Video: How to Make a Cafe Latte with Espresso

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Learn from an expert how to make a cafe latte at home in this free drink recipe video on making your own espresso drinks.

Comments

orwa Aug 02, 2008
That was a rather sad final episode of the "coffee shop with the roastery" series, since over-roasting the beans destroyed all the components that the espresso brewing method is distinguished by being capable of extracting. The end of the extraction above wasn't pale, but was plain water, and the poured shots lacked any body (i.e. was very watery). It's a known issue when people in some area who are not accustomed to espresso demand an espresso that resembles another coffee drink (e.g. drip), but in my humble opinion, this is a LARGE waste in terms of fine espresso equipment, and in terms of coffee bean flavours.

Video Transcript

Now we're going to learn how to make a traditional cafe latte. Cafe latte is basically an espresso shot with a lot of steamed milk, so the first thing you want to do is pull our shot. Since I'm making a small latte, I'm actually just going to use a single shot. Next we should steam our milk. Now because we're making a latte, we don't want the milk to expand too much. We want to make sure that we have enough milk for the drink. We want to keep the milk very liquidy, and to achieve that we don't want to let too much air into the pitcher, into the milk. There should always be a swirl going on in your milk. The moment it starts getting hot on your hands, you want to stop. The ideal temperature should be from 140 to 160 Fahrenheit. You can use a thermometer if you want to, but I like to go by feel. Now when it comes to pouring, if you want to make a latte art, you have to make sure you don't pour too fast. There you go. That's a beautiful cafe latte.