by Holly Hughes
I once asked the manager of one of those small, influential shops where groupies Instagram their drinks, to describe his ideal customer. We were a few beers into the afternoon and he took a moment to collect his thoughts before giving a description of a generic somebody with urbane tastes (good palate, good income) and an open mind (willing to try anything once, even coffee without milk). Then I asked him to describe his nightmare customer. He shot back: “An old Italian man who thinks he knows everything about coffee just because he was fucking born in Italy.”
The moment that old Italian man places an order, the manager said, the lectures start: hold it like this, there’s too much of that, there’s not enough of this, it should taste like that, you’re doing it all wrong. At some point, the old man grows exasperated and fatherly and tells the staff that if they want to understand the soul of espresso, they need to go to Italy.
The way the manager told it, that was the punchline. Conventional wisdom might hold that the coffee in Italy is an art form, but that’s just folklore—nobody at the cutting edge of the coffee industry cares about the coffee in Italy.
To be sure, there’s a reverence for illycaffé—the official if unnecessarily slickly branded name for the company better known as illy—and their ability to produce quality coffee on a large scale. (Espresso Coffee: The Science of Quality by Andrea Illy and Rinantonio Viani, a dry, textbook-like tract of detailed information, is required reading for any serious professional.) But that’s it. There’s no interest in other big coffee roasters, or small coffee roasters, or coffee buyers, or coffee bars or baristas. This rising generation of coffee artisans looks to Melbourne, Oslo or San Francisco, not Milan, Rome or Turin.
In part, it’s because the mystique of espresso has faded. A well-made shot is always a pleasure, but it’s no longer thought of as the highest expression of the roasted bean. Instead, we’re living in an age of filter coffee, and the tastemakers who are reshaping the industry tend to be more interested in how the brilliant clarity of a simple cup of brewed coffee illuminates the strange, delicate flavors you can find in the beans from a particular region, or farm, or lot on that farm, than in a syrupy espresso. If a roaster or buyer travels to origin (industry speak for the countries where coffee is grown), and goes through the trouble and expense of sourcing high-quality ingredients, it’s with the goal of presenting a coffee that’s distinctive, unusual, maybe even challenging. You go halfway around the world and sample 400 coffees in a week in search of something beautiful and unique, not familiar and safe.
But even if you take filter coffee out of the picture and only look at espresso, the scene in Italy is ossified, the coffee a relic from an era that might have been at the apex of quality and flavor back when televisions used antennas nut that hasn’t evolved much since. Mystery blends, regional roasts, beans stored for months or even years: this was fine when Americans were drinking watery swill from a percolator, and the Swedes used coffee as a mixer for their morning aquavit, and the British had to take a hovercraft to Calais to see an espresso machine, but the world caught up, and then it moved on. Go to The Coffee Collective in Copenhagen, or Heart Coffee Roasters in Portland, or Coffee Lab in São Paulo, and you’ll have a shot so elegant and floral that it will bend your mind and reshape your understanding of what you can find in an espresso; go to the peach-colored marble counter of a coffee bar in Verona, and you’ll enter a flavor time machine set to 1975.
Although if you do go to The Coffee Collective, or Heart Coffee Roasters, or Coffee Lab and you order an espresso, it won’t be prepared on a machine made in Denmark, or in the United States, or in Brazil. It will be pulled on an Italian machine, with beans pulverized by an Italian grinder. Faema, Mazzer, La Marzocco, Nuova Simonelli, la Pavoni, La San Marco: these are the names of manufacturers so admired that they end up on t-shirts and in tattoos. In the convoluted relationship that high-end coffee has with Italy, nobody follows Italian coffee, but everybody pays close attention to Italian machines.
Last October, the manufacturer Nuova Simonelli unveiled a prototype called the Black Eagle 0388, the newest model in the Victoria Arduino line. It’s a handsome object. While many espresso machines have the boxy silhouette of an air conditioner, the Black Eagle has the low-slung profile of a fast, jumpy car: slim chassis, lattice side panels, wishbone legs. It’s two axles and one drivetrain away from going for a couple of laps around a test track.
