How to Make Cappuccino At Home?

Cappuccino

I will show you how to make cappuccino at home without using an espresso machine. Here is the thing if you want to drink the perfect cappuccino or flat white, pick a cafe from our website and let the professional barista make it for you that's what we do 99% of the time  But sometimes, you want to experiment. Rather than saying no to all milk options, or building the espresso setup at home, let's figure out what we can do instead with the equipment we already have. So, that's what this blog is about. The truth is that you can't brew espresso without an espresso machine. However, since we will mix coffee with milk, we don't need all the properties of a real espresso to achieve a good-tasting cappuccino at home.

Let's start with choosing the right coffee. As always, you want to use freshly roasted coffee but, this time, you might look even to the espresso roast category because you will dilute the coffee with milk, you want to pick coffee with a higher body that you can taste through the milk. Today, we will use Colombian coffee roasted by Doubleshot in Prague. It's from Finch Buenavista owned by Carlos Imbachi. It's a sweet coffee described as like plums, sugarcane, and lemongrass.

Cappuccino 

The next question is how to brew espresso-strength coffee?. 

Think about coffee strength as a percentage of coffee in the total brew. It's much higher for espresso, somewhere between seven and 12 percent for filter-style coffee, which is typically between 1.2 and 1.8 percent in the espresso machine you achieve higher strength by applying high pressure to extract coffee quickly and by brew ratio that is typically between one to two and one to three coffee to water. To achieve espresso strength without an espresso machine, we need to adjust the brew ratio and increase the extraction by adjusting grain size adding agitation, increasing the water temperature, or extending the extraction time. Eventually, all of it combined. For this blog video, though, we decided to use the brewing method that most people have at home already. And that's the French press. We get this one from Bodum and it's from a legendary Chambord series.

Here is our recipe:

We use 30 grams of coffee. We grind it fine. That's about 16 clicks on Comandante. (coffee grinding)

Add 100 milliliters of 98 degrees Celsius water.

Stir it for 20 to 30 seconds.

And then let it steep until four minutes, 30 seconds. (timer ticking)

Then we put the plunger down and pour coffee into the cup.

We get 30 to 35 grams of coffee.

The next thing is milk.

Let's face it, there is more milk in cappuccino than in coffee. We should be as careful in choosing and preparing milk as we are with coffee. What we want is fresh, full-fat milk that is delicious on its own. We got one from a local farm of the Niemetz family. Now, we need to heat milk to a temperature between 60 and 70 degrees Celsius. For our cup, we use 150 milliliters of milk that'll be heated in the microwave oven for about 40 seconds. If you go over 68 or 70, (bell dings) it negatively influences the taste, it's more complicated to create the microform, and it's too hot to drink it straight away.

The last step before mixing it with coffee

Frothing the milk. We'll use Bodum Chambord milk frother to do the magic but you can use also use a regular, small French press or I even try a shaker or kitchen mixer to create the desired structure of the milk. The goal is to transfer part of the milk to the microform. It took us a while to figure out the right way to froth the milk and our conclusion, our method, was to actually start with three to five presses that go from the top and that introduce more air to milk and stretch it a little bit and then continue with 15 to 20 presses where you don't go over the top. So you stay inside and, that way, we have really nice milk for our cappuccino.

Now, it's time to put both ingredients together.

You can pour directly from the Bodum milk frother but, if you want more control over pouring, and even think of learning or practicing latte art, you should consider getting the pitcher. I have to admit that I really suck at latte art and, since I wanted to tell you in this blog, what is possible with simple tools to what kind of cappuccino and latte art you can do, that pouring happens in two stages. 

 Cappuccino

In the first stage, you pour more milk and mix it carefully with coffee and in the second stage, you pour more microfoam into the cup and eventually draw latte art.

                                                        I hope you like this recipe