Was literally cursing when the spill happened and then when I looked at the cup! 😍

Not too shabby!!

Full fat milk, nice cold Pitcher, aerating and rexturising my milk....

I just need to be doing this consistently

Youtube videos show that you can but want you guys opinion if you can do latte art using this? Has anyone tried it? I would love to buy a proper machine from Kmart but broke atp 😭

You can also recommend any cheaper alternative if you think this doesnt work

Been trying to wiggle for the past month. The lines are not as defined as i want it. Am I wiggling too fast? Best one so far.

This is not terrible, but it’s the best of about 5 I’ve poured in the past few days. The rest were disasters. I just don’t feel it for some reason.

@coffee_by_jonny

I took the advice I was given from my last posts, and I feel like my technique has gotten a lot better. But my art is basically coming out the same every time I pour and I don’t see much improvement. Any tips on getting the right shapes in my pour for a stacked tulip?

Made a couple drinks for my wife and I.

Edit: Video added in the comments.

Edit 2: Followed the tips given here and it seems to have brought some improvement. Aerated a little less which seems to take away a lot of the blobbiness, normally this would cause the milk to roll away when setting the art but with the tips applied this didn't seem to happen.

Tl;Dr: I'm using a Thermojet/block based machine instead of a boiler for steaming, even if steaming very wet foam, I never get a thin, non-blobby stream. I steam in a small pitcher, transfer to a larger one as quick as possible and pour my latte art. I wonder if this behaviour is typical for thermo-based machines or if I'm running into, well... A skill issue.

The details: Heya, a question that I have about how the milk behaves when coming from the pitcher; I seem to never be able to get a nice thin stream pouring out that when poured up high sinks easily and when poured close to the surface lays still right away, like so many of the really good latte artists seem to be able to do.

I'm wondering if something is wrong with my technique, or if I'm running into a machine limitation. First of all, I tried a few amounts of aeration, from too much air to barely enough to work with. Even when pushing for very thin, wet foam, I can't seem to get that beautiful thin stream that I've seen some latte artists pour with, that stream that makes putting down rosettes look easy. It's like a concentration of foam is always in front of the milk, but when setting the art, it drifts away sometimes so clearly I must be either on the too thin side or I still have too much turbulence in the cup.

When steaming milk I steam around 140-150 ml in a very small pitcher of 350 ml, then transfer to a 600 ml pitcher to do the pouring. This is done as quickly as possible after the steaming is done and the wand is cleaned and purged. Before steaming the milk I also do an extra purge to make sure there's no unnecessary extra water shot into the milk.

The machine that I'm using for this is a standalone Morning Dream (MD630) that uses, I believe, a thermojet (or thermoblock) rather than a boiler, pressure seems to be regulated by how often the pump pulses. This can be set on the device which is currently set to 90%, giving a nice quick froth without it being too much for me. I tried lowering the internal temperature from 260°C to 250°C (probably much higher than a boiler because of how this heating element works) as I understood from somewhere that too high a boiler temperature can also give trouble when steaming milk, but it didn't seem to do much. The milk itself is steamed to 54°C. (Device measures this with a laser thermometer from the wand and stops when this is reached.)

Lastly, maybe it's the milk? I'm using just regular whole milk from the grocery store, no UHT, no special barista milk, just whole milk.

I'm going to assume that this all is just layer 8 issue, so me. Though I did notice when steaming with a Profitec Go from a friend of mine that the steamed milk behaves so much differently. So yeah, I hope this info dump can perhaps lead to some pointers as to what I could try to address this issue that I'm having.