Nicholas Gavin is the Culinary Creative Director of ChefSteps, where he develops recipes and is responsible for making all the food look beautiful. Nick has worked at ChefSteps for over a decade; he and ChefSteps co-founder Grant Crilly worked together at Modernist Cuisine. Nick has worked in professional kitchens both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.

Nicholas Gavin

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 <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/drink-ratios">espresso drinks</a>; 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 <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/steaming-milk-for-espresso-drinks?context=espresso">stretch and texture</a> beautifully.

Milk Brew Coffee