Great Espresso and Cappuccino At Home

I have been eyeing a good espresso machine to buy for home use for a long time. Breville is my favorite appliance brand and I must have had Breville Barista Express BES860XL machine with grinder in my Amazon shopping cart's "saved for later" for a year (click here for listing). Finally price decreased last week to $539 - still pricey, but lower than before (at the time of writing this post, price is $599) and would still be well worth it. Both I and Shyam had a discussion about this purchase (it is a lot of money) and finally agreed to go for it. To our surprise, there was an additional $108 discount (ends up, Amazon is running this discount: "Through April 9, 2012, you can save 20% on select Kitchen & Dining products when you use your Amazon.com Store Card" - pretty darn neat!), and we got this baby for only $430, which is a great bargain for this machine. Few days later we had it delivered and today we finally had our first home-made espresso and cappuccino.

Espresso

This machine is extremely easy to use. In the back, there is a water tank with filter that stores up to 67 oz of water. You do not need to connect this machine to a water source. In the top, there is an integrated grinder. There are settings for you to define the size of the grind.

Load up the coffee beans. Select a filter size, place into the portafilter and place it under the grinder. Push to grind.

Tamp grinds.

Now insert portafilter into the maker and turn to lock.

Place cups underneath, select 1 or 2 shots, and wait.

And here is a shot of espresso. It is amazing how simple it is and how good the espresso comes out of this machine.

Cleaning is easy too - remove the portafilter and empty the used grinds, I cannot stress enough how easy it is to operate this machine.

Cappuccino

Cappuccino is 1/3 espresso, 1/3 steamed milk and 1/3 froth. This machine comes with the frother attachment.

Fill container with milk, place under the frother.

Turn on the steam. Be very careful - steam is extremely dangerous. Watch the milk form delicious froth.

Add to a shot of espresso. Et voila!

Wow, just wow. Makes us wish we got this machine earlier, but given the discounts at the time we purchased it (20% promo is still running, but price went up), this was just perfect timing. There is plenty of experimentation to be done with the grind size, strength, pressure, etc when it comes to making espresso. We still have a long way to go to perfection. But even the very first cup was amazing, so it can only get better from here.

Cheers!