Hi friends! This is my first 💖 VIDEO 💖 post, a perk that’s available to paid subscribers of the newsletter!
For the month of May, I’ll be sending subscriber-only posts to everyone, just so you can see what I’m working on. But if you can, please consider becoming a paid subscriber of Boss Barista:
Also, support abortion rights. Donate to your local abortion funds, and support people with uteruses—and if you don’t, get out of here. In 2018, I did two episodes on abortion, which I re-run every time abortion rights are threatened (which continues to happen, over and over). Those episodes are linked here and here.
You may know that I was selected to participate in Substack’s Food Writers Intensive Program, which brings together writers from across the platform, and introduces us to industry leaders, while helping us accelerate our growth and reach. It’s one of the reasons I turned on the “paid” option for my newsletter, and it’s how I ended up hearing Andrew Zimmern—a fellow Substack writer who you might know from television shows like “Bizarre Foods”—speak about hidden superpowers.
Over Zoom, Andrew sat down with our fellows group and told a story about razor clams. Once, years ago, he ordered razor clams for a restaurant where he was working. At the time, they were not an especially well-known ingredient, but would end up becoming increasingly popular in the years to come.
Even though the razor clams didn’t sell (Andrew said he ordered 40 pounds, thinking it’d be best to order less and run out … and he ended up with 38 pounds left over), he said it taught him something: his superpower. That power was being able to spot an item that wasn’t well-known yet, but which would soon come to prominence. “I learned so much from those fucking razor clams,” he said.
That inspired me to ask: What is your superpower?
I’m talking about this now in part because I keep coming back to an interview I did a few months ago on Speaking Broadly, a podcast run by food writer and former editor of Food and Wine Magazine Dana Cowin. Towards the end of the episode, I gave her a little rundown on how to make a heart in a latte, and she really loved my mini-tutorial—she even shouted it out on Instagram:
Before I worked in coffee, I was a teacher, and my time in the classroom has transformed the way I share things. I’m always thinking about simplifying ideas, breaking things down into easy-to-understand steps, and checking for comprehension, because that’s what teachers are trained to do: A teacher is ineffective if they are unable to assess how effective their lessons are.
I would have never thought to put a video of myself, making latte art, on any platform —there are hundreds of videos out there that can help you do that. But I think one of my strengths (maybe even one of my superpowers 👀) is that I can teach things well.
So how the heck do you make a heart in a latte? And why aren’t you teaching me how to make something wild, like a tree or a swan or something really complicated?
Everyone likes a heart. Period, the end. (Some customers have been creepy and said things like, “Oh, you must love me,” which—please don’t do that.) But let’s assume you’re at home and you’ve struggled to make the beautiful latte art that you see baristas do.
Start with a heart. Get comfortable with hearts. Do 100 of them before you even think of anything else. They are the basis for every other shape in latte art, and so much of latte art is muscle memory.
One of the analogies I like to use is that pulling a shot of espresso is a never-ending journey that’s easy to embark on. Learning how to grind, tamp, and taste coffee is relatively simple, but you’ll still discover something new about the process every time.
Steaming milk and making latte art, however, is like riding a bike. You will fail a zillion times before you get it right, but once you do, you’ll never forget.
Okay, enough lecturing. How do I do the damn thing?
In the video above, I’m demonstrating pouring a heart as two distinct phases. I’m assuming you know how to steam milk and that you’ve pulled a shot of espresso, but if you need help getting started, YouTube is your best friend. (Here’s a guy I used to work with explaining espresso and milk steaming.)
You’re going to start with your cup tipped and your milk pitcher far away. If you’re right-handed, you’ll hold the cup by its handle in your left hand and your milk pitcher in your right (if you’re left-handed, simply reverse everything I’m saying). Using your left hand, tip the cup about 45 degrees towards the right.
In the first stage of pouring, you’re simply trying to pierce the espresso with your steamed milk so the milk sits below it. This is what will give your latte art contrast—that pop of milk against the deep brown of the espresso.
