You know when you want something, but you can't have it
and it just makes you crave it all the more.
And let's say for whatever reason,
you couldn't go to your local cafe right now,
and you didn't have an espresso machine at home.
Well, you might really want a little flat white
or a cappuccino or a latte.
I'm here to help you.
Today we're gonna talk about
how you can get some really, really, really delicious drinks
without having to have an espresso machine.
I'm gonna explore how we can take coffee equipment
we might already have and a few other bits and pieces
and get to something surprisingly good.
Now, that isn't to say espresso machines
aren't necessary or useful.
The magic of espresso is that it can extract
all of the good tasting soluble stuff from the ground coffee
using very little liquid.
You can end up with a very, very strong cup of coffee
that tastes fantastic, has great texture,
got some lovely crema on top.
That's the magic of espresso.
No other brew method can do a good job
of getting the flavor out of the grounds
with as little liquid.
Let's just say we've got a good burr grinder,
but one that can't do espresso,
one that doesn't go fine enough to pull
traditional espresso shots,
like this little cheap Wilfa grinder here.
But we can still use a grinder like this
to get something great.
Here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna try and make coffee that's very strong,
but about half as strong as espresso.
In order to get all of the good flavors
out of the ground coffee that we're going to start with,
we're just gonna use a little bit more water.
And that means we can use a pretty fine grind,
but not as fine,
but we need to have some sort of percolation.
We need a little bit of pressure in there
to get the water through the grinds.
For that reason, we're gonna be looking at the AeroPress
and the moka pot.
These are things that lots of people have
that can brew surprisingly strong coffee
that tastes pretty great.
Once we've looked at how to get the best out of those,
then we're gonna talk about foaming milk at home.
Today we're not gonna get overly hung up
on the definitions of what is a cappuccino,
what is a flat white, what is a cafe latte?
I just want you to make something that you like
and that requires you have a cup that you like
of an appropriate size.
Today we're gonna be trying to mimic an espresso in a way.
So we're gonna start every time
with 18 grams of ground coffee.
Now, in espresso that would produce
maybe 36 to 40 grams of liquid.
Here we're gonna be looking more
at 65 to 70 grams of liquid,
using a little bit more water as a solvent
to pull out some more flavor.
That means we need some space in the cup
for milk on top of that.
So something in the six, seven ounces, 180, 200 mils,
that sort of size is a pretty good place to start
if you like the taste of coffee,
but you can go a bit bigger if you'd like something
a little softer, a little sweeter, a little less intense.
Let's talk about how we're gonna brew some coffee.
First of all, let's talk grind size.
For our 18 grams of coffee that we're gonna use each time
we're gonna be grinding pretty fine.
What would be towards the limits
of a typical cheap burr grinder.
We should have a little bit of texture to it.
It shouldn't feel floury in any way.
It should feel a little bit between,
say castor sugar and salt.
It'll have a bit of texture.
But on a grinder like the Wilfa,
you are down at pretty much the finest setting here.
If you're using a grinder that can go to espresso,
you're gonna wanna be a little bit coarser
for these techniques than you would be
if you were pulling shots.
Though that ground setting will be finer
than most supermarket pre-ground coffee.
So these techniques won't work super well
if you're buying pre-ground coffee,
you need a grinder to make life delicious.
A quick PSA on the kinds of coffee
that you could be using for this.
Generally speaking, if you're roaster separates coffees
that they've roasted specifically for espresso
and specifically for filter or drip coffee,
you definitely want something espresso focused.
They're typically roasted a little bit longer, deeper,
more developed to make them easier to extract
with less water.
If we brewed with a filter coffee,
chances are we'd never do a good job extracting it
and we'd have a very sour, unpleasant experience
even when we've added our delicious,
sweet milk down the line.
Let's start with the AeroPress.
Now, I know the AeroPress claims it can make espresso.
It can't, it just can't, okay?
Espresso is quite a specific thing.
This cannot make it.
You cannot produce the pressures necessary.
