Bicerin
Bicerinbee-che-REEN
Thick drinking chocolate at the bottom, espresso in the middle, cold cream floating on top, in three bands you can see through the glass. Caffè Al Bicerin in Turin has been serving it since 1763 and the order of pouring is the whole skill.
At a glance
- Chocolate:coffee:cream
- 1:1:1
- Active time
- 10 min
- Total time
- 15 min
- Makes
- 1 small glass
- Serve
- Hot, unstirred
- Kit
- Small glass
Ingredients
Note: The chocolate has to be properly thick. A thin hot chocolate has roughly the same density as espresso, the two merge on contact, and you end up with a mocha.
Method
-
Make the chocolate thick
Heat the drinking chocolate until it is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon heavily. If you are making it from scratch, a teaspoon of cornflour slaked in cold milk and cooked out for two minutes gets you there.
Heat 4 minutes -
Whip the cream just barely
Whisk the cold cream for about thirty seconds, until it thickens slightly but still runs off the whisk. Stiff cream sits on top as a lid rather than a layer, and runny cream sinks straight through the coffee.
Whisk 30 seconds -
Chocolate first, into a warmed glass
Rinse a small glass with boiling water, tip it out, and pour the hot chocolate in. Let it settle flat before you go anywhere near it with the coffee.
-
Coffee over a spoon, then the cream
Hold a teaspoon upside down just above the chocolate and pour the espresso slowly over the back of it, so it spreads rather than punching through. Then do exactly the same with the cream.
Serve it without a spoon and without stirring. You drink through the layers, which is the point.
Why this works
The layers hold on density, and density here means dissolved sugar and starch rather than fat. Thick drinking chocolate is loaded with both, which makes it the heaviest of the three and puts it at the bottom. Espresso is mostly water and sits in the middle. Lightly whipped cream is fat plus the air you just beat into it, which makes it by far the lightest, so it floats. Get the chocolate too thin and the first two bands have almost the same density, so they merge on contact and you have made a mocha.
Pouring over the back of a spoon is what stops the stream drilling through. A thin falling column of liquid carries enough momentum to punch into the layer below and mix the two, and spreading it across a spoon breaks that momentum into a wide slow sheet. It is the same technique that floats cream on Irish coffee, for the same reason.
Temperature matters as much as density. The chocolate and the coffee both go in hot, the cream goes in cold, and that difference helps: cold liquids are denser than hot ones of the same composition, but the air whipped into the cream more than offsets it. Use warm cream and the margin disappears.
The drink descends from bavareisa, an eighteenth-century Turinese mixture of coffee, chocolate and milk served already combined. Caffè Al Bicerin, which opened opposite the Santuario della Consolata in 1763, served the components in layers instead and named it after the small glass, bicerin in Piedmontese. The café is still there, still doing it, and still refusing to stir it.
Variations
- Pur e fiur: the older variant, just coffee and cream, no chocolate.
- Pur e barba: coffee and chocolate only, no cream.
- With hazelnut: a teaspoon of gianduja melted into the chocolate. Turin is where gianduja comes from, so this is less heretical than it sounds.
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Questions
Why will my layers not separate?
Almost always the chocolate is too thin. It has to be properly thick, the kind that sets to a pudding as it cools. Also check that you poured over the back of a spoon rather than straight in.
Am I supposed to stir it?
No. Drink it through the layers so that each mouthful takes cold cream, then coffee, then chocolate. Stirring it makes a perfectly nice mocha and destroys the point of the drink.
Can I use hot chocolate from a packet?
Only if it makes the thick European style. Cocoa stirred into milk is too thin and will merge with the coffee. Thickening a packet mix with a little cornflour works.
What size glass?
Small. Around 150 ml. The name means little glass, and the drink is rich enough that a mug of it would defeat most people.