Adventure in the coffee world is the strangest thing. You spend your whole life using a 10 euro Italian coffee machine, heating it with water from that time, crushing the coffee in the basket, and suddenly you find yourself making coffee. espresso using a scale, measuring pre-infusion times and calculating the relationship between grams and extraction.

This cocktail involves dozens of Euros invested in accessories and this coffee-filled adventure to brew the best coffee possible espresso I learned a valuable lesson: The basics are the basics. And it took me a long time to understand this.

cheap grinder. First of all, there are two things to keep in mind. Coffee is water and… coffee, so you need to have good raw materials. This eliminates almost any supermarket coffee and once we have a coffee machine espressoThe next step is to purchase a grinder to grind the good coffee beans we purchase.

My coffee machine is De’Longhi Dedica. It is very popular because the quality/price ratio is good and they gave it to me together with the Bosh grinder for 25 euros. It has two blades and grinds the coffee into powder. For what else? There were larger pieces than the others, but I poured the coffee into the portafilter, put it in the coffee maker and out came the coffee. It wasn’t very tasty, but it was coffee.

First blow: YouTube. I didn’t understand why the coffee wasn’t coming out well. I bought increasingly expensive coffees from my specialty store and…the nuances were noticeable, but it was still a tool to wake me up in the morning. The problem was that coffee was too expensive because it was just a “tool”.

I started watching YouTube videos to hone the technique and… damn James Hoffman. Since I have a grinder, I stopped looking at grinder videos and focused on accessory videos. I thought that was the key to making good coffee.

Filter holder in good condition. The Dedica, like many other affordable coffee makers, has a pressurized filter holder. This means breaking the coffee isn’t that big of a deal because the water in the coffee maker exerts a lot of pressure since the filter has a small opening. Functional but not ideal. It also has plastic parts that are difficult to clean, where residue accumulates, and… espressoThere may be particles blocking that hole.

On the left, the pressurized one. The basket I bought on the right

So I bought a bottomless portafilter or bottomlessand a basket. This has a wooden handle and it says it is compatible with my camera. Well, 32 euros for trouble. With excitement, I prepared everything, made my first coffee and the counter started flowing. Disaster.

Sabotage. This is because the coffee maker comes with a plastic tamper (the tool used to crush the coffee in the basket or filter) that does not allow much force to be applied. So I bought another tamper. Another 30 euros because I wanted it to be nice and springy.

Dosing funnel and steel filter. By the way, since I can put more coffee in the new basket, I bought a steel funnel to add the ground coffee to the basket without having to pay too much attention, to avoid wasting even half a gram. Another 13 euros.

It has a technical function, but I bought it mainly to prevent the coffee machine assembly from being stained with coffee beans.

I also bought the 8 euro steel disc to prevent staining of the coffee machine assembly. So there you have it… I excitedly went to use my new toys and it spilled less, but leaks continued to occur, staining the machine and countertops, and ultimately it wasn’t ideal.

distributor needle. While doing research, I came across a piece of content that talked about the water splash problem. It turns out that even if you squeeze the coffee, the channels through which the high-pressure water tries to escape open, and since there is a lot of energy inside the basket, it comes out from wherever possible.

You need to distribute the coffee thoroughly in the basket to avoid sewage, and there are two ways to achieve this: tapping the poltrafilter for a while (already with the coffee) to rinse everything out, or spending another 13 euros on a highly specialized tool: You “stir” the coffee once in the basket and before pressing it down with the pestle. ” a means of distribution.

Key: cheap grinder. After all the money I invested in coffee, I said: If it doesn’t work, I’ll return it all and switch to infusion. It didn’t work for me. I did the whole ritual, everything was as it should be… and still some channeling occurred. All that was left was to invest more than 200 Euros in a grinder. That was the problem by default, but I didn’t buy it because I was discouraged and tempted by the Steam Deck.

grinder of discord

What I did was use my basic grinder and press the action button for many seconds until I had almost powder. I know this isn’t ideal because if you grind finer than necessary the extraction won’t be optimal either, but don’t grind for too long although you have no control because these are just fast spinning blades and don’t grind like traditional grinders do. , is to get a very nice coffee. It worked and not only do I have great taste, but I also do zero channeling.

Happy ending. With all these challenges, what I want to convey is that the lesson I learned is an interesting one: The problem is not that my starting tools were useless, but that I didn’t use them properly. In my case, I did not grind the coffee enough and thus channeling and inadequate extraction of the coffee occurred. If you find yourself in a similar situation with a brand new portafilter that starts sputtering as soon as you start making coffee, this article may be able to help you.

All the accessories work together, but what most coffee popularizers ultimately agree on is that a good grinder is more important than the coffee machine itself. Of course, all the accessories I buy contribute to a better experience while making my coffee. It takes much longer than it used to, but it’s a process I enjoy doing every morning.

Of course, the next thing is a good grinder. espresso. The place I won’t go into is home stoves, because they say you should drink freshly ground, freshly roasted coffee. And I refuse. Now.

in Xataka | The best trick to making coffee in an Italian coffee machine is not to make coffee in an Italian coffee machine