Latte art training at Extract

Commit To The Pour. The same four words bounced around inside my head, mocking, taunting as yet another of my failed attempts at ‘latte art’ swirled down the plughole. It all looked so easy when our tutor, Sam patiently demonstrated the process for the umpteenth time, pouring a beautifully textured coffee adorned with an infuriatingly neat and symmetrical ‘rosetta’ (the industry name for the delicate, fern shaped, artistic pattern often seen decorating decent coffee). Fighting down the strong urge to howl in rage and knock the perfect cup to the ground, stamping on the broken pieces like a petulant child, I step forward, determined for another go.


Unsurprisingly, it’s a total carve up. My milk is too ‘stretched’ and I adorn my cup with a shapeless foaming milk blob. Cappuccino anyone?
Pouring my effort down the sink and gritting my teeth, I prepare to go again…

‘E’ and I were spending the morning at Extract, a South West based artisan coffee roaster of some renown and we’re learning how to ‘do coffee’, more specifically flat whites and lattes.

Irritatingly, ‘E’ is great at it from the start. (Hardly surprising from someone who owns a café). Me? I’d been quickly sized up; my capabilities measured and had been relegated to the remedial class of just one pupil, pouring the somewhat easier dumb-ass heart shape instead of the soaring phoenix like Rosetta. It felt like I’d been handed a coffee bean shaped dunce hat.

Practice, Practice, Practice. Sam insists that’s all it needs, and after 3 hours or so, I was back in the nerdy top set, adorning coffees with a stunted and withered parody of a fern shape instead of milk foam icebergs.

I had no idea that there were so many factors and variables to getting it right. The texture of the steamed milk, the height of the pour, the size of the cup, the angle it’s held, the angle of the milk jug and if that wasn’t enough, the right wiggle movement when creating the pattern. The pros make it look so easy. Bastards.


By the end of the morning, my face plastered with a smug grin, I’d actually produced something that was aesthetically pretty decent. So what if the cup was only three quarters full and any customer I attempted to foist it upon would immediately complain and refuse to pay for it? I’m chuffed with my final effort. Yes I need more practice, but I actually sort of know what I’m doing, kind of.


So, here’s what I learnt…

Tamp the coffee nice and flat, but not too hard (30lbs of pressure to be exact – I’ve no idea how you’d actually put that information to any practical use though)

Flush the machine and the steam wand before and after each use.

Use a small jug, and fill it to the same height each time – make only 1 cup at a time.

Insert the steam wand into one side of the milk, to create a vortex.
‘Stretch the milk’ for only a second or so, you want an initial crackle and then the wand needs to pushed slightly deeper into the milk. There shouldn’t be any loud hissing and spitting, more a smooth murmur.

Hold your hand on the jug and turn the steam off as soon as it feels too hot to hold.

The milk should be slightly creamy, not foamy.

Bang the jug’s base on a flat surface firmly, to remove any bubbles and then swirl the milk to add texture.

Hold the coffee cup at a downward angle.

Swirl the milk again right before pouring.

Commit to the pour, once you start, just go for it – (any half ass-ness will guarantee it goes wrong).

Pour the milk from around 4” or so height into the centre of the coffee, and move the jug closer as you pour until the jug is at right angles and the spout is pretty much touching the coffee. At this point, make tiny small sideways movements, whilst gradually straightening the cup as it fills.

The final flourish is a straight pour through the centre of your (hopefully) beautiful rosetta pattern.


After the training, we had a brief opportunity for a look around, and spent some time admiring the massive cast iron heft of ‘Betty’, Extract’s centrepiece and very much in use 1955 vintage coffee roaster that had been so lovingly restored that to my layman eyes looked like it had been built yesterday.



So, putting what I’d learnt into practice, my first attempt in ‘E’s café this morning wasn’t half bad. The milk was exactly the right texture, I didn’t manage anything that could be described as a rosetta, but the fancy artistic squiggles will come with more practice, the main thing was, it was the best coffee I’ve ever made. So, right now I’m more than happy with that.


Thanks to David, Samm, Marc and Sam for being so welcoming (and patient) as we spent hours making one disastrous coffee after another until we got it right… well, nearly.

Extract Coffee Roasters

Telephone: 01454 228 457

http://extractcoffee.co.uk

St Ali - London

I love good coffee. But It hasn’t always been so. I’ve found that as I’ve got older, more into food, I’ve become something of a coffee snob. Nowadays I sneer at the acrid essence of crumbled mud in glass jars that passes for coffee from the supermarket chains, but years ago, a more innocent, a more naïve me deemed it a perfectly acceptable brew. Later I felt the same way about the coffee from the doggy-style-humping-evil-world straddling-corporate chain, Starbucks, as I blindly ambled to work sipping my tasteless yet ridiculously expensive fix from a two gallon cup.

