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Milk question - 2006/02/12 08:54Saeco Aroma ... steaming about 12 oz. of cold 1% milk in a ceramic container that's about 2.5x as tall as it is wide. Using a thermometer. Opening the steam valve anywhere from 1/3 to all the way.
I can make good foam with the pannarella, but even without deep-submerging the wand I find that the milk reaches critical temperature with only about 15% of it converted to foam. The thermometer is in nice and deep, and the milk is indeed hot. But every drink is a latte - there's just enough foam to put a nice top on it.
What am I doing wrong ?
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dave
Admin Admin
Posts: 195
Karma: 42
Re:Milk question - 2006/02/12 11:23Have you read any of the "milk frothing guides" floating around here and there?
I'm not sure from your post, but you are using the pannarello wand? Using the wand should produce lots of big bubbles that will sit on the top of the milk and dissipate quickly when you finish.
Try taking off the outer sleeve of the wand, leaving a narrower tube with a single hole in the end.
Before steaming, purge any water from the wand. Let it get up to temperature, but try steaming just before the element turns off (i.e., just before it reaches full temperature). This will help keep the heat going as you steam, hopefully avoiding any loss of pressure. The Saeco's have a decent size boiler so this shouldn't be too much of a problem.
However, part of your problem is that you are steaming 12oz of milk! That is a lot. The Saeco boiler might be able to handle it (my Gaggia would start having trouble), but it will be difficult to move around that much milk effectively. Any drink would be a latté with that much milk
Try practicing with less milk. Some of us keep our frothing pitchers in the freezer and get our milk as cold as possible before frothing. This gives us a little more time to work the milk.
To start with, plunge the wand before turning on the steam. As you open up the steam full, raise the wand until it is just under the surface and sucking in little bits of air making a "chh chh chh" sound without any screeching or big bubbles. This is called "stretching the milk." Keep it up until your milk hits about 70'F, making sure that the "chh chh chh" continues.
At this point, plunge the wand deep into the milk and angle the pitcher so that the wand points at an angle toward the edge of the pitcher (a straight line from the wand likely hitting the bottom before reaching the edge). Make sure that your steam is at full pressure when you do this. You are aiming to spin your milk with a whirlpool effect. If possible, you would like to see the milk raise in a parabola pattern along the side of the pitcher, but you may not be able to do this with so much milk. The idea is to move the milk around in the pitcher and circulate it top to bottom, creating an emulsion of tiny foam bubbles throughout the milk and not just at the top. If you have too much milk, you may need to move the wand up and down to heat all of the milk evenly. However, you really should try to foam no more milk than you can successfully "spin" to obtain the results that you want.
Stop steaming somewhere between 140'F and 150'F. If you overheat the milk (e.g. 170'F), it will start to separate and lose its sweet taste. It will also be too hot to drink, with all that milk.
Try working with a smaller amount of milk to get the procedure down. I find that the Saeco wand works extremely well when you only use the inside portion and disable the auto-frother action. It takes some practise, but the results are worth it!
Good luck and keep us posted!
DaveDave is an Ottawa resident and Coffee Expert
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Tim Hicks
Visitor
Re:Milk question - 2006/02/13 13:06Yes, I have read the guides.
Ahem - the 12 oz. of milk was for TWO drinks. I'm not a $%$ Starbucker <grin> I can make them one at a time, I suppose.
I tried some tests without the pannarella, but I forget why they didn't go well. I will start over on that leg of the trousers of history (as Terry Pratchett puts it). Certainly with it in place the parabola effect just isn't a go at all.
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