The reason you want your milk pitcher far away from the cup is gravity: The milk picks up speed as it’s poured, enabling it to cleanly pierce the espresso. You’ll also notice I’m moving my milk pitcher in a concentric circle, but staying relatively close to the middle of the cup. Some of the top layer of the espresso (the crema) might start moving around, so my concentric circles are to counter the movement of the crema.
The cup will start to fill up with milk! Great! As you notice liquid reaching the lip of the cup on the tipped side, you’re going to straighten out your cup and move the pitcher closer to you. Gravity has done its job, and now you want the milk to float delicately on top of the espresso.
At its essence, a heart is simply a circle with a string pulled through it. So first, we’re going to make that circle by concentrating on pouring directly in the middle of our cup.
Then, as the cup looks like it’s full, pull your milk pitcher up and across. The stream of milk coming from the pitcher is like that string I just mentioned, and it’ll pull the top of the circle down and create that heart shape. PICASSO!
My heart in this video is not awesome—I’m gonna blame 50% of that on my steam wand, which sucks, and 50% on the fact that I haven’t been behind the bar since before the pandemic—but it’s a heart! And this is a skill I know I’ll never forget—my muscles always remember where I need to go and how I need to move. With practice, you’ll get to the same place.
What I like about breaking down latte art into these two distinct movements—milk pitcher far away and cup tipped, then cup straightened and milk pitcher close—is that you can practice the hand motions without any coffee. Or, you can practice with water (water + a dollop of soap is a common technique to practice milk steaming without wasting milk, and it works for pouring, too). I recommend practicing over the sink because you will spill (that’s okay—baristas do, too).
Now, a question for you: What else would you like to see me cover in video form? Do you want to see more of my coffee setup? What I drink? How to clean your machine? Let me know in the comments below!
Other Stuff to Pay Attention to:
A few weeks ago, Nespresso announced that it received B-Corp certification. My piece on B Corps was probably one of the most controversial I’ve published on this platform, and Nespresso’s new certification brought the conversation to light once again.
I published an interview with Morgan Eckroth in TASTE. Morgan is the 2022 United States Barista Champion, and is also the wonderfully engaging and friendly content creator behind Morgan Drinks Coffee on TikTok. You might see more of Morgan on this page soon, but I wanted to share a snippet of the interview that ended up getting cut for space:
Ashley: Usually, barista competitions are livestreamed—this year’s competition wasn’t. However, that didn’t stop you. What was it like when you found out the competition wouldn’t be online? If I remember correctly, you posted on Twitter that it wouldn’t be livestreamed just a few weeks before the competition. How did you decide to take matters into your own hands?
Morgan: We had originally planned just to explicitly reference the status quo of livestreaming in my routine and then direct my audience to partake in the competition via the official livestream. You can imagine the horror I felt when I found out, a week before competition, that the glue that held my routine together wasn’t going to exist.
We frantically took matters into our own hands. Thanks to my current filming setup we had some of the tools we needed to put on our own high-quality livestream, but there was a definite monetary investment on our end in order to pull off what we did.
I have to give a tremendous thanks to my partner, Graham, for being in the audience and handling the tech side of streaming for each of my performances. I could not have done it without him. With his skill, we were able to have me fitted with a separate wireless lav mic on stage that went directly to the livestream.
We additionally livestreamed from the stage to TikTok, essentially giving a direct, behind-the-scenes look at the routine. That wasn’t a part of our original plan, but since there was no status quo of livestreaming across the competition, we needed to represent the livestream in some physical way on stage. All in all, I think we had approximately 10,000 concurrent viewers between the two streams during Round 1.
I don’t know a lot about koji, a mold that grows on grains, except that it’s a culinary delight used to ferment food, and is a staple in Japanese cooking. But did you know koji can be used for coffee? My colleague Christopher Feran wrote about coffee and koji, and I recently ordered a coffee from Onyx Coffee Lab that has been processed with koji. Usually I’m not too keen on buying or promoting experimental processes since the burden and risk are often left to the farmer, but Onyx’s breakdown of the price of this coffee made me more comfortable with this purchase.
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"I Learned So Much From Those Effin' Razor Clams."