Of the number of improvements hiding behind the mirror-polished hood—temperature stability, boiler capacity, recovery time—the most significant breakthrough is built into the drip tray. Called the “gravimetric system,” it consists of a drip tray equipped with hyper-sensitive scales to weigh each espresso as the liquid flows into the cup. If you come across a machine after they roll out later in 2014, peek around the side to see if the barista doesn’t finger the grates to test the scales in a gesture that might be considered mildly obscene.
The gravimetric system is the first time a manufacturer has responded to what the best shops are already doing, namely measuring an espresso by weight, not volume. Right now, if a shop pulls shots by weight it means rigging up a jewelry scale sensitive to at least 1/10 of a gram and watching two sets of numbers—the timer and the weight—so that you stop the machine at the right moment. It works like this: the director of coffee will work out a recipe for a particular espresso (example: 19g dose of coffee; 27-second extraction; 35g yield of espresso), and it’s up to the barista to tweak the grind, watch the scale and keep an eye on the timer so that the numbers all line up.
It’s a labor-intensive process. You place the portafilter on a scale, set the scale to zero, dose the coffee, check the weight, add or subtract more coffee, flush the machine, lock the portafilter into the machine, place a demitasse on a scale on the drip tray, set that scale to zero, start the shot, keep an eye on the timer (which is above the portafilter), keep an eye on the scale (which is below the demitasse), and stop the machine just when you feel it hits the sweet spot. Then you bang out the puck, wipe out the filterbasket, flush the machine and do it all again. In a busy shop, you might repeat those steps a thousand times in a day.
The software that runs the Black Eagle 0388 is supposed to respond to use and be able to read what happens in a busy shop, with autocorrect-like functions that keep the readouts from getting too twitchy. Program the machine to pull a 35g shot, and the pump will shut off at just the right moment so that last fraction of a gram trickles into the cup. It’s the little things that count.
If it seems excruciatingly wonky, it is. But that’s where we are in coffee, or at least that’s where the most interesting figures are to be found. One of those is James Hoffmann, the co-founder of London’s Square Mile Coffee and the winner of the World Barista Championship in 2007. Hoffmann was a consultant on the Black Eagle, and pushed for the gravimetric system. “I’ve been bothering them about it for almost two years,” Hoffmann said. “I think I just wore them down.”
That Victoria Arduino, a brand that first started manufacturing machines in 1905 (the triassic period for espresso: Luiggi Bezzera registered what is considered the first patent for a true espresso machine in 1901), turned to Hoffmann, a Londoner who commutes on a tastefully urban bicycle and whose speech was polished in boarding school (words such as “whilst” and “thrice” come easily to him), isn’t as odd a mashup as it might seem. In fact, it’s a feedback loop that reflects the state of coffee. The innovative baristas might not be in Italy, but the manufacturers are.
What might surprise coffee’s true believers is that the Italians still have a thing or two to teach the rest of the world.
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A couple of years ago, I was standing in line at one of New York’s better hardcore coffee bars. When it was my turn, the barista recognized a friend standing farther back in line and curved his eye contact around me like a free kick. The friend was served and fist-bumped before the barista bothered to ask me what I wanted.
The coffee that morning was better than
anything I’ve ever tasted in Italy, but the masterful roast and skillful preparation didn’t make up for the low-frequency rage simmering in me all morning. I was delayed maybe three minutes, but that’s a long time to seethe.
I like most baristas—I’m not one of those haters who catalogs a few slights and castigates the whole profession—but in the thousands of interactions I’ve had over the last five years, there have been a number of instances when the delicious coffee was spoiled by a sullen barista.
It doesn’t have to be a shitshow to ruin the fun. Indifference is enough of a turn-off. When a transaction is nothing more than an exchange of money for goods and services, it doesn’t matter how magnificent the espresso might taste to an objective judge. When you get the sense that the barista would rather be anywhere other than facing you, you’d rather be anywhere than facing that barista.
