Un caffè, per favore
Florence made espresso special to me again, but now I'm married to Mr. Bialetti.
I love espresso to the depths of my bitter, sour soul, but I’ve tasted too many bad ones. It’s not an easy drink to make. I know because I’ve tried.
I taught myself to make a pretty decent espresso through many years of trial and error by experimenting with superior home equipment, but I burned through a lot of imperfectly coddled coffee grounds on my quest to make a reliably perfetto espresso. Here is the conclusion I’ve come to after many years of effort: Don’t bother. Leave it to the professionals.
Unless you can afford to spend at least 2.000 euros on a legitimate Italian espresso machine that takes up half of a typical Dutch kitchen, you’re better off relegating your enjoyment of espresso to a semi-regular treat in your life, something you indulge in when you have time to get to the few places nearby that you know will serve you a decent cup. Do not expect to get it at a decent price.
On the banks of the Arno river
This is not a problem in Florence. On my visit last summer, I could stop at almost any random cafe and have a truly perfetto espresso for only €1,10. That’s what they charge when you stand at the bar instead of getting a table – and that’s steep these days. Some cafes raised their prices ten cents after il Covid to account for inflation. Italians still grumble about it, perhaps thinking (perhaps rightly) that breaking the one euro barrier is just a shrewd way of asking for a tip from the leftover change.
But, good God people, those beans cost money. Ten cents more than one euro is still a remarkable deal, especially when you consider the attention to detail most cafes take in preparing it. This culture’s reverence for coffee, not specially sourced artisanal beans but relatively common beans, is legitimately special. I don’t think most Italian cafe owners would dare use a one-button machine to serve coffee drinks.
I drank it up heartily, multiple times per day.
Where the Italian hipsters roam
The place I enjoyed drinking espresso at the most was La Cité Café. It’s a library cafe, so there are books everywhere. Some you can buy, many you can browse or just take down and read in a comfy chair by one of the front windows. The decor is akin to a well-curated and colourfully painted thrift store, with stairs leading to hidden alcoves, where you can sit on a couch under a reading lamp or camp out at a common table or cozy up with a partner and a pastry at a tiny table in the corner. Dark wooden shelves line the walls, which are filled with an eclectic mix of mostly Italian books about art and literature and culture. The place oozes bohemian coolness, with a soundtrack of Italian ‘80s arena rock anthems and forgotten ’60s Brazilian ditties that had me Shazaming up a storm. I bought two tote bags.
I went there for the first time with my nephew Jake, who had weeks before decided he was going to drop out of Juilliard with only one year left to go. He’s not my kid, so it’s easy for me to say this, but I thought that was a pretty punk rock move. He’s a talented jazz musician and classical composer who was doing stand-up comedy at nightclubs on school nights when he was a teenager. I’m confident he’ll join the ranks of famous and successful Juilliard dropouts, which is a long list that includes Kelsey Grammar, Robin Williams, and Miles Davis. Or not – which might be even better. I’m not convinced fame and fortune is all that it’s cracked up to be, at least if you want to live a happy and balanced life. This is the kind of conversation you should have over an espresso at a bohemian European cafe.
After that, I went back almost every day, sometimes for a snack and sometimes for a quick cup on my bike rides exploring the city. It was worth it for the medieval bathroom alone, with its sinks’ ancient water taps that unleashed a powerful jet of ice-cold water from deep under the pietraforte stone floor, making me wonder if it came directly from the Arno river, one block away.
Amateur espresso and its discontents
I’ve been making and drinking decent espressos for well over a decade, usually starting my mornings with at least one double, but that trip gave me pause about my daily habit. After I returned from Florence, my home-brewed espressos didn’t taste quite as good. It made me see how sub-par they sometimes could be. I dressed them up with little koekjes and mini stroopwafels, but I just couldn’t press out the same deep, dark espresso from my finicky machine. Even better machines than mine can be difficult to master. You must adjust the grind for every new type of bean, along with a host of other variables, which leads to an endless cycle of trial and error, which leads to more wasted beans than I’m comfortable with.
