The world's earliest pulling flowers, pulling not coffee but tea

Now having a latte in hand is a stylish casual anywhere, at least it feels much more fashionable than a cup of tea. If you have leisure yaxing, sit in the shop to drink, many baristas will also specially serve a pull flower, pull out a swan, or a rose between the shakes, in addition to pleasing the eye to make the coffee more interesting.

I think when I was training and exam as a barista in Melbourne, Australia, I did practice pulling flowers. It's just that my hands are very stupid, and after practicing for half a day, I still can't pull out a duck, so I can only make a normal latte in a regular manner. But because of this, I still have some basic understanding of the principle of pulling flowers.

There are two types of coffee flower pulling methods

Coffee pulling, or latte art, is mainly done on milk-soaked Italian coffee, especially lattes or cappuccinos.

The practice can be divided into two kinds, one is to use the milk foam to pour into the coffee, the use of the wrist subtle movement to adjust the speed and angle of the milk foam pouring, so that the white of the milk and the brown of the espresso are intertwined, on the back to present the design pattern; and the other is that after the milk foam has been poured, then milk the caramel, chocolate sauce to the surface of the milk foam, and then use sharp tools to caramel, chocolate sauce to portray the pattern.

Did Lahua originate in China? The earliest can be traced back to the Northern Song Dynasty

Such pulls are mainly applied to espresso, so nature naturally flourishes with espresso machines, in other words, it is a product of the 20th century. However, don't think that pulling flowers on drinks is only such a history, in fact, pulling flowers is not a foreign thing, it first appeared in the hands of Chinese ancestors, and it appeared in history as early as the early years of the Northern Song Dynasty, that is, about the 10th century AD, a full thousand years ago. Of course, at that time, the material used for pulling flowers was not coffee, but The Chinese national essence "tea".

However, the Song Dynasty tea drinking method is very different from the way we drink tea soup today, the drinking method at that time is called tea, which is to grind the tea into tea bricks after grinding paste, and then crush the tea bricks before drinking, and then while injecting hot water while quickly stirring with a teaspoon or tea basket, so the surface of the tea soup will present many small milky white foam, so it is sweet and not bitter to drink. The picture shows my friend personally experiencing the replica version of Song tea in the current Fujian Tea Mountains. We can clearly see that the surface is a thick layer of fluffy white foam, which is very similar to the foaming black tea we drink today. Please note that this is no milk ingredient, it is entirely because the tea polyphenols or amino acids in the tea form an emulsification effect with the air and tea soup, so it forms a delicate foam.

Song Dynasty Dou Tea Culture In addition to drinking tea, it is also beautiful

In addition to drinking tea, the Song people also especially love competitions, called doucha. Better than tea is not good, but also better than the appearance of good or bad, fighting, may form a drinking method, then called tea, or called tea hundred plays. Tao Hub, the minister of the early Song Dynasty, wrote in the "Qing YiLu": "Tea to tang shisheng, in recent times there are soup luck daggers, do not use magic tricks, so that the soup pattern water veins into objects, animals, insects, fish, flowers and grasses, slender and picturesque, but the whiskers are scattered, this tea change is also known as tea hundred plays." Translated into the vernacular, it is "drinking tea to the Tang Dynasty is only popular, recently some people pour water at the same time to use a teaspoon, with a very clever technique, so that the water pattern of the tea soup presents the shape of a variety of objects, such as animals, fish, flowers, grasses, etc., slender like a strip, but can only be maintained on the dispersion, this is a special way to drink tea, now people call tea a hundred plays." "This tea play was not only popular among tea workers and literati in the Song Dynasty, but also historical records that even Song Huizong was a master, and even when drinking tea, he did not forget to show his artistic talent."

Therefore, it seems that when the hot water is poured into the bowl with tea paste, the use of flushing water and teaspoons to mix with each other, so that the white foam of tea is intertwined with the yellow-brown color of the tea soup to form a special pattern. If you imagine, is it very similar to today's coffee flowers? It's just that tea is tea after all, and the emulsification stability of the foam is still no more than milk bubbles, so this pattern will soon disappear, no longer than the coffee latte. It is just that since the Ming and Qing dynasties, the tea drinking method has changed to the popular tea brewing method, and the tea ordering method of the Song Dynasty is no longer popular, and the tea drama has also been lost.

So don't think that the flowers can only be presented on the coffee, as early as 1000 years ago, the song dynasty ancestors, on the tea showed the wonderful art of pulling flowers, but now only leave a written record, can not witness the year or into a painting or a poem of the wonderful pulling flowers, can only rely on imagining the wonderful and leisurely drinking tea in that year. But modern people are fortunate that nowadays we have too many kinds of drinks that can be used as flower pulling materials, such as pulling flowers with creamer on sesame paste, if you want to make drinking more fun, you may wish to play more creative to try it.