Milk Art: Don't Be Afraid

My Giotto

With the arrival of my new espresso machine at Christmas (the Rocket Giotto Evoluzione), I realized that I was crossing a line from casual coffee drinker to serious coffee snob. To fan the flames of my new passion, I recently enrolled in an all-day class at the Espresso Academy in Florence.

Mokaflor (a Florentine coffee roaster since 1950) offers a range of courses, from a half-day appreciation course for newbies to an all-day course for professionals. I chose the milk art class, the one that lets you paint pretty pictures using milk on  top of the espresso. Why milk art? Because I want to impress my friends when I serve them a cappuccino with a heart or a leaf on top. But like most attempts at showing off, this one has not been successful.

Gabriele shows us how it is done.

Italy isn’t the birthplace of coffee, but it has done a great deal to promote the commodity and more importantly the culture that has flourished around this humble seed for the past 500 years. Thought to originate in Ethiopia, coffee—along with other exotic commodities from the Middle East and Africa—made its way to the trading hub of Venice around 1500. Despite appeals to ban the “Muslim drink,” Pope Clement VIII gave coffee drinking a big thumbs up in 1600, and the first coffee bar opened in Italy in 1645. The modern high-pressure espresso machine was invented in 1945 in Milan. Cappuccinos became fashionable around the same time. One-third espresso, one-third steamed milk, and one-third milk foam,

Can you find the cappuccino
in this picture?

cappuccinos are named after the Capuchin monks, some say because of their tonsure haircut, others say  the monks brown robes represent the espresso and their small hoods represent the foam. The cappuccino has become the ultimate test of a barista’s skill and milk art is the coup de grace. YouTube is full of videos of expert baristas who make milk art look as easy as finger painting. It’s not.

Lots of latte

Because creating milk art requires repetition, and using milk and coffee at the beginning would be wasteful, the course instructor, Gabriele, had us start by using liquid soap in water to get the foaming technique down. Since the class was composed of eight seasoned Italian baristas and me, it didn’t take long to get through this portion of the class. These people know how to foam milk and pull a shot of espresso.

The pressure was on with everyone watching.

Next, we poured water from a pitcher into a cup to practice the motion of creating a heart, the easiest design to master. After Gabriele watched us practice with the water, he pointed to me and said “you are ready.” Me? Out of a room full of baristas? Gabriele said that the quickest learners of milk art are novices, because they haven’t accumulated any bad habits. He was right. I made a near perfect heart the first time I tried. “Brava!” Everyone cheered. We each took turns with different levels of success, Gabriele always trying to find the design in even the poorest attempts and then sending us back to our water to practice the motions over and over again.

These guys are professionals.

After lunch (and what else? an espresso!), our group started working on the leaf design. More nuanced than the heart, the leaf requires a lighter touch. Most people couldn’t get the limp-wristed technique that Gabriele demonstrated. For me, the motion wasn’t a problem, but I couldn’t get the tip of the pitcher close enough to the espresso. “You are afraid! You must be brave and bold!” Gabriele said as though he were coaching me on life, not milk art.

Always encouraging and lighthearted, Gabriele’s face lit up when I told him I was from Seattle. “We have Seattle and Starbucks to thank for increasing our export of coffee around the world.” He was quick to point out that Starbucks is more about the experience—large, puffy

Closer, closer, closer...Don't be afraid!

couches with a fireplace and free wifi—than about the time-honored Italian tradition of knocking one back at the bar on your way to work, at the mid-morning coffee break, and after lunch. He also poo-pooed the quality of Starbucks, but did say that there were a number of great roasting companies in Seattle, such as Caffé Vita.

It’s telling that Starbucks, with nearly 20,000 stores around the world, has exactly zero in Italy. Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, has written that Milan was the site of his coffee store epiphany. But his reluctance to bring Starbucks to Italy, makes it clear he is uncertain about its acceptance in a country that has an estimated 140,000 establishments serving espresso.

This is how Italians like their coffee...
but only in the morning.

Italian bars are like Irish pubs. They are community gathering places. People rarely sit down and linger, but they also don’t buy coffee to go in paper cups. They enjoy their beverage in the company of the barista and the other locals that frequent the bar, talking about families, soccer, politics, and weather. Italians are fairly regimented with their consumption: cappuccino with breakfast and caffé normale (an espresso) during the rest of the day. (According to my Italian friends, too much milk and coffee together is hard on the liver.) Italians put a high value on the quality of the coffee, and they prefer a lighter roast and cooler temperature than the coffee that Starbucks serves.

According to a recent article in Business Week, Schultz isn’t ruling out Starbucks in Italy, but he is being careful. Frankly, I think the traveling and expat community alone could support Starbucks in Rome, Florence, and Milan, but sadly they would be missing out on one of the great cultural experiences of Italy, the coffee bar.

My best attempts in class.

Although I was able to make a heart and a diseased-looking leaf by the end of the course, my attempts on my own machine have been less successful. Monday morning after the course, I made the worst cappuccino in the two months that I’ve owned the machine. I sat despondent at breakfast with Jim. Tuesday things improved, but I decided to order a pitcher with a better tip. At this point, I am not giving up. I’m just blaming my tools. Wednesday I made an itsy-bitsy heart and what looked like the tongue and lips logo from the Rolling Stones. Progress is incremental and might be measured in my ability to creatively interpret accidental designs.

A rhino?

I might be disappointed in my abilities as a milk artist, but I am not disappointed in the class. I learned a lot from Gabriele about coffee history, culture, chemistry, and process. And I still hope to impress my friends some day with a perfectly shaped heart or leaf on top of a delicious cappuccino.