… I am convinced, is to give you time to clean up all the stainless steel utensils required, in the meantime. Making a cappuccino in the machine didn’t require this many utensils.

In the meantime, I need the following to keep testing and tasting.

1. Dark roast coffee beans mixed with chicory. I have to admit that when I found out that South Indian coffee uses chicory, I was a bit deflated. Historically, chicory was added to coffee to cheat customers when coffee beans were in short supply. But apparently, I need that to get the authentic South Indian coffee smell and taste. Haver ordered on Amazon now.

2. Use full-fat milk. I am balking at this one. Being a bit afraid of lipids (and with my LDL levels high), I have trained my palate to enjoy coffee with skimmed milk. Maybe I will settle for 2% for a while.

3. The third one, I need help from experts. I cannot get my coffee to be steaming hot. Do you folks boil the milk? What do you do when you need it only for one person? That is 8-10 ounces of milk at most.

Thanks to a call last night with Lakshmi (Vidya), I changed up a few things, and the results are improving. The big difference was the grain size. Instead of using some packaged grind, I used the Breville to grind the coffee beans with a “3” setting – that is Turkish Grind level. That made a huge difference to the dripping speed. In fact, there was no dripping during the blooming period.

Ten minutes later, while meditating, I could hear the sound of water dripping in an otherwise quiet room. Caught between the prospect of a bathroom faucet leaking and my coffee-dripping reaching a modicum of success, I rushed to the coffee counter and was delighted to find no bathroom leaks!!

I still have a long way to go. While the decoction was strong, the coffee (with milk) did not hit the richness of what I have tasted in my South Indian friends’ houses. I wonder whether using skimmed milk is part of my problem.

Also, I can’t get the end result to be piping hot. Do not get me wrong — it is coming out hot — around 160 deg F. But, in my friends’ houses, I can barely hold the tumblr!

The experimentation shall continue…

Fixed the volume problem. But something is amiss. The water is percolating immediately. It is not supposed to.

When I first got started with cappuccino and all that, my friend Raghu from Austin had sent me this contraption to make South Indian coffee – often called “filter kaapi“. Now, this is something I grew up with during my college years since I did my engineering in Chennai.

This year, one of my goals is to learn how to make good “filter kaapi“. Today was my first attempt after looking up a few YouTube videos.

The result of the maiden venture has been distinctly un-South-Indian-like. Followed all the instructions, and then I was left with only half a tumbler of totally diluted coffee. I might have had some more coffee in the cup if only I had not spilt some in the basin while trying to do that South Indian frothing thing with some panache!

If you are not aware of what I am talking about, you have to look it up. Those guys in the coffee stalls in college would throw the milf-coffee combo from high up in the air from the tumbler into the dabarah – without spilling one little drop.

I need to call up Raghu and Prabha and get some tips on how to make the coffee thicker.

[P.S. My second attempt fixed the volume problem but not the thinness problem]

… one of those were held right.