In 1994 I lived in Venice while I was interning at the Collezzione Peggy Guggenheim. The following year I returned to work at the Biennale, and I stayed in one of the apartments that were circulated among the art professionals who came to town before the dealers and the tourists arrived. It was a converted storage room on the ground floor of a palazzo on the Grand Canal that had been carved into more than a dozen apartments for the branches of a fallen noble family.
The terrestrial side of the palazzo faced onto a narrow street directly across from a pink building with a marble balcony. The ground floor housed Bar da Gino, a caffé that was the unofficial clubhouse for the Guggenheim staff. Later, the museum opened its own caffé, but at the time Bar da Gino was the closest place we could get a drink or a bite. It was where you had your morning coffee, your mid-morning coffee, your lunch, your afternoon coffee and your first after-work aperitivo.
Like many caffés in Italy, Bar da Gino had a three-tiered price structure. You paid one price at the bar, another at a table and a third if you sat outside. Like many caffés in Venice, there was a second layer of prices: one for tourists, one for locals. It was an important day when I was given the local discount; it was an even more important day when my mother came to visit, and she overhead the cashier tell the waiter that she should get the lower price because she was “the mother of that boy who lives over there.”
I went back to Venice a few years ago, well before I started writing about coffee. When I stepped through the door of Bar da Gino, the waiter saw me, put down her tray and gave me a hug. Then the cashier came over, then the bar man, then the other waiter. Service stopped. I teared up, and so did they, and when the momentum of the morning returned I found myself outside at a table with a cappuccino and a cornetto and a waiter who refused to let me pay.
I don’t think I was a remarkable customer. I was a familiar face for two blocks of time, an American with enough Italian to order quickly and politely, but that was enough to leave an indelible impression. The espresso at Bar da Gino was equally unremarkable—it seemed fantastic then, although I’m sure that I would taste all kinds of faults were I to try it now—but I will remember it long after the detailed impressions of the exquisitely-prepared coffees I’ve had in Los Angeles, New York and Portland will have dissipated. The intellect can be fickle; it’s the heart holds onto memories.
That old man might get most things wrong, but he gets one thing right, at least in part. If you want to master espresso, you can learn the craft in a number of countries, but that will only take you so far. If you want to understand the soul of espresso, you need to go to Italy.
COOKING AS THE CORNERSTONE OF A SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEM
By Kim O’Donnel
From CivilEats.com
Sustainability matters deeply to Kim O’Donnel, a Seattle-based cookbook writer (The Meat Lover’s Meatless Cookbook), longtime food blogger (the Washington Post, EcoCentric), and founder of the Canning Across America collective. But sustainability, she argues here, isn’t just about what happens on a farm.
“How cool is this!” Susan, a 68-year-old retiree from Philadelphia, was on her maiden voyage with her new toy, a salad spinner.
As she pulled the spinner’s retractable cord, the room filled with a rattling hum, similar to a washing machine at the end of its cycle. She was visibly pleased that after just a few pulls, the lettuce leaves tucked inside the colander-like basket were nice and dry. She marveled at how she could both wash—“Wow, there’s a lot of dirt in these leaves”—and dry salad greens with just one tool.
This was just one of the many ah-ha moments for Susan, who signed on to take an immersion cooking course with me earlier this summer. Over the course of a week, we met in her kitchen each day with one primary objective: Getting a handle on the bare essentials of cooking.
With beautifully washed and dried greens before us, the next logical step was to make some salad dressing. This would be another first for her record books, a stark departure from decades of lining the inside door of the refrigerator with an array of store-bought bottles of Thousand Island, Ranch, and Creamy Italian.
She could hardly fathom, as with the salad spinner, the low-tech simplicity of the DIY version. Surely there was more to salad dressing than a few tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of a lemon, salt, pepper, and maybe a smidge of strong mustard. “That’s it and you just shake it all together in a little jar?”
