Sophia

Sophia on the Hot Seat

1. What inspired you to become a Barista/Chef?

Cooking for me is freedom! To cook for a living and work as a chef means more freedom that allows you to be more creative and spontaneous than pretty much any other career. Cooking also encourages you to make improvisations and create new and interesting palatable flavors. Even recipes are just guidelines to get started with, you can always change the ratios and add new ingredients to own the dish. I think I’ve always been free-spirited and being confined to a cubicle is not me.

2. What is your signature dish? What do people love about it?

It’s my Frappe Coffee. Customers stop by before heading to work and the coffee wakes them up and helps shake off the blues. Frappe coffee is an iced coffee made using instant coffee and water, that has been shaken to produce a foamy, and refreshing drink. You can add ice cubes after beating the coffee and also sugar and milk, according to preference. An ice-crushing blender is better than a shaker for blending a frappé.

3. How do you describe your overall cooking philosophy?

I think that recipes are much more forgiving than you think. A recipe doesn’t have to be followed exactly — if it calls for dark sugar but all you have is brown sugar, that’ll do just fine. If you can only find thyme in the grocery store when the recipe demands rosemary, it’ll probably do the same thing to your dish. You got to cut yourself some slack and accept that cooking is an art, not an exact science.

4. What do you love the most about your home country Colombia?

Oh, I can write a book about Colombia and all things I love about it. If I have to narrow it down to one, it’s the towns that look like they’re filled with dollhouses. It’s a little strange, but if you like windows and doors as much as I do, you’ve got to visit Colombia. In the popular destinations of Cartagena, there are pretty little towns with monuments that look like cute dollhouses. Guatapé, a city close to Medellín, and the cities of Salento and Filandia, located in the coffee region, were some of my favorites.

5. Name the three kitchen tools you can't do without. 

Okay, there are a lot of tools in a barista’s counter, here are some of them.

Tamper: You can pack your ground coffee tightly into a puck. If you don’t tamp your coffee, it’ll mess with the taste of your coffee, and trust me people are pretty unforgiving about bad coffee.

Thermometer: It’s preferred that milk is around 65 degrees Celsius and anything higher than that can ruin the flavors by over-burning it. So, you can see why I’d add a thermometer as an absolute essential.

Caffeine Wrench: If it’s a machine, it breaks down from time to time, and mostly when the restaurant is packed with orders overflowing. A caffeine wrench can single-handedly fix some common issues your espresso machine faces and I always keep it handy and would suggest other Baristas to do the same.