The Latte Day 2: Sweet Warm Milk

Sorry about the terrible presentation today. The latte itself looked pretty boring and it didn’t even fill the cup. Also the picture is incredibly boring. Just look at yesterday’s photo. 

There are a handful of things that I do in the kitchen that don’t really make sense. For example:

• My meal times fall on a generally precise pattern of 6-hour separations. I am fully convinced the best times—in terms of mathematical symmetry and hunger—are 7:00AM, 1:00PM, and 7:00PM. This means that you will eat on a precisely incremented cycle so you can have equally sized meals throughout your day. Additionally, after a remaining on such a pattern, your body will begin to not need snacks throughout the day—saving time, money, and calories. Also, the hunger that comes around 11:00 for all the people who ate dinner at 5:00PM will be pushed back until 1:00AM because your body needs food every 6-hours. More than likely you will be asleep then (unless it is hell-week), and you can safely avoid the midnight munchies.
• I always drink black coffee. No cream. No milk. No sugar. No stevia. This is often a complicated order for flight attendants and so I find myself reciting Brian Regean:

Yeah, I would like a cup of black coffee please. ‘How would you like that coffee?’ How would I like the black coffee? Can you put it in a cup? Yeah, don’t just splash it on my face. ‘Would you like cream and sugar with that?’ Is it black cream? If not, I’ll take it blackity black, black. Filled with blackness. Devoid of all light. Think of the blackest thing you can imagine and double that blackness and take a black magic marker and fill in the gaps and put that into a black rocket ship and shoot that into the depths of black space and close your eyes and use that as a reference.

• I don’t actually measure, unless I am baking. For all my dedicated blog followers, the measurements are a lie. I follow in the spirit of my great-grandma Isaac—they are more suggestions than anything (I will admit though that my suggestions are easier to follow. “Until it looks right” can be a bit vague…).
• I prefer skim milk. Not sure why. I remember my mom sent me to the grocery store once I got my license, and I purchased the cheapest milk—skim. That didn’t fly well for my family—everyone except for me. I discovered then I enjoyed skim milk.

Today I broke all these preferences.

• At around 9:30, I woke up. I wanted to work out before eating breakfast, so I pushed back my latte making by 30 minutes. But then I wanted a shower (add an additional 30 minutes). Very quickly it was 10:30 and I had eaten no breakfast. Failure 1.
• Second, I need to make my latte great again, so I skipped the black coffee that beckoned my name from the freshly brewed pot. It had to be a latte today and not the blackity-black-black-black-hole-blackness I usually drink. Failure 2.
• Yesterday my latte was not actually a latte. It was a failure wrapped in the deceptive guise of one man’s attempt at a latte. So today, I wanted to have some sort of measure to compare future lattes. That measure came in the form of measuring all my ingredients. Failure 3.
• When I had made my latte, I was sipping on it contemplating its texture, its flavor, its color and presentation, its repeatability—and I thought how I really should start using whole milk for these lattes rather than the 2% my parents purchase. It would give a lot thicker (…thicc-er…) of a texture. Failure 4.

Fortunately, it was not all failure this morning. My latte turned out acceptable. I don’t feel bad calling it a latte this morning. Whatever I made yesterday, was definitely not a latte. There was significant improvement, but I am definitely not an enlightened barista yet.

Today I wanted to simplify and improve technique and overall basicness. I will have to revisit my spiced latte again, but this was just getting the essentials down.

Latte Day 2: Sweet Warm Milk

• Latte-ness: 7/10 (If I gave this a letter grade, it would get a C+. It passed, but it needs work.)
• Create-ability: 6/10
• Fluffiness: 4/10
• Time: 20 minutes
• Flavor: A lot more simple, but very sweet. Coffee flavor hid right behind the sugar and cocoa. It did not carry its weight. The milk took on the topography of the rolling hills of Ireland. Very pleasant. The cocoa touched the tongue with the touch of Michelangelo’s Adam and God. The sugar was a lot more blunt. A semi-truck of cotton-candy just ran into sugar land and exploded. The residue landed in this drink. It wanted to be the star, where I distinctly intended it to be the backup-singer.

Ingredients for an Acceptable Latte:

(Note I did actually measure these today)

• 1 Tbl dark roast coffee (medium to fine grind)
• 1/4 cup filtered water
• 2/3 cup milk
• 1/2 Tbl sugar
• Couple drops of vanilla extract
• Dusting of cocoa powder

Necessary Tools for an Acceptable Latte:

• French press
• Coffee filter (This was a bad idea. Just don’t.)
• 2 pots
• Liquids measuring cup (there is a difference between liquid measuring and dry measuring for all you single men)
• Fork or other stirring tool
• Mason jar with lid

Instructions for an Acceptable Latte:

Bring the water to a boil. Place in French press. (I made the mistake of doubling up filter power and so I placed a coffee filter in my French press so I could go with a finer grind. Poor choice. Moving the arm was a pain. Hopefully, I will figure out how to get good espresso, but today was not that day.) Pour milk into a pot and warm slowly with sugar and vanilla. Stir constantly. The milk will eventually hit peak foaminess when it boils. Have the espresso in your coffee bowl when this happens. Pour quickly over the espresso. Dust with cocoa. Realize your presentation sucks and you have to blog about it. Cry internally.