A barista puts the finishing touches on a rosetta design, a type of latte art.
Credit:
Christy Duggan / Counter Culture Coffee
Latte art has become a hallmark of many quality coffee shops around the world. If you order a drink made with espresso and steamed milk, such as a cappuccino or a latte, you may find yourself marveling over the elegant, marbled patterns of earthen browns and shimmering white that top your beverage. But how do baristas create such works of art?
The designs take shape when a barista pours the drink into a cup; steamed milk over a couple shots of espresso. The impressive creations are a blend of the skill of the barista and the physical properties of the mixture of air and liquid: a foam.
"Foams are very complex and interesting fluids," Emilie Dressaire, an engineer who leads the Particles, Interface and Fluids Lab at New York University, told Live Science in an email. This makes it difficult to know exactly what's going with latte art without studying it specifically. [10 Things You Need to Know About Coffee] https://www.livescience.com/55696-how-does-latte-art-work.html