My tastes had also been changing since I moved to the Netherlands, making the quality of coffee less important in general. They love coffee here, but they don’t care so much about the artisanal details of specialty beans. Coffee brands do, however, go to great lengths to point out on their packaging that their beans weren’t harvested by modern-day slave labor, which when you take into account the history of the Dutch coffee and slave trades, is understandable and admirable. Otherwise, the Dutch are not very picky about the details. They just like drinking it, preferably with other people. Some stores supply it gratis to customers, serving cups of joe via a push-button coffee-making machine. It’s not the best coffee, but it makes the store more gezellig.
Perhaps owing to the more limited coffee choices in my new land, I was choosing tea more often, which slowly became my beverage of choice after my daily mid-afternoon naps. I know it sounds indulgent, but I try to fit a 20-30 minute nap into every weekday, which isn’t difficult when you work from home. Working from home also makes it easy to live a life without an alarm, which I’ve been able to do for much of the last decade. This has been a godsend as a night owl. But drinking tea in the morning just didn’t give me the same jolt. It didn’t make me want to open my eyes wide and say “aaaaaah” after slurping down a big gulp while standing on the balcony in the morning, assessing the many weather possibilities of the day.
Disappointed with my fancy espresso machine, I began taking my Bialetti out from the cupboard more often. I’ve always had one, but visiting the Bialetti store in Florence made me want to rekindle my romance with this icon of Italian culture. I think everyone should have a moka pot in their home because it will almost certainly come in handy someday, if only for a camping trip.
I think the Bialetti has been successfully, but wrongly, branded as an espresso maker without even trying, even though it doesn’t provide anything close to the level of pressure you need to make a legitimate espresso. That said, you can get surprisingly deep, rich, and tasty coffee out of it if you’re willing to approach it methodically. If you’ve got one in your cupboard but have abandoned it because it never quite delivered the brew quality that you wanted, today is your lucky day. I have a method for making delicious coffee in the Bialetti that I’ve been perfecting.
Here is the way you do it
Patience is key. As everyone who has used one knows, you leave a Bialetti alone at your peril. If you step away or get distracted, you’ll return to a hissing and sputtering moka pot disgorging the last remnants of its bitterest liquors. I think some people assume that this is how you know the coffee is done, but this airy sputtering is the main thing you want to avoid if you want to be successful with Mr. Bialetti.
To begin with, grinding your own beans is essential. This is not to say that you can’t use vacuum-packed ground coffee in a pinch, preferably from Italian brands like LaVazza or Illy. I keep a steel tin in the cupboard with pre-ground coffee just in case I run out of fresh beans (which does happen), but you really need to grind your beans fresh before making coffee. Almost any bean will do. Because you are grinding it fresh, you will be able luxuriate in the taste differences between dark, oily Italian espresso-style beans and bright South American beans and sour African varieties. You can use almost any bean you like, but you will notice a world of difference when you grind it fresh. But you knew that already. Don’t be a cheapskate. Buy the good beans.
Grind size is important, but not as important as when making espresso with a real machine. You don’t want to grind it so fine that it leaves a residue at the bottom of your cup, and you don’t want it so coarse that steam struggles to get through and the grinds clump up. You don’t need a fancy grinder, though. Get the classic Krups spice grinder and use it only for grinding coffee. Put your beans in and grind and shake it for as long as you want. It’s not going to make your grounds fine enough to be used in a real espresso machine, but it’s the perfect grind size for a Bialetti.
You know how baristas get some sort of wire brush and massage the grinds into perfect formation and tamp it down, compressing it with panache and pulling away the tamper with yet another flourish, maybe even adding a round wire puck filter and brushing everything off with some other tedious accessory? Don’t do any of that. In fact, don’t even fill the filter device all the way to the top with your grind. Leave a bit of space and then tap the sides once or twice to settle the grounds into an even layer.
Do not fill the Bialetti with cold water. This will make brewing coffee take significantly longer, which will dramatically increase the chance you’ll wander away for a hot minute. Starting cold will also encourage you to crank up the heat to get things moving already for chrissakes, which will only hurt you in the end when you realise that you can’t release all of energy that you’ve built up in your little runaway steam train. Instead, boil water in a kettle and pour it up to the line inside the well. Of course this adds an element of danger. You’ll need a good dry towel when it comes time to screw the top of the Bialetti onto the water well.
