Espresso Class

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

About 200 g (3/4 cup) pumpkin syrup (enough for 5 lattes)

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 <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/how-to-make-a-latte">latte recipe</a> and add in some of our <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/pumpkin-spice-syrup">pumpkin spice syrup</a>. 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.

Real Pumpkin Spice Latte