Hi! I got an espresso machine last week and found myself learning milk frothing and latte art quite quickly by watching a bunch of YouTube tutorials. Here’s my progress.

I wanted to share how I got there with a few tips regarding steaming and pouring. Please correct me if you think something is wrong or would be considered a bad tip! Then I’ll fix it. Tell me if I missed something aswell! Anyways, here we go:

Milk and temperature:

• Cold milk is a must.

• Use HQ whole milk (isn’t as important, but I’ll make it a bit easier)

• Before going crazy with trying to froth in a specific way, make sure your temperature is right. Try using a thermometer and try to get a feel for when your milk hits around 40C and 55C.

• Definitely stop when you’ve reached around 60C and maybe even before! But it depends on your taste. The colder the milk, the sweater it will be. Therefore, try to aim to get the milk as cold as possible, but you should still enjoy it warm!

Milk frothing:

• You’re probably doing this right, but make sure your pitcher is in the right place aswell as your steam wand. This is not the hard part, so honestly just watch a video cause it’s way easier than trying to understand my explanation... In general: make sure the pitcher is at an angle and the steam wand is not in the middle of the pitcher nor at the edge, but somewhere in between as to creating a nice whirlpool.

• Right before you start steaming, make sure the head (of the steam wand) is about halfway under the milk. You want to perfect this starting position as you don’t want to be adjusting the height of the pitcher every time you start!

• Right when you turn it on, you want to hear small hissing noises. Now, this can be a bit tricky, but you should not hear a constant hissing sound. Just a hissing sound here and there.

• Don’t think about introducing air. You shouldn’t really be seeing big bobbles at all. It’s really easy to introduce way too much air and create thick weird foam, which we don’t want.

• You should see the milk expand a little, but honestly not that much.

• So remember the 40C I talked about before? When you reach around this temperature, you should not introduce anymore air. This will create small bobbles which we don’t want. We want microbobbles that we can’t see.

• When you stop introducing air, move the pitcher just under the surface and create a whirlpool.

Preparing the pour:

• Before even pouring we want to make sure the milk is mixed well and doesn’t have any bobbles at all.

• This is done by banging the milk at table to remove any bobbles.

• We then swirl the milk constantly before pouring.

• It’s ok to spill some milk when doing these two things. You want to be quite aggressive with this!

• (Small tip: If you have two sized pitchers and you’re steaming your milk in the smaller sized one, pour the milk into the bigger one. This will make pouring easier!)

• Don’t stop swirling until your pour your milk.

• (Are you doing this right? You should be seeing a nice non layered milk that is shiny. The consistency is actually not that thick at all! And most importantly, no visible bobbles of any size)

The art:

• Start high and create “a canvas”. This means that you mix the coffee with a bit of the milk. As said, have the pitcher high above the milk, so the milk doesn’t stick to the surface. Pour over any inconsistencies in your canvas to make it blank.

• I really can’t explain how to actually create the art. Watch a quick YouTube video for the different designs. I can only give you some tips they don’t always tell you: Pour faster than you’d think. Make small wiggles to spread the milk a bit more. Get the pitcher as close to the milk as possible by having the cup at an angle. The place you start pouring is quite crucial!

• (What are some signs that you should look out for? Small bobbles, which means you introduced air for too long or too aggressively! Probably more signs, but I’ll add this later if people comment! Just try to follow everything else in this post and you should hopefully be golden!)

Hope you learned something!

Some links:

• This video is really great. Watch from 1:44 and about a minute. This is a really good explanation of milk frothing!

• This Is great for milk pouring. If you find this really difficult to do, then make sure your steaming your milk the right way. Latte art shouldn’t be that challenging, if the milk is correct!

• This got recommended. It’s really in depth but covers the science behind the milk aswell, which might help you understand why your milk is behaving in a specific way or why you should steam the milk in said way.

• If you have some other dense yet great tutorials, please let me know and I will add them!