Best Food Writing 2014 (18 page)

Of the number of improvements hiding behind the mirror-polished hood—temperature stability, boiler capacity, recovery time—the most significant breakthrough is built into the drip tray. Called the “gravimetric system,” it consists of a drip tray equipped with hyper-sensitive scales to weigh each espresso as the liquid flows into the cup. If you come across a machine after they roll out later in 2014, peek around the side to see if the barista doesn't finger the grates to test the scales in a gesture that might be considered mildly obscene.

The gravimetric system is the first time a manufacturer has responded to what the best shops are already doing, namely measuring an espresso by weight, not volume. Right now, if a shop pulls shots by weight it means rigging up a jewelry scale sensitive to at least 1/10 of a gram and watching two sets of numbers—the timer and the weight—so that you stop the machine at the right moment. It works like this: the director of coffee will work out a recipe for a particular espresso (example: 19g dose of coffee; 27-second extraction; 35g yield of espresso), and it's up to the barista to tweak the grind,
watch the scale and keep an eye on the timer so that the numbers all line up.

It's a labor-intensive process. You place the portafilter on a scale, set the scale to zero, dose the coffee, check the weight, add or subtract more coffee, flush the machine, lock the portafilter into the machine, place a demitasse on a scale on the drip tray, set that scale to zero, start the shot, keep an eye on the timer (which is above the portafilter), keep an eye on the scale (which is below the demitasse), and stop the machine just when you feel it hits the sweet spot. Then you bang out the puck, wipe out the filterbasket, flush the machine and do it all again. In a busy shop, you might repeat those steps a thousand times in a day.

The software that runs the Black Eagle 0388 is supposed to respond to use and be able to read what happens in a busy shop, with autocorrect-like functions that keep the readouts from getting too twitchy. Program the machine to pull a 35g shot, and the pump will shut off at just the right moment so that last fraction of a gram trickles into the cup. It's the little things that count.

If it seems excruciatingly wonky, it is. But that's where we are in coffee, or at least that's where the most interesting figures are to be found. One of those is James Hoffmann, the co-founder of London's Square Mile Coffee and the winner of the World Barista Championship in 2007. Hoffmann was a consultant on the Black Eagle, and pushed for the gravimetric system. “I've been bothering them about it for almost two years,” Hoffmann said. “I think I just wore them down.”

That Victoria Arduino, a brand that first started manufacturing machines in 1905 (the triassic period for espresso: Luiggi Bezzera registered what is considered the first patent for a true espresso machine in 1901), turned to Hoffmann, a Londoner who commutes on a tastefully urban bicycle and whose speech was polished in boarding school (words such as “whilst” and “thrice” come easily to him), isn't as odd a mashup as it might seem. In fact, it's a feedback loop that reflects the state of coffee. The innovative baristas might not be in Italy, but the manufacturers are.

What might surprise coffee's true believers is that the Italians still have a thing or two to teach the rest of the world.

•

A couple of years ago, I was standing in line at one of New York's better hardcore coffee bars. When it was my turn, the barista recognized a friend standing farther back in line and curved his eye contact around me like a free kick. The friend was served and fist-bumped before the barista bothered to ask me what I wanted.

The coffee that morning was better than anything I've ever tasted in Italy, but the masterful roast and skillful preparation didn't make up for the low-frequency rage simmering in me all morning. I was delayed maybe three minutes, but that's a long time to seethe.

I like most baristas—I'm not one of those haters who catalogs a few slights and castigates the whole profession—but in the thousands of interactions I've had over the last five years, there have been a number of instances when the delicious coffee was spoiled by a sullen barista.

It doesn't have to be a shitshow to ruin the fun. Indifference is enough of a turn-off. When a transaction is nothing more than an exchange of money for goods and services, it doesn't matter how magnificent the espresso might taste to an objective judge. When you get the sense that the barista would rather be anywhere other than facing you, you'd rather be anywhere than facing that barista.

In 1994 I lived in Venice while I was interning at the Collezzione Peggy Guggenheim. The following year I returned to work at the Biennale, and I stayed in one of the apartments that were circulated among the art professionals who came to town before the dealers and the tourists arrived. It was a converted storage room on the ground floor of a palazzo on the Grand Canal that had been carved into more than a dozen apartments for the branches of a fallen noble family.

The terrestrial side of the palazzo faced onto a narrow street directly across from a pink building with a marble balcony. The ground floor housed Bar da Gino, a caffé that was the unofficial clubhouse for the Guggenheim staff. Later, the museum opened its own caffé, but at the time Bar da Gino was the closest place we could get a drink or a bite. It was where you had your morning coffee, your mid-morning coffee, your lunch, your afternoon coffee and your first after-work aperitivo.

Like many caffés in Italy, Bar da Gino had a three-tiered price structure. You paid one price at the bar, another at a table and a third
if you sat outside. Like many caffés in Venice, there was a second layer of prices: one for tourists, one for locals. It was an important day when I was given the local discount; it was an even more important day when my mother came to visit, and she overhead the cashier tell the waiter that she should get the lower price because she was “the mother of that boy who lives over there.”

