Cold brew coffee has grown in popularity, even though it can be a hard sell for some folks. Coffee enthusiasts complain about its lack of acidity and complexity, but a lot of people like the fact that the cooler brew temperature produces sweet and mellow coffee notes, with little to no bitterness. Part of the issue is that a lot of coffee geeks look at cold brew as an inferior method for making coffee: We’ve got all these other ways to make great coffee, the thinking goes, why pick one that takes all day to make a less complex drink? But if you take the cold brew process and substitute milk for water, with a couple of tweaks, you can create a unique drink—a smooth and rich coffee-flavored milk with faint notes of chocolate that’s perfect for making iced lattes with tons of flavor, straight from the fridge. The process is almost the same as for cold brew coffee: Coarsely grind the beans, combine the coffee with liquid, let the mixture steep for 16 to 24 hours, strain, and you’re done. The main deviation from cold brew is that this milk doesn’t contain a concentrated dose of coffee. After running through a bunch of trials using different ratios of milk to ground coffee, as well as comparing pressurized infusions with just letting the mixture sit in the fridge, I found that using 5 percent of the milk’s weight in coffee yielded a milk with a robust coffee flavor that could stand on its own even when diluted with a couple of ice cubes. No need to dilute with more water or fiddle with it in any way, as you would with cold brew coffee. To streamline the brewing process, I steep the coffee-and-milk mixture in a French press; that way, you can just push the plunger down and pour it off when you’re done. However, if you want a milk with absolutely no particulate matter, strain the milk through a Chemex lined with a reusable coffee filter. (A paper filter will decrease yield, take a lot longer, and affect the flavor of the drink, since the perforations are much finer and will sieve out some of the dairy fat.) You can also use this method to make coffee-infused milk that can be steamed and used in hot [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/drink-ratios espresso drinks]; dial the ratio of coffee down to 2 percent of the milk weight, steep, and strain it twice through a reusable filter to remove all coffee particulate matter that will otherwise turn the milk bitter during steaming. The lower amount of coffee ensures that the milk proteins won’t start to denature due to an excess of acid, even if you steep the milk for 24 hours, and it’ll [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/steaming-milk-for-espresso-drinks?context=espresso stretch and texture] beautifully.

Love it or hate it, the pumpkin spice latte is one of the most popular drinks during the fall. We wanted to make a better version of it by dialing up the amount of real pumpkin flavor. Not only that, we also wanted to make a real pumpkin latte. This drink has the sweetness and spice of the one made famous by that huge coffee chain, although the sweetness isn’t as outrageous and the warm spice mixture is better (we love the pumpkin spice mix from World Spice, but even a freshly made pumpkin spice mixture—a 3:2:1:1 ratio of ground cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and nutmeg—will be vastly superior). It’s also got the velvety microfoamed milk that defines a true latte. But what it doesn’t have is espresso; in the place of a shot of espresso, I use an equivalent amount of homemade pumpkin syrup, so the drink tastes entirely of pumpkin and pumpkin spice. Is it a latte if it doesn’t have espresso? That’s a good question, and the answer is … sure! After all, “latte” simply means milk in Italian, and anyway, the huge coffee chain calls their drink a “crème.” Half the names there are made up or meaningless anyway, so nothing really matters, we all die in the end, and this tastes amazing. (If you want to make a more “traditional” PSL with espresso and steamed milk, you can use our [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/how-to-make-a-latte latte recipe] and add in some of our [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/pumpkin-spice-syrup pumpkin spice syrup]. It, too, will taste amazing.) While this recipe is quite simple, getting here was a journey. I started out trying to figure out how to distill the essence of sugar pumpkins into a syrup that was sufficiently sweet for this application. So I toyed with the idea of breaking down some of the pumpkin’s starches with amylase and using a centrifuge to isolate a sugary syrup from the rest of the solid matter in the flesh. But after a number of trials, it turned out that the fastest, most efficient, and most reliable way to make a pumpkin syrup was to just peel and juice the pumpkin; cook it a little to brighten the color, letting the starch molecules swell and hydrate to thicken up the liquid; and then season it. Also, unlike the centrifuged syrup, this one has a consistency that’s closer to the slightly viscous texture of espresso.

