For those of you who have AT&T (an maybe other providers) there's a new series on espresso, its history in Italy, city by city, starting Saturday evening on a relatively new network on the AT&T provider called Wealth TV.

The Wealth Network does a lot of cooking shows, where they actually teach real cooking, not Food Network crap, there's a lot of shows on traveling and a few nice history programs. The show about the guy who travels the world searching for fine cheeses is quite good.

Anyways, just a heads up, the first episode starts Sunday at 7AM Pacific, and its starting in Milan. The second episode in the series goes to Turin. I don't know anything about the show other than a brief commercial, but I hope it doesn't suck. There's apparently 6 episodes. I see LaVazza mentioned (not surprised) but hopefully it will be more than a passing glance at the espresso culture that was started there. Maybe if we're lucky they'll show some beautiful vintage levers in action.

It looks similar to this show on Youtube:
Kfir.

That's one of them.

The whole show is on Youtube at least for a few months, it's sponsored by DeLonghi and they promote their automatic machines in it.

The presenter is good and it's edited nicely but you see in there a lot of bad coffee from automatic machines

Kfir.

BTW, in this episode at about 13:10 you can see the barista doing what looks like an active pre-infusion:
Kfir.

The coffee sphere shown in the Milan episode is interesting. I wish I'd seen this episode before my trips to Milan, for some background.

for those interested, I found this page on basic molecular gastronomy technique of spherification consisting of submerging a liquid with sodium alginate in a bath of calcium, if you want to try it at home: http://www.molecularrecipes.com/spherif ... ification/

If you do try it, be sure to post how it turned out.

Oh, and is anyone else noticing the baked on milk froth on the steam wands of the finest cafe's in the world in this episode?

yakster wrote:Oh, and is anyone else noticing the baked on milk froth on the steam wands of the finest cafe's in the world in this episode?

Actually, no. I was too busy noticing how beautiful the shops were. I've been to the one in the Galleria. The most expensive cappuccino I ever ordered.

I knew not to set my hopes very high, but the show is pure rubbish. Probably funded by Nespresso. I'd rather have watched them wander around the cool cities more. I recorded the Turin and Milan episodes and thought little of it.