Weekly Wake-up
Steaming 101
Starting off, there’s two main ways to steam milk for coffee:
The way baristas do which takes a long time to master, and the hands free way which is the kinda cheat/ super busy way of steaming. To save you the many hours of practice we will just cover the hands free method.
Firstly, gaze at my professionally made diagram below showing steam arm positioning:
For this method you will need to have your milk jug placed on a flat surface, be it the drip tray of the machine or anything else that can hold the jug up to the steam arm for you. Once half filled with the milk of your choosing and flat on a surface in range of the steam arm, you’ll need to position the steamer into the milk as shown above, the steamer should be pointing diagonally into the milk entering at a centre left area, this will help make the vortex in the next stage.
Make sure the tip of the steamer is submerged in the milk by about 1-2 centimetres.
Once in this position the decision needs to be made, what milk texture/ what drink do you want to make. If you want a thick, foamy cappuccino then you will need the tip of the steamer to be closer to the surface than if you want thinner more flat white or latte textured milk, this is because as the steamer tip is closer to the surface it will pull more air into the milk and thus creating more bubbles.
As mentioned before with the tip of the steamer being submerged, simply bring the tip to only ½ a cm into the surface to create milk for a cappuccino and submerge deeper to around 1.5/2 cm for thinner milk drinks.
VERY IMPORTANT! When steaming milk, please use full power on your machine as consistency is key and if your not using the same pressure for the steam every time, the results will be hit or miss.
Once your steamer is in position and at the right depth in the milk for your desired texture then just turn on the steam to max and let it work, the milk should make a chirping sound as it stretches and gains volume and will do the aforementioned vortex spin. Keeping your hand on the side of the jug or a thermometer in the milk, turn off the steam when the jug is too hot to touch for longer than a second or when the milk reaches around 55-60 degrees Celsius on the thermometer, this is a good hot temp that doesn’t burn the milk!
That’s it! you’ve done it and hopefully now able to make at least much better milk texture than before, if any problems with this guide then please reach out to us on our Instagram with the same name and we can send a demonstration video.
I was looking to cover some basic latte art this week but the word count has encroached on a few too many so for next week we will cover all things patterns and give it the attention it deserves.
Hope you have a great week and some even better coffees!