Coffee ice cream—rich, creamy, with a robust coffee flavor and a little caffeine kick—is one of the best ice cream flavors out there. It’s also a really good way to use up leftover lattes. Leftover lattes? I don’t mean the dregs of lattes left around a coffee shop. I mean all the lattes you’ve made as you’ve [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/latte-art practiced and perfected making latte art like a pro barista]. Like anything worth doing well, making latte art takes practice—lots and lots of practice. And unless you’re drinking 10,000 practice lattes, which we don’t recommend, using them to make coffee ice cream is a delicious way to cut down on waste. Making a good ice cream comes down to making a good ice cream base. It needs to have the correct sugar-to-dairy ratio so that [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/ice-cream-geekery?context=ice-cream it freezes properly and forms small ice crystals] that contribute to a smooth and creamy mouthfeel. For this ice cream, I include egg yolks for richness and the custardy flavor they provide, but whenever you add egg yolks to an ice cream base, you need to temper them by bringing them up to at least [f 180]. You can do this in a pot or a [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/vanilla-bean-ice-cream sous vide water bath], but a quick and efficient way to bring the temperature of the base up to [f 180] is to just let it run in a blender on high speed for a few minutes. If you choose not to use eggs, you can forgo the tempering step and just blend the ice cream base together without running the motor. Once the ice cream base is blended, it needs to be chilled to [f 40] or below, before it can be churned. You can set the base in the refrigerator (make sure your refrigerator is set to below [f 40]), or you can use an ice bath to quickly chill it. Once chilled, churn the base up using an ice cream maker or liquid nitrogen/dry ice and a stand mixer, and then transfer it to a lidded container and place it in the freezer to harden further.

As its legions of fans will readily attest, cold-brew coffee—with its low acidity and rich body—is well worth the 24 hours it usually takes to make. Given the option, however, wouldn’t you rather make it in two? Enter the [link https://www.chefsteps.com/classes/whipping-siphons whipping siphon]. Yup, the kitchen tool you use for your favorite aerated pie topping also makes a flavor-packed coffee concentrate (not to mention [link /activities/it-s-so-fun-and-simple-to-garnish-your-cocktails-with-flavor-infused-foam foams], [link /activities/byrrhgroni-cocktail carbonated cocktails], [link /activities/hollandaise amazing hollandaise], and, like, so much more). Just pour water and coffee into the pressurized environment of the siphon, chill it, go watch two episodes of [link http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/ Black Mirror] or something, filter, and voilà: perfect cold brew. No more waiting until tomorrow for that smooth dose of caffeine-packed goodness—the future, as they say, is now.

Traditional cold-brew coffee is made with a slow drip method, where cool water seeps into the grounds for about 12 hours. Seems like a long time to wait for the best part of waking up, right? But there are definite perks to this method: it produces a less acidic and more concentrated batch of joe, and it will also keep in the fridge for up to two weeks. But with rapid-pressure infusion, you can make smooth, low-acid brew in a matter of just two hours. You need only a whipping siphon, a few N₂O charges, and a coffee filter.

