Coffee

My mother-in-law commented from all the photos we have sent her from cafés, we are drinking a lot of coffee. She may have a point, though to be fair, the amount of coffee you get in each cup is a lot less than in the States. There is no venti or grande here. No one wandering around topping up your cup.

What coming to Portugal has taught me (among many things) is the beauty of that tidy little espresso in the morning or even mid afternoon.  I get it now.  You aren’t consuming a large amount of acidic liquid, and my stomach and tooth enamel may be the better for that. It is quite civilized to have your espresso shot, or one of the other varieties of caffeine delivery, that all do the job very economically.

At various times in my adult life I’ve thought about giving up coffee or trying to convert wholly to decaffeinated. But I always get right back on that caffeine wagon. Your dad was right A. I think I’d sooner give up alcohol than coffee. That is fortuitous given how ingrained in the culture it is here. There are some pastelarias here that only sell two things, pastel de nata and coffee, and have no trouble staying in business. Those two things are all they need.

First, coffee.  You can find it everywhere, and good coffee. For example, on our way back from a road trip (to be blogged about soon), we stopped at a gas station just north of the airport rental car return. Trev went in as the pumps were a bit confusing. He reported back to me it is just like you might expect at a typical 7-Eleven-kind-of-place except that they had a huge and shiny espresso machine and were cranking out all kinds of barista-style drinks.  Yeah, that is a statement.

At home we use a french press. I don’t remember when we switched from coffee make to that, but we prefer the press. Even if you didn’t ask why and/or don’t care, I’ll still give you our top three reasons. It doesn’t require an ongoing consumption of paper filters. It doesn’t require any electricity to operate. It doesn’t take up precious counter space in our not-so-large kitchen. Bonus is it makes great coffee which you can easily control.

When we roadtrip, we are known to take a kitchen box of our favorite items (Yep, foodies, guilty), and a french press is in there. It can be easily washed and then stowed away. It also makes enough coffee for the two of us, and no more than we should have.  

While I’m thinking about it, the quantity of coffee is a thing here. I’ll admit, at first that was an adjustment. I was used to nursing a mug (or two) of coffee in the morning. Now, I’m adjusted. An espresso does give you a boost, and a quick one because it takes no time to consume. And that is ok.  That also means that people don’t have to carry around a cup with them. Rarely do you see any to-go cups here.

We were curious what our coffee making options would be here as clearly we weren’t bringing our own press along. At this rental in Lisbon, there is a Nespresso machine. It is our first experience with one and it is ok, but I’m not crazy about the waste it creates. Much like Keurigs back home, I’m not a fan.  But getting coffee out all the time isn’t an option, so we’ve used it while here.

When out, my favorites range between two now – Gelado, or iced coffee, for a hot afternoon refresh and pick me up and meia de leite. The former (at least in my favorite shops) start with a big cube of ice in a glass about the size of a rocks or lowball glass. Pour in milk about halfway. It sounds like a lot, but the big ice cube takes up a lot of the space. Then pour the hot espresso shot in. It is a thing of beauty and AWESOME when you’ve been wandering up and down Lisbon’s streets (in a non-prostitute way) on a hot summer day.

Meia de leite [māy-uh du late] is medium size coffee cup with ⅓ espresso and ⅔ warm to hot milk so as not to cool the espresso. So civilized. This is also known here as a Flat White – that term apparently coming from Australia.  The best explanation I’ve found for some of this is the following menu screenshot I grabbed from a cafe.

For what it is worth, there is no half and half here. You get milk in the coffee shops. There isn’t even full-on cream. Even in the grocery store, I struggled to find something thicker (you know what I mean) than milk to add to my Nespresso coffee. When we were in Montreal, there was a wall of percentages of milk fat -from 1% up to something like 20%. I don’t remember them all, only that what we ended up with was decadent and probably really bad for my heart.

Kind of an interesting contrast to that here.  The option for cream I found was a small, aseptic box called Creme with a photo of some fruit and custard dessert on it. It isn’t sweetened condensed milk or evaporated milk, but something else entirely. But it was thick and did the trick. Another nice surprise here on the dairy-related front is that oat milk is common. So anyone that has lactose issues has no problem still ordering milky coffee.

Clearly, we have fallen deep into the coffee rabbit hole (Here’s looking at you, R) since I’ve been able to write paragraph after paragraph about it.  So moving on – Pastel de Nata.

They are sweetened little egg custard pies that are a perfect compliment to the bitter of an espresso or any coffee. Personally, I think they pair better with a hot coffee (not iced).  We’ve tried them several places – pastelarias are everywhere – and as I mentioned, some of them only have coffee and pastel de nata on the menu.  Pastels are just served at air temp, not warmed or cooled. We also found a Vegan Nata place since Trev likes to find non-dairy options when possible. These things are delicious and wickedly dangerous. 

A pastel has layers of puff pastry cut into a circle and then tucked into a shallow muffin tin cup. It is then filled with a sweetened, luscious, smooth custard and baked in a shockingly hot oven. Trev read in a recipe around 550 degrees Fahrenheit. They end up with these characteristic browned/burned areas on top. My god they are good. Did I say that already?

This is one I want to try and redo at home if I can get our oven that hot and if I can find the right muffin tin shape. A non-dairy option is in our future I think. We were also discussing but on the fence about the idea of a compact espresso machine. That was until we both had a particular cappuccino at a particularly brilliant brunch place that made us both look at each other and say “Yep, we are getting one.” That cappuccino is pictured below next to a knock out juice. Blog post coming.

The adventure continues.