But I’ve matured. I’ve grown. I’d sooner neck a litre of my own piss than drink an overpriced Shattachino (TM) from the aforementioned Seattle based company, at least my ‘home brewed’ is cheap, steaming, and tastes of something.

Nowadays, I want to buy my coffee from a little independent place. I want it made with love and care. I want it to taste smooth and amazing. I want a flat white. And I want leaf patterns drawn in the froth to show just how damn skilful and artistic the person who made my coffee is. Oh, and they simply must have lots of tattoos.
Not much to ask is it?

Luckily, London is sprouting a rash of decent independent coffee shops like a pubescent teen developing a particularly fine crop of acne. Pop your head into any of these places, and it’s a pretty safe bet that it will be an Antipodean behind the coffee machine. In a somewhat surprising development, whilst we were all gormlessly sipping on awful brown coloured pish, across the other side of the globe, the Aussies and the Kiwis were developing a café and coffee culture that is second to none. What they don’t know about decent coffee isn’t worth knowing. And God bless them, they want to share it with us.

All of which brings me to the latest, coolest place to get your premium caffeine fix, all the way from Melbourne Australia, supposedly the pre-eminent café in a city that is absolutely heaving with serious competition. Yes….Clerkenwell in London now has a ‘St Ali’.

But why St Ali? I hear you ask. Well, apparently it’s like this. Ali ibn Umar al-Shadhili (St Ali) was the patron saint of coffee, who in the 15th century introduced coffee beans to Muslim mystics. Who knew eh?

So, a couple of weeks ago, I made the pilgrimage back to my old and much loved stomping ground of Clerkenwell (Some of you will know that I was cruelly mistreated and banished from this wondrous area of London, last April by my one-time evil ex-employer in a savage and entirely unwarranted act of redundancy). In fact, I more or less worked right across the road from the new St Ali site.


Happily my pained and tortured countenance was rapidly replaced by a look of serenity and total calm, as I greeted my pal Nicola who was joining me for lunch, and took in the vast and light flooded space.

Seriously, the place is bloody huge. (You could fit my entire flat into the toilets). At one end of the main room, beyond the central bar is an absolutely massive free standing roasting machine. Next to this, a ‘living wall’ of plants, which added considerably to my feeling of zen…


…A feeling which, doesn’t last long for two reasons. Firstly my ordered flat white is absolutely excellent. Smooth but packing quite a wallop, it’s a bloody nice cup of coffee. The problem is the ‘coffee art’ gracing the foam.
I’ve had a few goes at doing this on a professional machine myself, and basically, I can’t do it. It’s much harder than it looks and all my attempts have been frigging diabolical. The example that I now held in my hands didn’t have just one fancy palm frond. It had a three. To my eyes, that’s just taking the piss and reinforces what an utter dribbling incompetent of a coffee maker I am, with all the subtlety of a boot heel grinding my face into a gravel path.
I throw a look of utter contempt at the smiling unknowing barista.

Strangely, the other ‘calm killer’ was the beautiful old communal antique bench we were sitting at. Absolutely cracking to look at, battered, full of character, one end covered with vases festooned with flowers. It looked like it belonged in a glossy magazine photo shoot. But…it’s set at just the right height that when seated on the proffered stools, it’s impossible to put your legs under. So we both ended up sitting ‘side-saddle’ whilst eating, which isn’t a comfortable dining position at all. Solution, raise the bench up – or cut the legs off the stools, right now it’s definitely a case of style over comfort.


On the plus side, apart from the excellent coffee, the food menu is very interesting. With an obvious emphasis on brunch/lunch, it’s full of fresh, Bill Granger’esque dishes and combinations, with unusual foreign sounding ingredients –savoury French toast with bacon, maple labna and apple balsamic, grilled sardines with skordalia (What the hell is skordalia?) dukkah, kasundi, zhoug all feature (Aren’t they characters from Star Trek?). Trust me. It’s an intriguing menu.


Mystery ingredients aside, those in the know had flagged up one dish as being absolutely cracking. The weirdly named ‘My Mexican Cousin’ (I have no idea why its called that – as far as I can tell, based on the ingredients, it has sod all to do with Mexico).
Consisting of corn fritters, baby spinach, halloumi, kasundi (A spicy Indian tomato chutney) and two poached eggs. It’s lovely. Just simple, fresh food and therefore pretty much the perfect brunch dish.

In fact, St Ali is the perfect brunch place. I just wish it was down the road from where I live. It’s the sort of place you want to grab a late weekend breakfast, chill out and read the papers. Sadly it’s in the wrong frigging city.
F*ck my luck.
Build it in Bristol next time Ok guys?

St Ali
27 Clerkenwell Road
London
EC1M 5RN

Telephone: 020 7253 5754

http://stali.co.uk/uk

*Added Note*
I've just been informed by the owner of St Ali, through the wonder of Twitter, that 'My Mexican Cousin' is so called, because it was literally his Mexican cousin who came up with it. So, now we know.