate is simply that when teaching, the focus is the material, the students, the uptake, not us and how hard we've worked to deliver what people are paying us to deliver, eh? Given that, and given the assumption that most of us teaching actually want nothing but the best for our students, we might be able to use falling into Easy or Hard as warning lights for our own practice
- - Red Alert/action item: mastery: when we hear ourselves saying anything with easy/hard in it in a teaching context, perhaps that's an opportunity to interrogate why we think we're going there. For who's benefit? And is that the best way to achieve the result we want, given the risks it brings? Most of the time going to easy or hard means we still have work to do, and we're not as comfy, as satisfied with that part of the material's delivery as we'd like to be.
- - Red Alert 2: take a break: if we're bailing to a meta-lecture, to talk about the process of this part of the lecture rather than the stuff itself, maybe it's time for a break; we ourselves need coffee or air or something, because we now have a new sign that we're falling off task, losing the plot. Maybe it is challenging material for us to track, so make sure our fuel levels are good to go.
In other words: if i feel i'm having a "this is hard" moment on anything - i know to check how rested, fuelled energised i feel. IF i'm saying this is now easy, or "as easy as possible" (big "hard" undercurrents there), i need to check in what i'm trying to achieve by making this claim at this time.
OVERALL: reducing if not eliminating the transfat of teaching.
The question this post is asking beyond teaching is, in the main, to consider the concept of Hard and Easy. As the song about war goes, what good is it - in teaching, in life in motivation? Yup, i suggest that Hard/Easy is the transfat of education - it's the cheap substitute for finding the Real Deal of Challenge, Engagement, Confidence, Security, Mastery. A little crap in our diets is probably not horrible, and given our lives, is from time to time perhaps inevitable but i hope i've made the case for why reducing it (if not all out eliminating it) may lead to far better results.
Thoughts?
FOLLOW B2D on TWITTERps this is not a perfect essay - it's been written in fits and starts as i can grab time - but was keen to get it out - which is the advantage of a blog over a formal research piece: it's a great place to put work in progress.
Related Posts
- the irritation of the "i want you to..." coaching cue
- What's your 5H ratio?
- Train the Physical Brain
- Deliberate Practice
- Train Socialising
Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Zen Manualist Coffee: Part 1 - roast your own beans.
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IF you enjoy good coffee, such that your fave coffee place is because of the coffee not because of the ambiance per se, and if your a bit of a Manualist (i don't know what else to call it - someone who enjoys crafting a process by hand-ish - is there a term?) then here's something simple you can try: roast your own coffee beans.
Roasting one's own coffee rather sounds daunting, doesn't it? It turns out, it's not. And so i begin to wonder at all the hoopla and mystique around roasting and the oh so precious precious ness of it. Great packaging for a product, but ah c'mon! You may come to the same conclusion after the following "it can't be this simple" post.
Step 1: get green beans and be as ethical and snobbish about it as you like, as you can pick beans from anywhere in the world.
Green beans stay fresh for YEARS. That seems a big plus. And getting sample packs of bunches of places lets one explore flavours, blends and roasts.
For bean sources:
In the US i keep hearing about Sweet Maria's. In the UK, i've found Rave Coffee.
Step 2: choose your roasting implement -
There's loads of how-to's on the web from using fry pans ( i wanna be a cowboy...) to amazingly crafted bbq rotiserie turned roaster. Just check out this page of roaster mods (who knew?)
One way to get into it - and you may have this implement for other purposes - just use a hot air popcorn popper. No fuss; no muss. Super overview and video how to here.
NOTE: In the UK, here's one german made model Severin - that i've used for about 23 quid (amazon uk affil link). You can drive these into the ground. If you're using them weekly, at 4-6 mins per batch, and do three batches - more or less in a row - that's pushing these little motors to the max - and they can fall over. They make very interesting noises when they do. I rationalise this by considering that a dedicated home roaster now is about 300 quid, and i'm just not sure i'm ready to go there. Not quite sure.