I went back to Venice a few years ago, well before I started writing about coffee. When I stepped through the door of Bar da Gino, the waiter saw me, put down her tray and gave me a hug. Then the cashier came over, then the bar man, then the other waiter. Service stopped. I teared up, and so did they, and when the momentum of the morning returned I found myself outside at a table with a cappuccino and a cornetto and a waiter who refused to let me pay.

I don't think I was a remarkable customer. I was a familiar face for two blocks of time, an American with enough Italian to order quickly and politely, but that was enough to leave an indelible impression. The espresso at Bar da Gino was equally unremarkable—it seemed fantastic then, although I'm sure that I would taste all kinds of faults were I to try it now—but I will remember it long after the detailed impressions of the exquisitely-prepared coffees I've had in Los Angeles, New York and Portland will have dissipated. The intellect can be fickle; it's the heart holds onto memories.

That old man might get most things wrong, but he gets one thing right, at least in part. If you want to master espresso, you can learn the craft in a number of countries, but that will only take you so far. If you want to understand the soul of espresso, you need to go to Italy.

“H
ow cool is this!” Susan, a 68-year-old retiree from Philadelphia, was on her maiden voyage with her new toy, a salad spinner.

As she pulled the spinner's retractable cord, the room filled with a rattling hum, similar to a washing machine at the end of its cycle. She was visibly pleased that after just a few pulls, the lettuce leaves tucked inside the colander-like basket were nice and dry. She marveled at how she could both wash—“Wow, there's a lot of dirt in these leaves”—and dry salad greens with just one tool.

This was just one of the many ah-ha moments for Susan, who signed on to take an immersion cooking course with me earlier this summer. Over the course of a week, we met in her kitchen each day with one primary objective: Getting a handle on the bare essentials of cooking.

With beautifully washed and dried greens before us, the next logical step was to make some salad dressing. This would be another first
for her record books, a stark departure from decades of lining the inside door of the refrigerator with an array of store-bought bottles of Thousand Island, Ranch, and Creamy Italian.

She could hardly fathom, as with the salad spinner, the low-tech simplicity of the DIY version. Surely there was more to salad dressing than a few tablespoons of olive oil, the juice of a lemon, salt, pepper, and maybe a smidge of strong mustard. “That's it and you just shake it all together in a little jar?”

You see, during the 20-plus years of raising three children, Susan put dinner on the table with minimal chopping, slicing or dicing. Instead, she opened cans, unsealed jars and unzipped seasoning envelopes, as per the directions on the back of a box, and within minutes, voilà, dinner was ready. With so many heat, reheat, and quick-serve options on supermarket shelves, Susan, a young mother of three in 1971, felt no need to learn how to use a kitchen knife, and it certainly never occurred to her to make salad dressing. In her mind, Susan fulfilled her job of putting a hot meal on the table for her family. Nobody ever starved, she noted.

Susan is right. Her kids did eat three “square” meals a day. But they each went out into the world without knowing how to prepare one.

I should know. I'm her daughter.

I was 21 when I graduated from college, the same age Susan was when she gave birth to me. I bought my first cookbook (
The New Basics
by Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso) and fumbled my way through my first-ever apartment kitchen. Cooking dinner, I quickly learned, was a practical way to stretch my measly paycheck. But it also set me on a path of personal discovery. Cooking was a way to learn about the world and find my place in it. It helped me grow up and grow into a kinder, more nurturing version of myself. Far from a great cook was I, botching and burning and under seasoning with great frequency. But it hardly mattered, I was cooking dammit, and I felt alive.

Learning to cook reminds me of discovering my true love for reading. I was six years old, the lucky recipient of a brand new hardbound copy of
Charlotte's Web
, a gift from cousins on my mom's side. I laid at the foot of my bed, on my stomach, and cracked open the book, reading out loud so that I could hear the words, proof positive
that I could read, yes indeed. It marked the beginning of a lifelong love affair; reading took me places I longed to go and helped me to better understand the world, even at the age of six.

At the stove, my world similarly expanded. Even when I screwed up a dish, I learned something new: Maybe math or chemistry, botany or history, or a hard-fought lesson in patience. Looking back now, with the perspective that comes with a culinary degree and a 17-year food career, I still believe deep in my bones that cooking, which marries the practical with the magical, can be the greatest teacher of all, and that it's never too late to learn.

It was in this spirit that I approached Susan about the kitchen project. Nothing too cheffy or complicated, I said to her over the phone, simple tricks and techniques like washing and drying salad greens and making legumes.

Legumes. What are those?

You know, lentils.

Oh yes. And can we make some quinoa? I would like to learn how to make some quinoa salad. I love the one that's on the menu at Terrain.

Sure. And maybe work on some knife skills, you know, how to dice and slice.

Ugh, my knife is so dull. Maybe we need to buy a new knife.

Secretly, I hoped she would have so much fun and feel so empowered and wowed by her food that she would forget about what she had never learned and instead celebrate what she would come to know. As with reading, cooking is all about diving in and just doing it.