coffee and ear damage

Here I am asking the universe for an improvement. Worldwide. Think that you are in a medium large city, carrying around a backpack with a book or two, your calendar and your laptop, you’ve got an hour to spare and it is, say, 11:15. Time for a seat, a cup of coffee, a horizontal surface and an illusion of a tiny private space. Unless you’re at some American university campus and have access to some dedicated sit-and-wait-and-sip place, your chances of finding a suitable café are small.

In one typical kind of coffee place one can only manage a quick, standing and back-nudged espresso, like in that corner shop in Ithaca’s Collegetown where there was not even a place to hold the cup.

In others, such as the last-resort-type cappuccinery at Kiel Central Station, one drinks one’s coffee while balancing on a wobbly bar chair.

kitchen gadgets you never knew you needed II

Five years ago I bought a milk frother, since I decided not to have a proper espresso machine with a foam nozzle. It was made, or rather, labelled and distributed, by a well-established Swedish brand, it had gotten good reviews for perfect foam and a good price-device relationship, and it worked well until it, 2 months after the warranty had expired, expired too with a scratch, a fizz and a bleep.

So I bought another one and took an effort to handle it extra carefully. It behaved exactly like the first one: perfect foam for a blissful while and then an unannounced exit from this world. I e-mailed the customer service of the firm, mentioned the exact nature of the problem (the motor’s collector gets damaged through normal use and cannot be accessed for repairs) and within days I got a third frother sent home for free. This summer, it quietly joined the others. Now I bought another frother, this time by a German fancy design brand. Let’s see how this one survives. It foams better, the motor makes less noise and it stands all by itself on the counter.

Why do I persist in wanting milk frothers? Because they are great. For someone who had his early milk-frothing training using a cheap and coarse wire brush in a battered aluminium pan, they are the symbol of coffee culture luxury.

better moka results

Stove-top coffee makers are an attractive alternative to a space-eating grime-collecting espresso machine. Interestingly, there are many general instructions of how to use it available, but few really concise descriptions of what to do and avoid when using stove-top espresso cookers.

The classic model, the Moka Express, is made of aluminium. This article claims that the coffee fat creates a protective layer inside the pot that prevents the coffee from tasting metallic. Not mentioned is that undefinable blobs of whitish goo tend to form in the lower compartment of an aluminium cooker, even if the device is kept dry and clean when not in use. Under pressure, the aluminium clearly reacts with either the coffee or the water or both. After a while, the inside of the Moka Express thus gets increasingly rougher - aluminium is being washed away. I would never wait for a metallic taste to manifest itself: there can be no doubt that some aluminium gets transferred from the pot’s inside into my own inside all the time. I don’t like thinking about what it would do there, so I am using stainless steel espresso cookers. With a little care and understanding, one can create a very decent cup of espresso with one of these.