INeedCoffee INeedCoffee
 
 

Home / Roasting /

Home Roasting Coffee in an Electric Oven

by Michael Allen Smith

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3

Stopping the Roast

Once the beans achieve your desired roast, stop the oven and remove the beans. Be prepared to be face to face with a cloud of smoke. Also, don't forget that this is a very hot oven. Use oven mitts.

Dig through the smoke and recover the beans without burning yourself.

Cooling the Bean

The immediate goal once the beans have been roasted is to cool them. Transferring the beans from the perforated pan into a metal colander or flat cooling tray will help. Also by using a water bottle with a fine mist you can accelerate the cooling. Don't drench the beans, just lightly mist the cold water over them. It should evaporate immediately and cool the coffee beans in the process. If your squirt bottle can't mist, don't use it. Anything more than a mist will do more harm than good.

Misting the beans will immediately cool the coffee

Removing the Chaff

A big disadvantage to oven roasting is that unlike the popcorn popper, you will need to remove the chaff by hand. Chaff is the leaf-like shell that peels off of coffee beans during the roasting process. Using a colander or something with holes will help a little. Still, most of the chaff will need to be removed by hand. Don't be obsessive about removing every bit of chaff. Your coffee is already far better than 99% of the beans available to the public.

Paul Sheridan emailed in this chaff removal technique:

Use two colanders. Pour the beans (and chaff) between them. Position the exhaust from your shop-vac so that it is blowing on the beans as they fall from colander to colander. The beans will fall, and the chaff will get blown away!

Electric Oven Roasting Step-by-Step

  1. Disable the smoke detector and alert family of impending smoke.
  2. Preheat the oven to 500ºF/260ºC.
  3. Spread the beans over the perforated baking pan so that they are no more than one bean deep. Make sure they are close together.
  4. Place pan into oven once it reaches 500ºF/260ºC
  5. Set up metal colander nearby or cooling tray.
  6. Have spray bottle on mist ready to go. You just want a light mist. Test spray bottle before using.
  7. Monitor the roast. The beans will take about 10-20 minutes to roast.
  8. Once roasted, remove the pan and place the beans into the metal colander or cooling tray.
  9. Apply a light mist with your water bottle.
  10. Once beans are cool, begin chaff removal.
  11. Let house clear of smoke.
  12. Apologize to any firefighters that may have arrived to your home.
  13. Enable smoke detector.
  14. Allow 24 hours for beans to de-gas before brewing.

The finished product.

Conclusion

If your oven has poor ventilation, you'll conclude that roasting coffee in an electric oven is no fun. It took 30 minutes for my house to clear of smoke. My cat was not amused. Also, I found it more difficult to monitor the roast than the popper method. The taste of the coffee was excellent, but thinner and less flavorful than equal roasts done in a popcorn popper. The ideal person for this method would be someone that has no way of roasting outside with a popper, owns an electrical oven, and doesn't want to commit $130 to a Hearthware Precision Roaster. Someday I hope to try this in a gas oven with strong vents.

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3

Tags: