Hi!

Im new here, so I just wanted to know what you experienced espresso-makers felt about the Gaggia turbo frother nozzle(or something like that). Im of course talking about the black plastic wand that extends the frother on my Gaggia. After having tried my machine mainly for Cappuccino and Latte-making for a couple of months, I have found that I simply cannot avoid it making to much froth in my milk. I usually froth a little bit less foam than I need, and then stick the nozzle at the bottom of the pitcher to allow the milk to reach a good temperature. Even though the nozzle is down at the bottom of the pitcher, it keeps foaming, and lots of it. Often, there is so much foam that I cant continue heating the milk to the needed temperature, because then I would spill foam on the desk...

Today, after having read about the turbo nozzle wand thing on a couple of forums, I tried foaming WITHOUT the nozzle in..
The effect was staggering! My first frothing made fantastic microbubbles, and the right amount of foam that I wanted. It also seemed to heat much faster - which I feel is a good thing.

What are your experiences on this? Do you agree that it frothes better without the turbo nozzle wand thing on?

Looking forward to reading your replies!

I replaced the entire steam arm on my Gaggia Classic with the arm from a Silvia. It completely transformed the steaming abilities. I never had really nice foam consistency until that point. The Silvia arm comes with a single hole tip, so it's roughly equivalent to taking the turbo attachment off of the stock arm I guess. But, it has a decent length so you can plunge it deeper into slightly larger pitchers.

In my book, you made a good choice removing the turbo attachment

Jon

I see, that's interesting. Is it difficult to replace the Gaggia arm with the one you purchased?
Oh, and do you know if there exists "extenders" to the Gaggia's arm, so that I can use the frother for less milk as well?

Thanks in advance.

The Silvia steam arm replacement mod is easy and cheap. You can get the steam arm for about $30 from Espressoparts.com or Wholelattelove.com. Just unscrew the nut that holds the stock arm in place, pull the nut off the old arm, and use it to attach the new arm. You may have to bend the old arm to get the nut off, but it's no great loss. Also, the Silvia steam arm is a tight fit, but it should go in there with a little bit of pushing. It makes a huge difference for the steaming ability of the Gaggia machines.

On the other hand, if you don't want to deal with replacing the whole arm, you can get the Saeco Panarello frother and just leave the frothing sleeve off of it. That extends the steam arm a couple of inches, which helps with swirling the milk. But I found that the Silvia arm mod is more effective.

you can also just take the sleeve off of the gaggia one, thats what I did on my Espresso and it seems to work great.

Yea I was kinda hoping not to replace the whole arm.

Where can I buy the Panarello? I live in Europe.

You can get the Panarello arm from Wholelattelove.com, but I'm not sure if they'll ship to Europe or not.

Some people just take the end of the stock turbo frother off and use the nub at the end to give some extra length to the steam arm. I think there was a thread here a while back about it. Apparently, that works OK. Or you can move the O ring on the frother so it blocks the inlet hole on the side, which "de-turbos" the frother and makes it work like a conventional steam arm. So you have a lot of options.

Old topic, but I seem to be getting back to this each time i froth milk. I'm using the arm without the wand, and it works pretty good. But - the arm is very short (I must always make a lot of milk which makes me make lattes all the time ).

Anyhow - the Panarello arm - is it this one you are speaking of? -> http://www.wholelattelove.com/Gag...gia_pannarello.cfm

Best regards, ElChe

Just a thought -- if you've removed the 'frothing aide,' which is definitely the right idea, and you don't really want to upgrade to the Silvia arm, and the only thing now is that the arm is short, so you have to fill your pitcher with more milk than you really need in order to reach the steam arm....

... why not just get a smaller pitcher?

This is the extension I was talking about:

http://www.wholelattelove.com/Saeco/saeco_pannarello.cfm

The other one is just the one that comes stock on Gaggias. The Saeco version has a much longer inner arm, so it's better for whirlpooling your milk.