Coffee

Long ago, around the time I started blogging, I had a girlfriend who was an art historian. She often did research at The Netherlands Interuniversity Institute for Art History (NIKI) in Florence, Italy, and I visited her there a few times. They allowed guests to stay at the institute, which was (and still is) at walking distance from downtown Florence. According to her LinkedIn profile, she is doing well, I suppose. I wouldn’t know otherwise, since she told me she never wanted to see me again when I broke up with her.

These beans are decaf, fair trade and sustainable and must be the most expensive I can afford. I grind them by hand.

Visiting Florence with my wife and kids last month was the first time I saw the city in over twenty years, and it was a perfect blast from the past. Not much was changed (in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if not much had changed since the late 1500s). We visited the Galleria degli Uffizi where my eldest son, who has a keen interest in Greek mythology, told my wife and me several stories around Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus (1484-1486) that is part of the museums own collection.

In Italy, it is customary to buy your morning caffè at a coffee bar, drinking it standing while forming political opinions from pink sports newspapers or having a chat with those around you. It is a moment of Italian style Zen at the start of a normal Italian working day with lots of class-promoting hierarchy, intimidatingly big signatures and the most stylish outfits in the world.

The coffee in question is quite strong, being what most would call an espresso. I asked my son if he wanted to try it, and he did. Just once. But the experience, having a coffee like that in a crowded and busy Italian coffee bar with our son, was one I won’t soon forget.

The filter is filled with ground coffee to the edge, but not pressed. After putting it in, I remove the coffee from the edge around it.

In 2005, working at the institute, there was this older Florentine lady. She explained to me how to make coffee using one of the big Bialetti Moka coffee pots they had there. My first inclination to put in a lot of coffee, for taste, and press it down hard, appeared wrong. These aren’t high-pressure machines. The coffee gets its flavour from the water passing through the ground coffee beans slowly. If you put in too much, the heat won’t be able to get the water through, and it will spill along the side of the coffee pot.

Setting 7 appears the induction equivalent of turning the gas all the way down in our kitchen

She had me turn the gas all the way down and wait until the upper part of the pot was filled. Then I had to quickly turn off the gas before it would cook. This was critical. On our induction plate, I found that setting seven is the lowest at which anything will happen, at all.

Coffee

There’s no accounting for taste, and at the office where I work now there’s a lot of coffee snobism. But to me, the simple elegance of the Bialetti Moka is an important part of the enjoyment of my coffee, after dinner at home. I have never looked anywhere else, and whenever we travel, we take two with us, one for gas and one for induction, just in case. Big machines with high-pressure pumps cost a lot in terms of money, maintenance and energy usage, and I don't use Nespresso and such other machines that make you throw away plastic for every single cup of coffee.

Of course, being Dutch, my mornings are filled with great floods of coffee whose social and body heating function in cold winters is not at all second to its taste. But that is something for another post.