Brew It Yourself, Part 2
A recipe, and a question
For Christmas, my wife bought me an electric milk frother for cappuccino and things like that. It’s a perfect gift: the kind of thing I like the idea of, but can’t justify buying for myself.
We had a little $15 stick battery-powered frother, which works about half the time and I can’t figure out why it does or doesn’t. This new one is a plug-in kettle style, with an electric base and a unit that goes on top of the base. The frother mechanism is held on by a magnet and is removable, so you can clean it and the basin easily. It’s effortless to use and so far produces the same results every time. It also has steamed milk/little foam/lot of foam settings, and a cold foam setting.
I also just tried this vanilla syrup from Trader Joe’s for $4 or $5 a bottle, I forget. Their flyer ad for it got me interested. It basically tastes like simple syrup with vanilla extract added, which is probably what it is.
I could do that myself, but it’s funny, there are some things I love doing myself, and other things I just have no interest in. Making my own coffee drink is something I love; making my own syrup just triggers that “too much work” feeling; it makes the treat into a chore. (Baking my own bread falls into this category too, though I wish I were better at baking!)
Anyway, I now make this almost every morning:
It’s pretty simple. I brew strong drip coffee, to roughly approximate espresso, though it’s still much thinner/lighter than that. Just stronger than typical drip coffee. I add a pour of the vanilla syrup to the carafe after the coffee is brewed, and swirl it around, which is a little shortcut from having to pour syrup twice and in the same amount into the actual coffee cups.
Then I steam the max amount of milk in the frother, pour it in the mugs, and top with the syrup/coffee. (It’s very lucky that our favorite set of mugs happens to just end up perfectly full with half of the normal amount of coffee I brew plus the full pour of milk. I didn’t have to workshop that, it just turned out that way!)
This basically tastes like a vanilla latte you would get in a coffee shop. Frankly, better than a lot of them, and much cheaper. And it’s not fussy the way real espresso is (that’s another thing that sounds fun but which I know would be too much of a chore.)1
It’s always satisfying to be able to roughly reproduce something I can get at a store or restaurant at home. But there is always a part of that wonders whether it’s “right”—whether it’s perhaps a little unpatriotic from a local perspective—to try to make all my favorite stuff at home instead of patronizing local businesses.
I think about something someone said once, when I was having this discussion: basically, that self-reliance is not an urbanist virtue. Part of community is relying on other people. The idea—wherever it comes from—that there’s sort of this wee bit of moral illegitimacy to outsourcing a task to someone else—is just people being precious and proud. It’s good to outsource things! On some level, too much thriftiness almost becomes a kind of greed, and perhaps more to the point here, a kind of insularity.
My wife and I drive past this Starbucks all the time (not a local business, I know) and always go, We just had better coffee for much less and no wait! But of course there’s something nice about going out for something. The wait and the hassle and even the possibility of disappointment are kind of…part of the experience.
I find that even when I pull off a homemade version of a thing just right—even if it’s better than the store or restaurant equivalent—there’s still a little letdown or disappointment there somewhere. There’s a reason “We have X at home” is a meme. At the same time, if you really can do it better at home, it’s hard to justify paying someone else.
What do you think about this all? And let me know if you try the coffee recipe!
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A friend who thought she might want to buy an espresso machine did a little reading, and concluded that “liking coffee” is not enough; you have to be in the “I really want to make espresso as a hobby” category, which she is not, and neither am I.
I feel this way about going to a bar. Like it’s obviously a lot cheaper to drink at home. But there’s something about heading out, waiting for friends to show up, and maybe talking to other people that just adds some fun to it.
Having done the espresso machine thing... you are 100% right about that. It's way too much work. You might get better results from a Moka Pot than strong brewed drip though - it's a staple of every workplace here in Miami (Cuban coffee is basically just espresso and sugar) and not too difficult to do.