Accessories

To get as much pleasure from your espresso as possible, one important thing is the right grinding degree of the coffee beans. If the coffee is too fine it might clog the portafilter or make the extraction time too long which will give you a dark and bitter espresso. If it is too coarse, on the other hand, the extraction process will be too quick and the espresso watery and tasteless.

The best is to have your own coffee grinder with different fineness settings. If you don´t have your own coffee grinder it’s a good idea to let your local coffee distributor grind it for you, even though this will reduce the freshness of the coffee and you’ll be less likely to get the grinding degree you want.

A good coffee grinder costs about 100 €, but the money is well invested.

There are plenty of espresso, cappuccino and latte cups and glasses on the market today. The espresso cup should be small and hold about 10 cl of beverage, a single shot espresso should amply fill one third of the cup, or slightly less than the half. A cappuccino cup should hold approximately 18 cl and a latte glass about 30 cl.

Something to keep in mind when looking to buy espresso and cappuccino cups is that they should have thick walls to keep the coffee warm for as long as possible.

The choice of cup is very personal and a big contributor for finding the right espresso feeling.

A milk jug in stainless steel made especially for skimming milk is the best tool for milk skimming. It comes in different shapes and sizes, depending on how much milk you intend to skim at a time. If you normally skim milk for two cappuccinos at a time, a jug holding 0.6 liters is the best buy. For a single cappuccino a smaller one is a lot easier to handle without wasting heaps of milk every time. There are even bigger sizes on the market, but unless you skim milk for two big lattes on a regular basis, these jugs are unnecessarily big as you should never skim milk for more than two coffees each time as it makes the proportions between the milk and the froth too uneven.

To make the milk rotate the right way, it’s good if it is designed to be narrower at the top than at the bottom.

There are different ways to foam the milk. The professional way is to use the steam pipe attached to most espresso machines, but the technique can sometimes be a bit difficult to master, and the quality of these steamers vary greatly. There are other ways to get nice, velvety milk froth.

The easiest way is to heat the milk in a saucepan on the stove and whip up foam with a hand whip. For this you will not have to buy any extra accessories. The only problem is to get the desired kind of froth because with this technique the froth has a tendency to become either too hard and compact or too bubbly.

Another way, which is quite similar, is to use a manual electrical milk skimmer. They are cheap and easy to use, but just like when you use a hand whip, the froth tends to become too bubbly or too compact.

There is a product on the market that works like a pump. The milk is poured into a jug and the lid is placed on top. In the lid there is a pump that you pull up and down until the milk has become foamy. Then it can be placed on the stove for heating. A good milk pump can give really nice froth.

The last alternative is to use a detached milk skimmer that works just like the steam pipe on the espresso machines but without being attached. It is the more expensive alternative, and possibly also the trickier one, but when the technique is mastered it gives the very best froth for your coffee drinks.