Once you’ve screwed the top on cleanly and very tightly without burning yourself, put the Bialetti on your stove’s burner, on the lowest flame possible, but do not close the lid. You need to see exactly what is going on at all times. Although it may look like it, the moka pot is not a percolator. Hot coffee is not supposed to be splashing onto the bottom of the lid. If operated correctly, the Bialetti pushes steam through the grinds, whereas a percolator splashes water over grinds multiple times, which, if anyone remembers the 1970s, results in a very bitter brew.
If you can’t handle the heat, get a diffuser
Come closer. I have a special tip for you that might spell success or failure for you in this endeavour, if you do indeed wish to uncover the true ways of the Bialetti. What you want is some sort of metal heat diffuser to place on top of your burner, firstly to insulate the moka pot from too much heat, but secondly to retain heat, which will come in handy during the final step. If you don’t have one, you could utilise a cast iron pan. Almost any sort of sturdy metal disc will do.
For this purpose, I use a bicycle disc brake, which was given to me by my fietsenmakers Alex, Andrea, and Simão at Bicicare, my local bike shop. They also have a Bialetti in their shop, which I noticed one day out of the corner of my eye while I was picking up one of my bikes. It was sitting on a hot plate with one of these discs in between. Alex, who used to be a chef at a fancy restaurant, runs the shop, and he got rid of their espresso machine recently, for the same reasons that I was struggling with my machine. They gave me a leftover disc brake to try it out myself, and it works perfectly. Alex also showed me other things he was making with leftover bicycle parts like flowers for his girlfriend that he’s welding out of coloured strips of metal. Please don’t go see how wonderful these guys are for yourself because I already have to wait three weeks for an appointment.
Since you already boiled your water, it won’t take but a minute or two for the dark, rich liquid to ooze out of the little coffee chimney, running down and collecting in the pot so beautifully – and so aromatic! Maybe don’t sniff too much if you’re standing over a gas burner. If the water is rising too quickly or the flow is too fast, pick up the Bialetti and move it off the heat or higher up above the heat, whatever it takes to keep the coffee running in a slow and steady stream. When the pot has filled up more than halfway to where the pouring spout begins – that’s the finish line you’re aiming for – turn off the burner. The metal diffuser will supply the rest of the heat you need, slowly dialling the temperature down as the metal cools, gradually filling your moka pot to the spout line.
From here, all you have to do is make sure you never get to the point where air is starting to bubble out of the top, which you’ll know is the case if you start seeing larger and larger bubbles. If you feel like that’s about to happen or if your juice is already at the spout line, immediately grab the handle of the moka pot and rinse its hot octagonal bottom with cold water in your sink to slam the brakes on everything.
Runaway steam train saved at the last minute. Bitterness problem solved.
Espresso at the cafe, Bialetti on the balcony
My espresso machine didn’t get used much after I mastered the moka pot. The old machine started to feel like it was taking up a lot of valuable real estate on my kitchen counter. It began to feel too complicated for my new life, which over the last few years has been turning away from the digital and back to more analog ways of doing, towards more deliberate ways of being.
I don’t want to put convenience at the top of my list of preferences anymore. I want to do more things manually, and with buttons instead of screens. I can’t promise I won’t buy a ridiculously expensive candy-red Italian espresso machine one day – if I ever have the space for one – but for the foreseeable future, it’s just going to be me and the moka pot. I want to savour the simplicity of Mr. Bialetti’s ingenious little steam machine and stop chasing perfection.
Unless I want a truly perfetto espresso and the authentic cafe trappings that come with it. Then, I might need to go back to Italy. I can’t wait to step back over the threshold of La Citè and sidle up to the bar, jangling a handful of euros in my pocket, ready to use one of the few phrases I remember from the last time I was in town.
Un caffè, per favore.
Furthermore
The photo opportunities in Florence are endless. Just like in Amsterdam, there are an endless number of beautiful, interesting, and ancient looking doors. Or former doors.
I was incredibly lucky to stumble on a legit New Orlean dixieland jazz band just as they were setting up in a beautiful plaza. I watched almost the entire set.