You can't produce the concentrations necessary.
Now, this is one of the few times
where I'd advocate actually for brewing
in what's called the inverted method.
The conventional way to brew
is just to place this on the cup,
add your coffee, add your water,
do your extraction this way around.
What some people like to do though
is called the invert method where you take the plunger,
this becomes your base,
and in here you have a chamber
where if you add water and coffee,
they can't go anywhere, they can't escape.
That's what we're gonna do this time.
Do make sure it's plunged in a decent amount of the way.
The inverted method freaks me out
because it's really easy to make a horrible mess
and or burn yourself by flipping this thing around
and things popping out, so do be very careful.
So you can preheat the AeroPress,
you can make sure your filter is nice and rinsed
and ready to go.
Get your scales,
add your 18 grams of coffee,
and hit zero.
So we're gonna add 90 grams of water now,
which will give us about 70 grams out when we press
'cause some will be absorbed by the coffee.
And we're gonna need to stir to make sure
all of the coffee is getting wet.
Now, it will be a bit clumpy
because it's reasonably finally ground.
So you do want to be a little bit aggressive
in your stirring.
Lid on, filter on.
Now, we're gonna steep this for 90 seconds,
which seems like a really long time
in the world of espresso,
but this isn't the world of espresso.
We're not looking at 30 second brew times here.
We need to do a lot of extraction with not much liquid.
That's a real challenge here.
After 90 seconds, we're gonna invert.
I would say cup on first,
give it a flip,
give it a little swirl to make sure
we've got no grounds stuck to the side,
and then give it just a second to have the grounds
settle towards the bottom.
We're gonna press very gently.
If we push too hard, we might effectively create a channel
in that coffee bed and cause some under extraction.
So we want quite a gentle pressing.
There's no need to get crazy with it.
You've got time, it's okay.
And usually I would say don't push all the way
till the bubbling hits at the end,
but here we need every gram of liquid.
We want to hear that bubbling hiss.
And here we go.
We have 65 to 70 grams of very strong coffee.
Perfect for diluting with some delicious milk,
but we'll get to that in a minute.
I really like the moka pot,
but I don't always enjoy the way
a lot of people like to use it to make coffee.
You can end up with something very strong, but very bitter.
We're gonna be using this in a kind of similar way
to the way I recommend using a moka pot
in the video you can see up here,
with a few small twists.
Now moka pots are designed broadly speaking
to do a kind of ten to one ratio.
If you fill a moka pot to just below
its over pressure valve,
in this case that would be about 200 mills of water
and this basket holds about 20 grams of coffee.
We don't want all of that water
to go through all of that coffee.
In fact, we're gonna dose again 18 grams into this basket.
So here's the twists,
we're gonna be using that finer grind setting
we talked about,
finer than most people use when they use pre-ground coffee
from the supermarket.
That means that if we pushed all of the water through it,
that would definitely over extract.
We do not want to do that.
We wanna aim for that same kind of 65 to 70 grams
of water through.
So here's a quick run through, start to finish.
Fill it with freshly boiled water to just below the valve,
grind your coffee, don't tamp it, don't mess with it,
don't compact it in any way.
Put it all together and put it onto medium heat
and no higher than medium.
Now, you're just gonna have to pay attention.
You'll see that slow, beautiful stream of coffee
start to appear and it will look delicious.
You wanna wait until you hear that very first bubble,
the very first bubbling.
At that point, run it under the cold tap.
Stop it as quickly as you can.
At that point, you should have around
70 grams of liquid in a brewer like this
of that kind of size or an appropriate amount
for the size of moka pot that you're using.
So far so simple.
But before you go any further,
before you get the milk out of the fridge
or your oat milk or your soy milk or your hemp milk,
any of those things,
before you go down that pathway, taste the coffee.
Because at this point you need to know if you've messed up.
If it tastes dominantly sour and is a little bit weak
and a little bit empty and hollow feeling,
you didn't grind fine enough.
