COFFEE

People have been conned into thinking that more is better, and the cups have correspondingly got larger. The milk therefore has to be hotter, so that the cappuccino is still warm by the end of the cup: the milk has to be so hot, in fact, that it gets burnt.

Thus the coffee has not only to be strong enough to be able to emerge through all that milk; but also blended in such a way so as to cover up the taste of the burnt milk itself. To attempt to take a blend geared towards mega-cappuccino as an espresso is to commit tastebud suicide. It is impossible to drink an espresso in these shops because the coffee simply isn’t blended to be taken as espresso. These blends are designed to power whole vats of burnt milk with the flavour of coffee.

Cappuccino, which has espresso at its core, is the drink that Italians wake up to. This is where the visually stunning art lies, and the mastery of the product is evident. It is where the sublime, instinctive vision of the coffee master is expressed, and where the texture of the foam must be just right – not a single bubble should be allowed to spoil the soft sheen of the rosetta.

One knows a truly great cappuccino by the shine on top of the light fluffy texture, and the superb taste. A cappuccino is coffee, milk and foam. Foam, that is, and not froth. It should be even finer than shaving foam.

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