Step 3: Load beans into roasting mechanism of choice
Here we see green beans loaded into a popper - usually take about 100g pre-roasted weight. Mark Prince gives a lovely overview of the popcorn popper set up approach here.
Step 4: attend as required
(learn about first crack, second crack, temperatur, time and immanent flambé)
Step 5: delight in bean roast
It's pretty cool to see the transformation happen, as beans go from green swirls, to yellow, to darker tan to what we recognise as roasted coffee bean color.
Interestingly, roasting beans do NOT smell like coffee. it's not an entirely enticing aroma. so the first flush of coffee joy may be mainly visual in observing that this bean transformation has actually taken place.
Step 6: put in appropriate off-gassing vessel for 18-36 hours pending preference.
Here's where the coffee roast aroma starts to happen, as the beans blow off the gasses from the roasting.
You can use a bag with a gas out valve (the kind of bags starbucks coffee come in - i got a bunch from Rave when i ordered the beans) or, one tip from the Sweet Maria's video tutorial above, get screw lid type mason jars and leave the lid slightly unscrewed for a day or two. And then either transfer to an airtight vessel to keep beans out of light as well, or just grind up for service.
Some beans - Guatemalan in particular - seem to do better to be left alone for a week or ten days.
Step 7: Occasionally enjoy the aroma of the roast's progress
It's fun after the beans have been bagged to squeeze the valve bag and inhale a bit to get an aroma for the colors of your coffee as they mature over the next day or so.. It's really happening, this wonderful chemical reaction.
Small story: in Paris last week for conference; found a coffee roaster in a wonderful wee market area (the shop is called "brulerie des turnes) - i'd run out of the coffee i'd roasted and ground for the trip (yes and i also brought a moka pot), so went to the shop asking for coffee that had been roasted two days ago - no sooner. Intriguingly this request perplexed the staff. Everyone else wants it just after it's roasted, they said. Oh dear. Well (and then my french failed me in terms of "perhaps they grind it themselves, or do they grind it here?)...Were these staff or owners? I was then perplexed: based on what i've learned (and inhaled) about "fresh roasted coffee" why would you grind coffee just after it's roasted?? Fascinating, oui?
And that's about it.
Just roasting beans is a pleasure. If you find you enjoy it, but don't like coffee, you have a very personalised gift you can share with friends.
If you do like coffee - you're in for a treat on multiple levels, from process to product. Really: you did that! Isn't that cool? And it tastes great.
For some insights into the next part of the process, grinding, scroll down to the end of this post on post processing trauma through manualist interactions (i'm grokking this term). You'll see several videos on cool ways to do manual coffee grinding.
Anon:
I refer to this roasting process as part of a Manualist coffee "zen" - well ya know it just gives me delight - and perhaps any emotional experience is not particularly zen, but it sounds kind neat. Maybe it should be "delight coffee"??
Anyway, if you give this a go, please shout. Will look forward to hearing your experience.
We'll talk about using a wee espresso pot and about latte art, i'm sure, anon.
DO TRY THIS AT HOME (have some good ventilation) - and let me know - please - what you find.
you can follow me on twitter @mcphoo
Related Posts
Fat Tea
Possible Coffee Replacement Drink
Green Tea: good for more than what ails ya
Value of Reusable bits - like a tea infuser.
Tweet Follow @begin2dig
 |
| is it a sign? what does it mean?? latte art readings rather than tea leaves...a sort of automatic writing, perhaps? i continue to explore the lacto path |
Roasting one's own coffee rather sounds daunting, doesn't it? It turns out, it's not. And so i begin to wonder at all the hoopla and mystique around roasting and the oh so precious precious ness of it. Great packaging for a product, but ah c'mon! You may come to the same conclusion after the following "it can't be this simple" post.
or of course, there's instant...on the menu in some UK restaurants....
Step 1: get green beans and be as ethical and snobbish about it as you like, as you can pick beans from anywhere in the world.
Green beans stay fresh for YEARS. That seems a big plus. And getting sample packs of bunches of places lets one explore flavours, blends and roasts.
For bean sources:
In the US i keep hearing about Sweet Maria's. In the UK, i've found Rave Coffee.