If it is a brutal mouthful of bitterness,
you've gone a bit too fine
and you can go a little bit coarser next time.
What you don't want to do is prep a bunch of milk,
finish the drink, taste it at that point and be like,
"Oh, this is disgusting.
Now I have to waste the milk and the coffee."
Give it a taste.
That's what you want, you want balance.
There's a touch of acidity, but it's not overwhelming.
There's some nice sweetness and texture.
It's a little tickle of bitterness
but that's gonna be balanced really nicely
in the next step with our foamed milk.
Now, before we get into milk,
there's two quick things I wanna talk about.
Firstly, every video right now has a coffee giveaway.
If you've been laid off, if you're out of work,
if you're struggling, you can't afford coffee,
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So milk foaming.
I have three options for you
at three different price points.
And just so you know, this cost about 25 pounds,
this cost 50 pounds, and this cost 70 pounds.
All of them are cheaper than any decent espresso machine
that might provide you some sort of steam
with which you could steam milk.
So while they do involve spending some money,
they involve spending less money.
Let's start with this one
because it might look a little bit familiar.
This is made by Bodum,
the same people who make French presses.
And it looks exactly like a French press,
but it costs more money than a French press,
which I think is a little bit cheeky.
Because to be honest,
it doesn't do a better job than a French press.
So everything you see me do with this here,
you can 100% absolutely do with a French press.
So here's how it's gonna work.
You add hot milk up to this line and no more.
Now, in terms of milk temperature,
I'll cover this very quickly now.
Milk breaks at about 70 degrees Celsius.
Above that temperature you permanently, irreversibly
change the chemistry and taste of the milk.
You begin to cause it to break down
and create new and often unpleasant flavors.
It gives you that kind of cooked eggy smell.
You can't have a really delicious, really hot milk drink.
So generally speaking, I would recommend going no higher
than 65 degrees Celsius,
though I'm aware with something like this,
it's pretty tricky to know how hot 65 degrees Celsius is
without a thermometer.
So if you have one that's useful
'cause you're gonna have to heat your milk somewhere else.
I trust you to get it right.
I believe in you.
The principle's very simple.
Go like this.
And you end up with a sort of reasonably foamy thing
that's kind of okay actually, it's not the worst.
I have a stainless steel pitcher here
that's used for pouring latte out
and I'm not gonna claim that I'm gonna be able
to pour beautiful late out because I'm not,
this is foamed in a French press.
But the texture's okay.
Nothing fancy, nothing special.
You could pour kind of like a simple Monk's head
or something like that quite easily.
Your Rosetta would not go well.
How does this taste?
Actually, like the foam isn't perfect by any stretch,
but it's got a nice moussey texture that would make
for a reasonable cappuccino.
There's a nice pleasant, strong coffee taste here
as you'd expect from a drink like that.
Not bad.
With a French press and a moka pot or an AeroPress
you can get a really surprisingly good
cappuccino like thing that I think you'd really enjoy.
And again, at this point, I will reiterate,
you can use oat milk, soy milk,
any of the other milks you want to alongside dairy
if you don't want to do dairy.
What I would say is definitely go
for the barista style versions of those things.
They tend to foam better and have a better texture when hot
from a kind of replication of that fatty richness
that whole milk has.
Let's move on to some fancier things.
Now going into this
I thought this next contender was just ridiculous.
It's 50 pounds and it doesn't do that much,
but I kind of like it.
I like it more than I thought I would.
The way that these work is interesting.
You have essentially a kind of kettle with a hot jacket
and inside it, there's a little spinny frother mechanism.
This one's driven by magnets inside of here,
which is kind of cool.
It's kind of like those little handheld whisks
you used to get combined with a kettle or all in one.
And the way it works is you put your milk in
up to your desired level.
I'm gonna go reasonably high.
Put your lid on.
Push go.
Now this does two things.
It both froths the milk,
it whips in air with that little whisk,
and heats it at the same time.
And by combining these actions
it's a little bit frustrating.
You have no control over how much air goes in.
