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One of the great privileges of being a magazine writer is that you get invited to some fascinating places and meet some fascinating people.  For this Coffee House feature, we were invited to Italy for a big food festival where Lavazza were going to be appearing - and not just that, holding a conference with Ferran Adria.   Now, not being a foodie, I didn't have a clue who Ferran Adria was, until every other journalist in the place started swooning over the guy who runs the best restaurant in the world (I believe El Bulli has received the title four times!).   I was rather more interested in meeting the Lavazza guys to hear about their experiments, and to my great joy got to sit down with Giuseppe Lavazza, who gave me an entertaining run-through of their work.

Ferran Adria tells of his experiments with coffee and food - Giuseppe Lavazza listens.

Some of the most off-the-wall experiments with coffee have been collected together in a fascinating new book. It comes from Lavazza, the brand that styles itself ‘Italy’s favourite coffee’, and ‘Dieci Anni di Coffee Design’  (ten years of coffee design) tells in pictures the story of some very strange  experiments with coffee, working with the chef who runs the best restaurant in the world.

That restaurant is El Bulli, on the Spanish Costa Brava, and it is the only place to hold the title of ‘the best restaurant in the world’, four times.  And chef Ferran Adria is the man who invented the Lavazza’s solid espresso foam.

Adria is of largely the same school as the UK’s Heston Blumenthal (and the two have worked together) in that he does not stick to accepted ideas of ‘normal’ foods. Coffee House was lucky to sit in on a tasting of this, and his other ideas in Turin, but we couldn’t help asking Giuseppe Lavazza whether his work is relevant to the modern coffee trade.

“The way that we Italians taste food is the way of looking for a special pleasure,” he told us. “Coffee is more than just a beverage to us – we Italians seek to achieve an extraordinary pleasure from our coffee.  And so, we have been interested in making more opportunities for the barista to give fantasy and imagination in the cup.

“We have experimented with many different ways of serving coffee – for the evening, we have transformed the idea that espresso is just a ‘kick’ with our Sorbetto Espresso”  (somewhere between a coffee smoothie and a drinkable ice-cream).

The Lavazza research centre had first set out to work on flavours, and  created lemon and orange cappuccinos, with some success. Being given the remit to experiment further, the research team responded.

In 2003, their entry for a food design contest was an edible cup, made by biscuit crumbs moulded to a cup shape, with the inside glazed by a mixture of sugar and gum Arabic. and the idea was to drink the espresso and then eat the cup.  It won, but never went into production.

In 2005, the theme for the Lavazza calendar was to be ‘circus’, so the team created a coffee candy floss. Good coffee and sugar simply jammed the candy-floss machine, but finely-ground freeze-dried coffee worked.

By this time, the Lavazza research team was open to trying just about any idea. The Cappuccino Lio, the biscuit without flour or eggs that melted on the tongue, was made by freeze-drying a cappuccino foam; a different version had a firm outer layer and a cream inner, a kind of cappuccino meringue.

Challenged to make a chocolate filled with coffee, the Lavazza team froze  coffee into a little cube. After the cube was coated with chocolate, it melted to make a liquid inner.

A major breakthrough was the foam, which developed from the early work on flavours.  First, Ferran Adria and the Lavazza team tried to infuse flavours from citrus peels and milk, and when it curdled, they ended up with flavoured cheese. But further work with skimmed milk and sugar, at a very low temperature, produced a light, low-fat sauce, and then a cream – after a year’s work, Ferran Adria reached the right thickness for a cappuccino in foam form.

This turned into two products – Tandem, in which the foam and liquid espresso sit side by side in a special cup divided down the middle, and Espesso, which is the solid cappuccino in a cup on its own. (The name is a play on words between ‘espresso’ and ‘spesso’, the Italian word for ‘thick’.)

A collectors’ item has arrived with the foam –  a special spoon, with a hole in it. One story goes that Ferran Adria created it so that he could eat cereal without drinking the milk, and Giuseppe Lavazza is happy to launch into a straight-faced explanation of why foam should travel through a spoon when he breaks off, grins, and concedes: “Actually, it is a joke. Creative cuisine should make you smile!”

The most bizarre of the recent new ideas is the ‘sphere’, or ‘hot coffee egg’. It is a very curious item, neither solid nor liquid nor jelly, and is served on a spoon. Most consumers think twice, because it’s like an oyster - you can either do it or you can’t.

The general idea is that espresso coffee is treated with a commercially-available alginate normally used for beer, and calcium chloride. The result is an outer layer which forms around the coffee. Later, Lavazza found that far smaller ‘eggs’, served with whipped cream, produced a coffee ‘caviar’ canape.

The Lavazza laboratory took the idea a little further - the big regional drink in Turin is the Bicerin, a layered drink of coffee, chocolate and cream. For the Lavazza bicerin, the laboratory served the coffee egg in a nest of cream, with a covering of chocolate sauce.

Some of these ideas will reach the market, whether in coffee houses or in restaurants.  In Lavazza’s own historic side-street café in Turin, Café 10 San Tomasso, the Espesso is two Euros fifty.

But will they be accepted elsewhere?

“An experimental approach is not always simply to create products you can trade in,” Giuseppe Lavazza told Coffee House. “And the first reaction is always – ‘what’s this?’  So while we must always try to draw the consumer’s attention to a different espresso experience, we have learned that we must  not lose the starting point, and we have to keep the base of Italian espresso in whatever we do. So, we are on a new voyage, but not a completely free exercise.”

How important is Lavazza’s theme of ‘Italianity’ in other countries? Do the British really want an Italian theme? And if Lavazza UK continues to use the marketing line of ‘Italy’s favourite coffee’, how close is the brand to become Britain’s favourite coffee?

"Quite close, really!" he answered. "In London, we are very well positioned as a roast-and-ground coffee brand. We are also very popular in southern Ireland.

"I think the British are very interested in the Italian style and the Italian way of doing things – I sometimes think there are more English people in Tuscany these days than Italians. Italy is an easy-going, sensual country, and the English like that.

“However, we have learned that we must respect limits, and we must not lose the starting point, and that we have to keep the base of Italian espresso in whatever we do.

“So, while we are on a new voyage, and have discovered a new language in coffee… we still speak it with an Italian accent”

Giuseppe Lavazza demonstrates the 'solid coffee'... or, in its

conventional form (below) is the Espesso.  You eat

it with a spoon

One of the early

experiments was a s

ide-by-side espresso

and coffee foam (below)

The edible coffee cup (below) was one of the first experiments...

... closely followed by  the espresso biscuit.

Later, the experiments with the 'sphere' or 'hot coffee egg', led to a solid version of Turin's traditional coffee drink, the Bicerin.