It's been a while since I've documented an amazing feat of stupidity. That doesn't mean none have been committed, mind you, but rather I've simply been too ashamed to actually document them. Rest assured that numerous acts of stupidity have been committed (amazing or otherwise) over the past year.
This one deserved to be documented, so once more we bravely go where no man has gone (or wants to go) before.
I'm a great lover of coffee and tea. I have a manual Italian espresso/cappuccino maker in my kitchen, and I regularly drink all manner of teas (usually green or white whole-leaf tea). I've made some amazingly good cappuccinos, and like any guy who gets his hands on a piece of equipment, I've also been plotting all sorts of uses for the espresso machine that it was not intended for.
First was my attempt at making a green tea "cappuccino" (dubbed a Senchaccino) that was similar to the green tea smoothies I'd had in Malaysia, only this time hot and with frothed milk. While I did eventually have great success making these yummy concoctions, I very nearly destroyed my espresso machine (and kitchen) in the process.
It seems that even very finely ground green tea leaves expand far more than coffee grounds do when hot steam is passed through them. I ended up with 800lbs of pressure pushing against the green tea leaves and going nowhere because they'd expanded too much. I had to use the care of a bomb disposal technician to diffuse that mess, and I still ended up with a thin layer of ground green tea leaves exploding all over my kitchen.
Now that I have the technique perfected, the results are incredibly good. The mixture of green tea powder, frothed milk, and sugar is a wonderful drink. But I was not content with this. Oh no. One day while enjoying a fine cigar, the gears began dangerously turning in their twisted way again: the cigar I was smoking was made from tobacco leaves. Tea is made from tea leaves.
I like tea. I like cigars. They are both just leaves from different plants: why not try making a tobacco espresso? Or a tobacco cappuccino? The tobaccoccino was born!
The first step was picking the poor cigar that would be chosen to make the sacrifice of being cut up, and then ground into little bits for my tobaccoccino. I chose a Cuban Monte Cristo from my humidor, and considered that if Castro had any idea what I was doing with his poor cigar, he'd have me executed on the spot, just on principle.
Poor innocent little cigars | 
Set up for slaughter... | 
Oh, the humanity | 
The scene of the crime |
The first step was to cut up the cigar into little sections, so that I could feed it into the burr ginder. I could hear the poor cigar scream out in pain as it was chopped up into little pieces and fed into the grinder.
It actually took a good bit of work to get it all ground up, because the rather large pieces of tobacco were tough to force down into the grinder. When it was all done, I was surprised at how small the amount of ground tobacco looked.
Cigar Aficianado hates me | 
Not much left over from one cigar | 
Pouring the grounds in... | 
Temping them down firmly for the hot steam |
Already the room was filled with the smell of tobacco, and I was smiling with glee as my evil plot was unfolding with perfect precision. The next step in making an expresso is to compress the grinds into a cake, so that it the hot steam from the espresso machine is properly forced through it.
The moment of truth arrived with all the delicacy of a freight train. I lifted the level on the espresso machine, and brought it down like a guillotine, and the first blood from my concoction oozed out of the machine. It was black as night, and I half expected it to eat through the glass as it poured into it like syrup from hell.
All compressed up and ready to go | 
The first drips of black death... | 
Black as night, and twice as lethal | 
Even some nice crema on top! |
Holding the tobacco espresso (tobspressow) up to the window, it looked at once beautiful and sinister. Not a ray of light came through it. Clearly the proper thing to do now was to taste it.
But first, a sniff. I'd never smelled anything quite like it; rather acrid, and barely smelling like tobacco at all. What we were dealing with here was probably nothing more than high-test nicotine with a hint of bat guano from the barn where the tobacco was dried.
It almost looks pretty against the window light | 
hrm, smells a little funky... | 
Didn't Plato do something like this once? | 
WOAH! |
The taste... woah! Incredibly strong, and you could feel it tickling -- no, more like attacking -- your throat as it went down. WOAH! Yikes. There was no way I could drink this stuff raw. That's okay though, my plan was only half-complete. I had yet to create my frankenstein, the utterly wrong mixing of foo-foo Italian cappuccino with ground cigar tobacco.
First I emptied out the carrier that held the compressed tobacco, and just like for espresso, it came out in a solid compressed cake. The next step in making a cappuccino is to froth milk into the cup, by passing the milk through steam. This creates a nice light, fluffy texture to the milk, which is utterly at odds with the vile nicotine brew lurking below.
The tobacco, after being pressed by hot steam | 
It's aliiiiiiive!!!! | 
Serious scientific research being conducted here | 
Presenting... the Tobaccoccino!! |
When I was all done, it actually looked quite pleasant, almost like a real cappuccino, with swirls of black and fluffy white milk in harmony together. I added a tablespoon of sugar to it, and gave it a taste.
It tasted... interesting. The first taste wasn't that bad actually, but it was clearly still way, way too strong to even consider drinking. It was almost like swallowing liquid sandpaper, because of the feeling left on your throat as it tricked down. Clearly the thing to do was to add more sugar.
Beautiful looks, sinister bite | 
Time to give the creation a taste | 
Woah... more sugar... more sugar... please! | 
Well, that tastes... better! |
After 3 tablespoons of sugar, it was drinkable. In fact, I'm drinking it now. It has an interesting taste, though I'm not quite sure, even as a proud father, that I can call it "good". It's definitely interesting, though.
It's also incredibly potent, the buzz it's given me makes it rather difficult to type up this account properly. Once again, another amazing feat of stupidity showing you what you'd never want to do yourself, and proving that...
