Do you love places like Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, or the local coffee joint down the street because they’re convenient? Fast? Because they offer a quick and easy way to boost your energy?
Maybe. But our bet is you go to these places mostly because you know that when you order your favorite double shot peppermint latte or frozen white chocolate mocha, it’s going to taste like the one you had there yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and the day before that…
We humans are creatures of habit, and we like things the way we like them with little, preferably no, variations. Chain and fast food restaurants cash in on this human need by serving up dishes and drinks you can count on to taste the same, whenever and wherever you buy them.
The Main Difference between Home Coffee and Stores
The frozen mocha frappé you order at the McDonald’s drive-through window in suburban Boston will taste exactly like the frozen mocha frappé you buy the next week at a McDonald’s in downtown San Francisco, unless the employee making them has made a mistake. Product consistency is a huge deal for these businesses, and companies spend serious money ensuring consumers get exactly what they expect.
But for the home cook, this can be a challenge. You’ve probably had the same experience we’ve had in our own kitchens: You make this big pot of soup with stuff you pulled out of your produce drawer or follow a recipe from a magazine, making a few changes here and there, and amazingly, everyone at the table loves what you’ve served.
So, the next week you make the same dish again, trying to remember what veggies you threw into the broth, wondering if you used hot sauce or red pepper flakes to add some heat, or trying to recall how long, exactly, you cooked the onions. When you serve dinner this time, though, it’s just “meh”. The magic is gone, and despite giving the recipe a go a few more times, you never seem to capture the perfection of that first experience.
1. Be consistent.
We’re here to tell you that with a little effort and persistence, you can learn to make a fantastic cup of coffee or your favorite coffee drink that tastes exactly the way you want it, without fail, day after day after day. All you have to do is follow the same rules and procedures Starbucks, McDonalds, Dunkin’ Donuts, or your favorite local coffee bar follows. You can use these procedures when experimenting with your own recipes, or when tinkering with a pre-written recipe to make it to your taste.
This may seem like a whole lot of work, but we assume you’re reading this not only to save money, but to keep your tastebuds satisfied while you save—and these steps will help get you there. Here’s what you do:
2. Treat the coffee-making area of your kitchen like a science lab.
Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Tim Hortons, the Coffee Connection, and more all have corporate test kitchens where they develop and test not only varieties of coffees, but flavor profiles—how does white chocolate mesh with coconut? Anise in coffee? Let’s test bacon and caramel!—and how they can be used to develop specialty drinks, which they’ll test until they’ve got a winner.
Everything they do in these kitchens is measured, analyzed, and recorded, and the more you can do that in your own kitchen, especially when you’re trying to replicate a favorite coffee drink at home, the easier time you’ll have of getting it just right. You don’t need a lot of equipment or a multi-million dollar budget. You can get by with the following:
Equipment
A digital scale that measures in grams as well as ounces, to weigh your ingredients. You can buy a lab-grade scale for as little as $25 and it’s a tool well worth its weight. (Bad pun, we know.) Weights are more precise than volume measurements; you can weigh the amount of ground beans you use in your moka pot or the exact amount of caramel to drizzle on your foam.
Pyrex measuring cups with volume markings. Again, a digital scale is more precise, but especially for liquids, glass measuring cups do the job. They come in a variety of sizes; the 1-cup size should suffice for most recipes.
A candy thermometer. For making caramel, especially, but it can also be used for measuring the temperature of your coffee if need be.
A place to record your results. This may be your most important tool. Whether you use a notebook and pen or the notes feature on your smartphone, you’ll need a place where you can store the data you collect from your experimentations. You simply cannot trust your memory.
That’s it! With these simple and inexpensive tools, you’ll be all set to create the perfect coffee drink on the cheap.
3. Record everything.
When my friend Diana is developing a recipe, she writes down the name of the ingredients she used—including a brand name if necessary—how much she used by weight or volume, what setting she used on the stove, how long it took to cook, any tricks she discovers as she’s cooking, and what her or her testers’ reactions were to the final product (like “too sweet!” or “vanilla flavor perfect”).
It’s rare that she hits upon the perfect combination of ingredients the first time out. For example, her first try at making a caramel macchiato recipe came out too sweet, so she cut the vanilla syrup in half. She also noticed that the foam wasn’t supporting the caramel she was drizzling across it so the caramel was sinking to the bottom of the cup, sweetening the drink even more. All of this was noted and corrected with further testing.
4. Observe how the pros make your drinks.
When Diana wanted to save more money by making her own caramel macchiatos at home, she not only watched the baristas make her drink, she asked questions: What syrup are you putting in there? Why do you steam the milk? How many shots do you put in a venti size? All this data was collected and recorded in her notes. Likewise, when she started spending too much money on soy chai lattes, she took note that Starbucks used Tazo-brand chai and vanilla-flavored sweetened soy milk, both of which she discovered were available at local supermarkets.
5. Note brands and varieties.
You may not notice any difference between a national brand of sugar and a store-brand, but that won’t be true for coffee. Some brands, no matter what you do, will give you a flavor profile that doesn’t sit well with your palate—it’ll be too acid, for example, or taste burned no matter what you do with it—while a competing brand gives you more nuance and smoothness. Be sure to mention this in your notes.
Also, keep an eye on ingredients like milk. For example, when making steamed milk in the microwave, you’ll achieve a better result with low-fat or nonfat milk. However, you may discover you prefer full-fat milk or cream as an additive to straight black coffee instead of skim or low-fat milks. Another fact to add to your notes!
6. Train like a barista.
The barista at the local café may be making your drink without a recipe or measuring cups or scales; in fact, he may make making your drink look like performance art. He’s not exceptionally gifted in this respect. He has made it 10 billion times before. So, he knows that when the bubbles in the milk he’s steaming have a certain sound, it’s ready, and he can squeeze 15 grams of caramel across your drink in a perfect checkerboard pattern while flirting with you, you sexy beast. You have to follow the rules for a while, and then one day, you’ll wake up and discover you made your favorite coffee drink at 5 a.m. with only four hours of sleep just by eyeballing your measurements.
7. Have fun and experiment.
Go off-piste. Try new flavor combinations. Play with your ingredients and equipment and remember: Even failures with coffee drinks are usually drinkable. Diana has done things like put sugar and vanilla beans in her food processor to create stronger-flavored vanilla sugar (results: not good) and used her milk frother to blend hot espresso with ice cold milk and coconut sugar (results: yummy!).
8. Have patience.
Accept that getting a drink the way you want it may take some time. As we intimated above, it can take Diana dozens of tries to get a recipe to where she wants it. On the plus side, it’s not like the “failures” are completely undrinkable. When Diana was testing for this article, she drank so many delicious “failures” she wondered if she’d put her body into the early stages of adrenal fatigue.