You see, during the 20-plus years of raising three children, Susan put dinner on the table with minimal chopping, slicing or dicing. Instead, she opened cans, unsealed jars and unzipped seasoning envelopes, as per the directions on the back of a box, and within minutes, voilà, dinner was ready. With so many heat, reheat, and quick-serve options on supermarket shelves, Susan, a young mother of three in 1971, felt no need to learn how to use a kitchen knife, and it certainly never occurred to her to make salad dressing. In her mind, Susan fulfilled her job of putting a hot meal on the table for her family. Nobody ever starved, she noted.
Susan is right. Her kids did eat three “square” meals a day. But they each went out into the world without knowing how to prepare one.
I should know. I’m her daughter.
I was 21 when I graduated from college, the same age Susan was when she gave birth to me. I bought my first cookbook (The New Basics by Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso) and fumbled my way through my first-ever apartment kitchen. Cooking dinner, I quickly learned, was a practical way to stretch my measly paycheck. But it also set me on a path of personal discovery. Cooking was a way to learn about the world and find my place in it. It helped me grow up and grow into a kinder, more nurturing version of myself. Far from a great cook was I, botching and burning and under seasoning with great frequency. But it hardly mattered, I was cooking dammit, and I felt alive.
Learning to cook reminds me of discovering my true love for reading. I was six years old, the lucky recipient of a brand new hardbound copy of Charlotte’s Web, a gift from cousins on my mom’s side. I laid at the foot of my bed, on my stomach, and cracked open the book, reading out loud so that I could hear the words, proof positive that I could read, yes indeed. It marked the beginning of a lifelong love affair; reading took me places I longed to go and helped me to better understand the world, even at the age of six.
At the stove, my world similarly expanded. Even when I screwed up a dish, I learned something new: Maybe math or chemistry, botany or history, or a hard-fought lesson in patience. Looking back now, with the perspective that comes with a culinary degree and a 17-year food career, I still believe deep in my bones that cooking, which marries the practical with the magical, can be the greatest teacher of all, and that it’s never too late to learn.
It was in this spirit that I approached Susan about the kitchen project. Nothing too cheffy or complicated, I said to her over the phone, simple tricks and techniques like washing and drying salad greens and making legumes.
Legumes. What are those?
You know, lentils.
Oh yes. And can we make some quinoa? I would like to learn how to make some quinoa salad. I love the one that’s on the menu at Terrain.
&nb
sp; Sure. And maybe work on some knife skills, you know, how to dice and slice.
Ugh, my knife is so dull. Maybe we need to buy a new knife.
Secretly, I hoped she would have so much fun and feel so empowered and wowed by her food that she would forget about what she had never learned and instead celebrate what she would come to know. As with reading, cooking is all about diving in and just doing it.
Our adventure began, as it did every day, with warm-up exercises that went something like this: “Okay, ready? Heel, tip. Heel, tip. There you go. Glide, glide. Twenty times on each side.”
You might think we were working out to a Jane Fonda tape. Instead, we were honing our knives with a sharpening steel. A long metal rod used to maintain the edge of a knife, the steel is one of the first things I learned to use in culinary school, but unfortunately it rarely sees the light of day in most home kitchens.
Use the steel on your knife every time you cook, I said. Think of it like flossing, daily maintenance that doesn’t replace annual dental checkups but makes them easier. A knife left unhoned goes dull very quickly.
From honing, we’d transition to actual chopping. Susan was particularly excited about the “half moon” cut (also known as the crescent), which gives her quick-cooking thinly sliced vegetables. With the half moon, she saw many possibilities within easy reach: Caramelized onions, sautéed zucchini, and melty-thin potatoes for a frittata.
By our fifth day, Susan had prepared two kinds of lentil dishes, boiled quinoa (“wow, it took only 15 minutes!”), seasoned the quinoa with her newly beloved salad dressing in a jar, and stuffed that quinoa into bell pepper halves. We cruised the supermarket bulk section and comparison shopped for lentils, walnuts and oats, and we bought just-harvested asparagris (her word) from a local farm stand that we roasted and topped with lemon zest and grated Parmigiano.
