Harts of Stur Kitchen issue 09, spring 2019 | Page 53

kit T H E Instant Expert: Espresso Everything you need to know about espresso A good espresso should taste like this know that – if you’re at home with an espresso machine and a grinder, you’ll do fine adjustments. You can’t really advise on the size, it’s just experience and timing it. Start timing your yield – you’ve got to achieve your 36ml in 28-32 seconds. People who get into it get their stopwatches out!” “Espresso is obviously a short drink, but it’s more intense than a normal coffee. Your dream espresso is going to be sweet, well balanced and have some fruit flavours. It would also have a nice crema [the thin layer of foam at the top of a coffee]. If you’re using old beans, you’ll get a stale coffee and you wouldn’t get so much crema. “If you over extract the coffee – if you went on for 40 seconds – the crema could be quite dark and have a tendency for more bitterness. So, the longer the extraction, the more bitter it is likely to be, and the shorter, the more acidic. An under-extracted coffee – if it, say, took 20 seconds, it could be quite light and watery tasting, and too acidic.” The importance of stretching milk “If you’ve got a steam arm on your machine, this is probably the most tricky part of making a coffee. It is a two-stage approach – the stretching process draws air into the milk, so the top of the nozzle should be just out of the milk. Once you’ve stretched it as much as you want, you then want to texture it, where you’re spinning the milk and giving it a nice creamy texture. “For a cappuccino, for example, you’re incorporating bubbles by stretching, essentially increasing the volume of milk by sucking a little air in. Then you put the tip of the steam wand deeper into the milk and you just want to spin the milk and that’s called texturing, which is very important because it’s like whipping the milk up.” The importance of good beans “What a roaster is trying to achieve is to make sure you get that nice fruit favour cutting through the milk. So, the slight danger is losing the interest once you add the milk, particularly with speciality coffee. “At Moonroast, we only roast speciality coffee that’s graded over 80 out of 100. You’ve got speciality coffee and everything under that is commodity coffee, so when you’re buying premium arabica speciality coffee, what you don’t want to do is roast too dark and create a ‘roasty’ coffee flavour. You’re trying to draw out different characteristics of the bean. Getting the roast profile and the extraction right on the machine is what you’re trying to achieve to get the fruity, sweetness balance. If you roast dark you get a one-dimensional flavour. “A lot of our coffees are ethically sourced from smallholder farmers, and they’re being very well rewarded for quality. Because it’s scored over 80, it’s going to be good stuff – that’s our assurance that it’s minimum base quality. If someone is buying coffee that’s not speciality grade, they don’t quite know what they’re getting.” Buy a good grinder “If you want to improve your coffee making at home, buy a grinder. It’s practically impossible to make an espresso with pre-ground coffee because the grind size won’t be right for your machine. Some would say that a grinder is more important than an espresso machine, but it needs to be a burr grinder because what you’re trying to achieve is an even grind. If you buy a cheap grinder you’ll end up with big particles and small particles, so the extraction isn’t going to be very good.” How to choose the right coffee machine “I would always go for manual, because then you’re in total control. With a separate grinder, you can adjust the grind and extraction time. Bean to cup is a little more automated so the grind is incorporated into the machine, but you should still be able to adjust the grind and you should still be stretching the milk. “On a manual machine, it takes time to stretch the milk with the steamer, but some of the more fancy bean to cup machines will do the milk for you. “Capsule machines probably work out more expensive per cup, but it’s easy. If you’re interested in coffee, with micro roasters popping up all over the country, there’s a good chance that someone will have one nearby. So get it freshly roasted and you’ll be able to discover different coffees, different varieties and different countries. There’s more room to explore coffees with a bean to cup or a manual machine.” How to store beans “The element that deteriorates the beans quickest is oxygen. As long as there’s no oxygen in contact with the bean at all, you’d ideally use a bean within a month, but up to two months really. It’s really a matter of storing the beans in a cool, dry place – it doesn’t have to be the fridge. We put the roast date rather than the best before on our bags, to give it a shelf life of three months after roast date, but it’s really at its peak after four or five weeks. If you buy ground coffee it does go off quicker.” The importance of perfect grinding “There’s a sweet spot when you’re trying to get the grind right. You’re trying to achieve this perfect extraction – if the beans are ground too coarsely, the water is going to come through too quickly and you’re going to get a thin, tasteless coffee. If it’s too fine, it’s going to slow the water coming through and you’ll potentially get a bitter coffee. The humidity in the air changes things – every day is different, so you might have to do tiny adjustments on your grinder to achieve perfect extraction. You get to What else do you need? “You do need a tamper as the tamping part of making your espresso is important. When you’re forming your shot, it needs to be level because otherwise, the water goes down the side. How we recommend it in our barista training is that you put the pressure of mashing potato on it. You also need the right-sized milk jug.” 53 www.hartsofstur.com