Hello, I’m Greg Suekoff. I’m here at Caffe Pronto Coffee Roastery in Annapolis, Maryland. I’m here today to show you how to make the perfect latte.
We’re here on the production area of Caffé Pronto where we roast all the coffee. Today, we’re going to talk about what exactly is a café latte, extracting the perfect espresso, steaming milk and then we’re going to talk a little bit about the various designs you can make; heart patterns, rosette patterns and variations on those that we’ve created here ourselves. Before we go any farther, I’d like to show you some of the tools in the trade, the things we’ll be using to create the perfect latté.
So here we have both the tools and the ingredients necessary for making the perfect latte. First we have, these are called tampers. They are used to compress the fine ground coffee into the portafilter before extraction. There are few varieties of tampers. The main difference being the bottom, some of them are convex in the bottom versus some other styles which are flat. I prefer the flat. This is my tamper.
In addition to coffee tampers you also need pitchers to steam the milk in. You’re going to be steaming milk to about a 140 to 160º, and we find that stainless steel milk pitchers work the best. In addition to the tools of the trade, there’s also some key ingredients, obviously you’re going to need a fresh roasted coffee in order to make nice crema in your espresso which will produce a pretty design in the latte. You need to have fresh roasted coffee. Additionally, you need a high quality grinder that’s going to finely grind the coffee and prepare it for espresso extraction.
You’ll need an espresso machine that is plumbed properly and has the right pressure and temperature components to it. This is called a portafilter. This is the part of the machine that we’re going to put the coffee into, compact it, and then we’re going to put it into the machine and extract the espresso.
One thing to keep in mind when you’re making latte is there are few hot pieces, the steam wind produces steam that is very hot. You want to be careful from that and any water coming from the machine is also going to be very hot, you need to be careful.
Again my name is Greg Suekoff. I’ve been making lattes for about twelve years now. I’ve gotten to compete both nationally and internationally in latte art competition so I’m here to share my experience with you.
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