Step 2: choose your roasting implement -
There's loads of how-to's on the web from using fry pans ( i wanna be a cowboy...) to amazingly crafted bbq rotiserie turned roaster. Just check out this page of roaster mods (who knew?)
 |
| 4-7mins for about 100g fresh roast coffee |
NOTE: In the UK, here's one german made model Severin - that i've used for about 23 quid (amazon uk affil link). You can drive these into the ground. If you're using them weekly, at 4-6 mins per batch, and do three batches - more or less in a row - that's pushing these little motors to the max - and they can fall over. They make very interesting noises when they do. I rationalise this by considering that a dedicated home roaster now is about 300 quid, and i'm just not sure i'm ready to go there. Not quite sure.
Step 3: Load beans into roasting mechanism of choice
Here we see green beans loaded into a popper - usually take about 100g pre-roasted weight. Mark Prince gives a lovely overview of the popcorn popper set up approach here.
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| green water processed beans from an ethical, organic, free trade all things wonderful, place in Guatemala. |
Step 4: attend as required
(learn about first crack, second crack, temperatur, time and immanent flambé)
Step 5: delight in bean roast
It's pretty cool to see the transformation happen, as beans go from green swirls, to yellow, to darker tan to what we recognise as roasted coffee bean color.
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| Post processing of beans from the spin cycle and just past what's known as "second crack" |
Step 6: put in appropriate off-gassing vessel for 18-36 hours pending preference.
Here's where the coffee roast aroma starts to happen, as the beans blow off the gasses from the roasting.
You can use a bag with a gas out valve (the kind of bags starbucks coffee come in - i got a bunch from Rave when i ordered the beans) or, one tip from the Sweet Maria's video tutorial above, get screw lid type mason jars and leave the lid slightly unscrewed for a day or two. And then either transfer to an airtight vessel to keep beans out of light as well, or just grind up for service.
Some beans - Guatemalan in particular - seem to do better to be left alone for a week or ten days.
Step 7: Occasionally enjoy the aroma of the roast's progress
It's fun after the beans have been bagged to squeeze the valve bag and inhale a bit to get an aroma for the colors of your coffee as they mature over the next day or so.. It's really happening, this wonderful chemical reaction.
Small story: in Paris last week for conference; found a coffee roaster in a wonderful wee market area (the shop is called "brulerie des turnes) - i'd run out of the coffee i'd roasted and ground for the trip (yes and i also brought a moka pot), so went to the shop asking for coffee that had been roasted two days ago - no sooner. Intriguingly this request perplexed the staff. Everyone else wants it just after it's roasted, they said. Oh dear. Well (and then my french failed me in terms of "perhaps they grind it themselves, or do they grind it here?)...Were these staff or owners? I was then perplexed: based on what i've learned (and inhaled) about "fresh roasted coffee" why would you grind coffee just after it's roasted?? Fascinating, oui?
And that's about it.
Just roasting beans is a pleasure. If you find you enjoy it, but don't like coffee, you have a very personalised gift you can share with friends.
If you do like coffee - you're in for a treat on multiple levels, from process to product. Really: you did that! Isn't that cool? And it tastes great.
For some insights into the next part of the process, grinding, scroll down to the end of this post on post processing trauma through manualist interactions (i'm grokking this term). You'll see several videos on cool ways to do manual coffee grinding.
Anon:
I refer to this roasting process as part of a Manualist coffee "zen" - well ya know it just gives me delight - and perhaps any emotional experience is not particularly zen, but it sounds kind neat. Maybe it should be "delight coffee"??
Anyway, if you give this a go, please shout. Will look forward to hearing your experience.
We'll talk about using a wee espresso pot and about latte art, i'm sure, anon.
DO TRY THIS AT HOME (have some good ventilation) - and let me know - please - what you find.
you can follow me on twitter @mcphoo
Fat Tea
Possible Coffee Replacement Drink
Green Tea: good for more than what ails ya
Value of Reusable bits - like a tea infuser.
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COACHING with dr. m.c. 
