Can you brew coffee using a surgical face mask?
i'm gonna be rich, clowns
Hi clowns!
I’ve had another busy week being the greatest food writer in all of history. Something really fun happened, and it’s that I was featured on a podcast called A Hot Dog is a Sandwich. This is a podcast from the hosts of the YouTube channel Mythical Kitchen, Josh Scherer and Nicole Enayati, and I had an absurdly fun time recording it with them. We argued whether or not a pizza is an open-faced sandwich (my conclusion is no, but I did question myself on multiple occasions). You can listen to the episode here, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
If you’re not familiar with Mythical Kitchen, you should really check it out.
Josh creates all sorts of wildly ridiculous food concoctions (in a good way), like creating a fancy $237 Wendy’s Baconator, and generally wields his power of cooking for good, no buttholes involved, unlike me. Make sure you subscribe to the Mythical Kitchen YouTube channel, because you should listen to everything I say.
This week on the newsletter, I decided to tackle a beverage beloved to many, which is coffee.
I’ve recently been drinking more of it, and it’s been much better for me than my former sugar-free Monster energy drink habit. But let’s face it: Monster energy drink will always be hilarious. Come on. It’s called Monster. Not one good thing could come from something called “Monster,” except for maybe Monster energy drink pudding.
Now, for my day job at The Takeout, I’ve been doing some coffee-related stuff, so my second favorite hot brown liquid has been on my mind more than usual these days. I’ve been receiving samples of other types of coffee beverages that are created non-traditionally, like concentrated coffee, frozen products, and other novel ways to prepare your favorite roasted bean juice.
So, I thought to myself, “Dannis Ree, how can you disrupt coffee? Can you come up with a new way to brew coffee that will change the coffee industry?”
Then I ripped off my face mask, stared at it, and said, “Wait, can I brew coffee with this thing?”
Typical drip coffee filters are made out of paper, and so are these surgical-style masks.
This had to work, obviously. Why shouldn’t your mask also be used to brew coffee? Run out of filters? Grab a mask from the box! Ugh. I’m a goddamn genius. I’m going to win the James Beard Nobel Peace Prize. This success is too much for me to handle sometimes.
A good cup starts with a quality type of bean, like this large container of coffee that I paid $285 for.
It comes from the assholes of iguanas who eat coffee fruit on a tropical island that was once used for nuclear warfare testing. The reptiles eat irradiated coffee bean pods which roast inside their stomachs, and then get crapped out and delivered by pelicans to rich people.
Just kidding! It’s Aldi coffee. I probably paid $4 for it or something. It helps us take dumps in the morning. Really gets that engine started.
As for hardware, I’d try brewing the coffee in my trusty little Black and Decker.
I’ve had this thing for years. This thing is like a baby coffee maker. It only brews four cups at a time, which is good, because the gang is trying to cut back. Pepper the raccoon can’t sleep if she drinks coffee past noon. Harvey and Mr. Bee get into fistfights after their fix so they’ve been trying to limit the brawls to twice per week.
The surgical mask fits perfectly inside the coffee maker basket, as you can see.
Never mind the straps sticking out or anything. Details are for idiots.
I put the coffee basket back into the coffee maker and doled out some high-quality iguana asshole grounds.
I tried closing the thing, which wasn’t exactly successful.
The coffee maker kept popping back open due to the straps. I used all my great muscular strength and finally got the damn thing to shut after I pleaded with it and cried.
Then it popped back open.
After turning the thing on, I stood around to see if any liquid would come out of the dirty water-stained basket.
Lo and behold, a small trickle did start making its way out. I admired my handiwork and prepared the proper mug for my genius beverage hack.
I won a penguin mug set from Dave and Busters one night, using my drunken ticket earnings that probably cost me $73 or something.
Harvey clearly approves of my life choices. I sat down on the couch and congratulated myself for thinking of such a genius idea while the coffee brewed.
When the coffee maker stopped making trickling noises, I went over to see my handiwork and found that it had leaked all over the kitchen island.
“Everything is going according to plan,” I said to myself, angrily cleaning up the wet grounds and coffee.
As a reward for cleaning up, I poured myself a nice hot cup from what remained in the carafe.
It was very light with flecks of grounds floating around in it, and it generally looked disappointing. Basically what I’m saying is that this was the ideal cup of coffee. I took a sip and realized it did in fact taste as watery as it looked. It also tasted like used cigarette butts soaked in dirty rainwater. Thanks, Aldi!
I brought it over to Davida, who said, “I can already tell it’s weak.” She took a sip and just handed the mug back to me without saying much. She clearly loved it.
I examined the coffee basket to see why the coffee ended up being so terrible, and it turns out surgical masks don’t make good coffee filters after all.
The coffee grinds clogged up the mask, leaving a ton of coffee still cradled in the basket. It looked like one of my used diapers after a full week of non-stop usage. I handed my James Beard Nobel Peace Prize back to the committee and whipped out my phone to message my friend Steve Lewis, who’s a veterinarian in New Jersey, and a hell of a talented cook.
Steve is in the process of opening up a vet clinic, St. Francis Veterinary Medical Center in East Hanover NJ, which opens this coming January. He helped us when Cricket and Nugget were very sick, and who better to ask for coffee making advice using a surgical mask, other than a doctor of veterinary medicine?
I asked him, “In your professional opinion, is brewing coffee using a surgical mask a good idea?”
Steve replied, “I’d have to say other than it burning the shit out of my mouth when it went through the mask, it’d probably do the job of keeping the grounds out of the coffee. So no, not a good idea. Wait, are you wearing the mask?”
That’s the issue. Apparently I did it all wrong. You’re supposed to filter the coffee with your face.
As always, thanks for reading, clowns! To console me for my award loss, please share this newsletter post on social media, because maybe the James Beard Nobel Peace Prize committee will change their mind with enough petitioning:
And of course, make sure you sign up for the paid version of the newsletter. You’ll gain access to all the previous exclusive content at foodisstupid.substack.com, and you’ll get exclusive paid-subscriber-only stuff in the future. You’re witnessing history, everyone.
I love you all very much. Don’t forget to get your flu shot, everyone. See you in your inboxes soon and never stop farting.
I'm here cause I wanted to know if it's safe to use a mask as a coffee filter. The mess is whatever bro. To each their own. Broken coffee maker is depressing and that's at least a good caution, thank you.
I use my electric kettle with infuser to brew tea. While steeping the tea the infuser separated and tea leaves went everywhere. No coffee filters. I took a facemask and cut out the front two layers - there are 3 total. Worked like a charm filtering the tea into my 32oz water bottle and back into the kettle.