You just get as much as you get.
That's the one downside of these.
They tend to produce more foam than you expect them to.
But the quality of that foam genuinely surprised me.
Oh yeah.
It is a bit too foamy.
So what I would say is perfectly acceptable.
Get the nicest spoon you have, I've got a fancy spoon,
and just get rid of that foam.
You're in a kitchen in the morning,
I'm sure you can find a use for milk foam.
Don't just throw it down the sink.
Make fancy cereal or something.
And then we're gonna give it a little swirl
and decant into our jug and see if we can
pour anything with it.
Now, again, it's a tricky texture to pour latte out with,
but you might get something like a little tulip
or something like that out of it.
Cheers.
Very good.
Now, I'm not sure how much I'd advocate
for you spending 50 quid on this
unless you liked foamy milk drinks
and you wanted them to be as easy as possible every day.
It will heat milk without foaming it.
I don't know why, I guess if you didn't want any foam.
And it will do cold milk froth too, but it's 50 quid.
There are cheaper ones, there are more expensive ones.
I was probably very anti-these.
I am a lot less anti-these than I was,
but it's still 50 quid.
That's a lot of money for a slightly fancy
kettle and a whisk.
There's one more option I wanted to get
and look at and talk about.
And this is called the Bellman.
All this does is make steam for foaming milk.
That's its whole purpose.
It's 70 pounds online and it works in a reasonable way.
You've got a lid and inside you put your water,
not too much water, not too little water,
put it back together.
Once it's tightened up again, nice and tight,
you put it on the heat.
And the water inside boils, turns to steam,
the steam gets trapped and then you can just tap it off here
to your steam wand with your little steam valve.
So far so good.
This is the only option really that will let you separate
foaming, adding of air, from heating.
The way the steam ones work is that
when you're steaming with them,
at the start of the process,
you have the wand right on the surface of the milk.
When it's there, you'll hear it's there.
You get a kind of slurping sound as it whips in the air.
You can do as much of that as you want
to create as much foam as you want.
And then as quickly as possible really,
you wanna get the wand under the surface of the milk
and have that steam act to sort of move that milk around,
roll it around, smash the big bubbles that you made
at the start down to being so small that you can't see them.
On paper this is the most capable of all of the ways
in terms of producing the best possible texture,
producing the best latte art if you wanna do that at home,
that this is definitely it.
But it will probably drive you crazy before then.
This thing is a little scary, a little frustrating,
and a little bit just awkward all in one.
First things first, this is a pressured vessel.
Pressured vessels are scary things.
Fear them.
In your life look after them, treat them well.
Moka pots are pressure vessels as well.
This is a much, much bigger version of that.
They say put it on medium high heat for five minutes.
There's no gauge here.
There's no information.
You have no idea how hot this thing is.
You have no idea how much steam pressure is inside of it.
You have no idea when you have enough steam pressure
to steam milk.
I, while I was testing this,
would regularly just open the valve a little bit
to see how much steam was coming out
and try and kind of gauge whether that was enough
to foam good milk from, you know,
having used commercial machines
for years and years and years.
Often I guessed wrong.
There wasn't enough steam.
I would start to steam a pitcher of milk
and it would go wrong.
There just wasn't enough pressure inside of it.
I just didn't really enjoy it,
but you could probably get some very good results from it
with a little bit of work and a little bit of effort.
So it works okay, I just wouldn't strongly recommend it.
Now, as a final little FAQ, when it comes to coffee brewing
you could use other methods,
but I would always recommend something
that has percolation and a bit of pressure.
Using a French press to make very strong coffee
doesn't really work,
using a pour over to make very strong coffee
doesn't really work.
It tends not to taste very good
and I haven't really found a way around that.
More importantly, I'd love to hear from you.
What did I miss?
What should I have covered?
What do you want to see me touch on in the future
when it comes to making better milk drinks at home?
I'd love to hear from you down in the comments below.
But for now I say thank you for watching
and I hope you have a great day.