Here’s a glimpse behind the scenes at ChefSteps: Last St. Patrick’s Day, we asked Hans, our resident bartender and musician, to come up with a sexy riff on an Irish coffee. Hans put together a gorgeous, rich cocktail made with Seattle-roasted coffee, Noah’s Mill whiskey, and Bénédictine whipped cream. With a nod to our penchant for party tricks, he lit the whiskey on fire, burning off a little bit of heat from the alcohol and imparting a mild smoky flavor to boot. By all accounts, the drink was badass—an easy-to-make, layered cocktail with hot coffee on the bottom, smoky booze in the middle, and silky whipped cream on the top. Because it veered pretty far from a traditional Irish coffee, we changed the name to the Bitter End (y’know, because if you’re going to the parade and then to the after-party and then to the after-after-party, you’re going to need some caffeine), wrote up a recipe, and published it on our blog. That was almost a year ago, and Hans is still ashamed: his bartender friends rake him over the coals for every ChefSteps cocktail that’s measured on a scale rather than in a jigger. And here’s the thing—we totally get it. Bartenders tend to think of cocktails in terms of ratios—two parts sweet gets brightened up with one part sour; three parts booze gets softened by one part sugar; two parts thin-and-watery gets thickened up with one part viscous. Cocktails are made up of ratios, and most bartenders have entrenched behaviors and techniques built around this simple fact. Trying to get booze enthusiasts to make cocktails by weight, we decided, may just be a losing battle. So this time around, we’re making it right. Introducing the new-and-improved Bitter End cocktail, complete with the Hans Twite Stamp of Approval. Now please, stop bullying our bartender. *Do you make your cocktails by weight or volume? Tell us in the comments below!*

Sweet and creamy, this vegan coffee pudding hits like a refreshing iced coffee on a summer day. When I developed my simple, egg-free chocolate custard, I noted that you could easily turn it into pudding if you messed up while unmolding it, transforming a potential disaster into something just as delicious to eat. The reason that works is because of the magic of low-acyl gellan gum, a [link https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/unlock-your-hydrocolloid-starter-pack powerful hydrocolloid] that will thicken any liquid to produce a gel that has a silky, creamy, and luscious texture with near-imperceptible effects on the flavor of the liquid. Instead of just letting you figure it out on your own, I tweaked the process and dialed in ingredient quantities to show you how to harness the full potential of gellan to make perfectly textured, stable puddings with undiluted flavor. Because it’s such a powerful gelling agent, you have to be a little careful about how much gellan you add to any liquid. A little goes a very long way, so you’re definitely going to want to use a jeweler’s scale—accurate to 1/10th of a gram—to measure out the quantity. And while you can take my egg-free chocolate custard and transform it into a pudding, you can’t take this pudding and make a sliceable custard. That’s because a gel that incorporates chocolate—and its high proportion of cocoa butter—will produce a firmer consistency. To underscore gellan’s ability to make puddings with bright, clean, and clear flavors, this recipe uses coconut oil, which also means the resulting pudding will have set to a softer state. Not great for sliceable custards, but ideal for a pudding. The recipe calls for brewed French press coffee, but any kind of coffee will work. Just keep in mind that there’s nothing to mask the flavor of the coffee in this recipe; better coffee means a better pudding.

Let’s get right down to it: This is a recipe for chocolate, except it’s made with coffee beans instead of cacao beans. So it’s chocolate, without the chocolate. It looks like chocolate, it acts like chocolate, but it ain’t chocolate. At least, not technically. Pure chocolate is made by combining ground cacao beans, cocoa butter, and liquid soy lecithin in a thingamajig called a conche (which, by the way, can often be purchased used at a steep discount) that continuously grinds and swirls the ingredients together until they soften into a **smooth**, **creamy liquid that looks like melted dark chocolate**. That liquid is then made into your favorite sweet treats—cast into individual chocolates, drizzled over granola bars, poured over peanuts to make chocolate turtles, combined with milk to make milk chocolate.... You get the idea. Our Dark Matter, [link http://blog.chefsteps.com/2015/02/coffee-class-contest-name-that-recipe/ aptly named by heroic ChefSteps community member Jon Low], simply replaces the cacao beans with coffee beans, then follows the exact same procedure. The result is a robustly flavored, velvety coffee paste that behaves just like raw chocolate. What to do with it, you ask? Pretty much anything you’d do with regular chocolate. Once you make the raw ingredient, the rest is up to you. NOTE: As you may have guessed, Dark Matter is loaded with caffeine. Yes, you can use decaffeinated coffee. But if you opt for the regular stuff, just consume conservatively. That is, unless you’re taking the bar exam tomorrow and haven’t even started studying. In that case, eat a lot of it right away, and bring some more to the library. Good luck.