How To Make Latte Art - The most elusive coffee skill

How do you make latte art? It's the most elusive coffee skill, but it really comes down to two key things, milk steaming, and your pouring technique. For the milk steaming, I'm going to demonstrate with a glass picture so you can see what's going on inside. We'll anchor the spout of the picture to the steam wand like this, and we'll angle the picture so that the steam wand is closer to one side. The direction that it's pointing will create a whirlpool in our milk. We'll start with the tip of the steam wand fully submerged until we see the whirlpool form. Then we'll inject some air by lowering the picture down and just barely exposing the tip of the steam wand. After just a couple seconds of that, we'll move the picture back up, re-submerging the tip of the steam wand and continuing the whirlpool. It all happens pretty fast with these very small movements, which is why I'm showing you ahead of time. Remember to purge your steam wand before starting, and if you're using a machine like this that's a little less powerful, turn the steam wand on and wait until it's pumping out steam at full power before starting. Then you'll just turn it off, insert your milk picture and turn it right back on to start steaming. Remember the positioning we talked about earlier, and once our whirlpool forms, we're going to drop down and listen for the sound of air being injected. And after just a couple seconds of that, we're moving the picture back up to continue the whirlpool and incorporate all of the air that we just added into the milk. And when the picture becomes too hot to touch, that's how we know that we're done and we can turn the steam wand off. And if you're using a less powerful machine, you're just going to have more time to work with. It's going to take longer for the whirlpool to form, and you're going to want to add a few seconds when it comes to injecting air into the milk. You can tap your picture on the counter to get rid of any extra bubbles and then keep it swirling until you're ready to pour so that the foam doesn't settle. We want our milk to have the consistency of wet paint. That's how we'll know that we did a good job with the milk steaming. Now let's talk about our pouring technique. One key thing is to make sure that we're using a bowl-shaped cup. These will be way easier to pour latte art with. The most basic pouring principle to understand is that if you pour from higher up, the milk will sink down underneath the surface of the drink. But if you get the spout of your picture very low and close to the surface, the milk will glide out and the white foam will sit on top. But it will be hard to get close enough if your cup is standing upright. That's why you have to tip it, which allows you to get a lot closer to the surface of the drink with the spout of your picture. We do want to pour from higher up very briefly at the beginning to build our base. But then we tilt the cup and get as close as we can with the spout of our picture. And once we're done with our design, we pull up and use the sinking milk to cut through to finish it off. There's a lot of different pouring patterns you can learn, but an easier one to start with is this one where you just push forward in different pulses, stacking each one and then pulling up and cutting through at the end. It looks really pretty and it's way easier to achieve than some of the other ones. If your milk looks like this, when you pour it, that means that you injected too much air when you steamed it. If it looks like this, then that means you didn't inject enough air. If it looks like this, the air that you did inject wasn't incorporated well enough into the milk. So better steaming will make your pouring way better.