Blog

How to Prepare Cappuccino at Home

Myth: cappuccino’s silky magic is beyond the grasp of home baristas. It’s just too delicate of a dance, best left to the cafe.

Truth: great cappuccino is a delight available to discerning coffee lovers, right in their own kitchens. It takes some practice with water, steam and foam, along with the right equipment on your counter-top. You’ll want an espresso machine with a built-in steaming wand. And of course, this coffee guide on hand as your foundation.

Fact: A cappuccino is an approximately 150 ml (5 oz) beverage, with 25 ml of espresso coffee and 85ml of fresh milk The foaming action creates the additional volume.

The Perfect Cappuccino Recipe & Instructions

• Pour cold milk into a metal steaming pitcher, about a third full
• Release steam from the steaming wand for two seconds to eliminate any residual water
• Dip the tip of the steaming wand into milk and start the jet. As the foam rises and the volume of milk increases, lower the pitcher, always keeping the tip submerged and tilted to create a vortex. Do not mix unnecessarily (i.e. let the natural circulating action do the work)
• Continue steaming until the milk reaches 65 degrees (check via probe-style kitchen thermometer) and its volume doubles
• Tap the base of the pitcher firmly on the countertop to compress the foam
• Prepare an espresso in a large cup (ideally, a cappuccino cup)
• Pour the foamed milk directly into the cup, first aiming for the center, then continuing in a circular motion out toward the rim
• Operate the steam one more time to eliminate any remaining milk residue

How To Get The Best Foam

Foam’s consistency depends on the milk’s fat content.
For the most velvety, rich cappuccino, use whole milk. You can substitute low-fat milk, at the sacrifice of some smoothness.
Foam produced from skim milk is light and meringue-like, quick to dissolve.

Breville ESP8XL Cafe Roma espresso maker is the best espresso machine for beginners that has a built-in steam wand and is priced fairly cheap. 

One of my favorite drinks can be found in Portland, Oregon at a long-lasting bar called Paddy’s. Paddy’s is a gorgeous older bar, with a back bar nearly forty feet wide and sixteen feet tall, replete with two of those rolling library ladders for the bartenders to get to the ultra-premium top shelf. This bar, on St. Patrick’s Day, is jammed beyond belief. The drink there I like is their version of a Spanish Coffee. It’s a showy exhibitionistpreparation, with flaming alcohol, rum and whipped cream.

There’s some argument in Portland that this drink has it’s roots at a venerable local restaurant,Huber’s. Here’s a video I found on Youtube of them making it at Huber’s.

Last night I decided to try remixing this recipe with Mocafe Azteca D’oro 1519 Spiced Ground Chocolate. Oh my lord. It was one of those clear chilly New England summer nights and this drink was a hit with my friends. Simply substitute the coffee in the drink with Mocafe Spiced Ground Chocolate hot chocolate.

If you entertain a lot at home, this drink is sure to be a crowd pleaser at your next party. By the way, I stood in for my Dad years ago, giving my sister away in marriage to one of those Paddy’s Bar ladder-jockey bartenders, in the back dining room. Talk about an Irish wedding!

Jeff from Mocafe

Solutions for Operators

A standard practice in the restaurant industry is to calculate the food cost of every item you sell. Knowing this cost allows you to a) purchase ingredients more wisely and b) maintain and train staff to standards. There is a time investment in making these calculations, but the reward is a "tighter ship", leading to greater profit opportunity and lessening of production costs.

So how do you calculate the production cost of your menu items? If you ballpark it in your head, it's likely to not be accurate. Let's get started in a demonstration. First, download the sample Food Cost Worksheet. Then you'll need tools to measure: a scale and volume measuring (cup/teaspoon) tools are necessary.

Click this link to open a Food Cost Worksheet Template you can download for your use.

Please notice there are formulas in some of the cells. Be careful to not edit those cells.

Let's fill this worksheet out for a bagel with plain cream cheese. The first thing to do is enter the date and the recipe name: "Bagel with Cream Cheese". We're not going to enter anything in the cells named "RecipeMultiplied" nor "Size" - we don't need these for this sample.

Next, let's enter the sell price for this item. I randomly chose $2.95. We don't need to enter anything in either of these two cells (there are auto-formulas in them): "Cost Per Portion" and "Cost %".

Now let's enter our ingredients. We type in Bagel (be as specific as you want - this is a text cell). Moving right, we enter the number 1 in the "Count" column. Moving right again, we enter the cost of that one bagel in the "AP$/unit" cell. Let's pause so I can explain these column heading in both the measures section and the costing section.

In the measures section, we have three columns marked "Weight", "Volume" and "Count". If the ingredient is measured by weight, enter it in that column (this is when you need a scale). If measured by volume, enter the volume amount in that column. The same goes for count.

In the costing section, we have the column marked "AP$/unit". "AP$/unit" stands for Price of Ingredient As Purchased, per unit of measure. In this example, the cost of one plain bagel is $0.75 each.

The right-most column is the subtotal for this ingredient. You'll need to enter a formula in here. The formula for the bagel in this example looks like this:

=sum(E10*F10)

E10 is the cell that contains the count of the ingredient. F10 is the ingredient cost. The multiply function is the star character *

Writing the formula in this column is pretty easy. You only need to choose which cell from the measure of the ingredient you want in the formula. It is going to be in either the Weight, Volume of Count cell of that row. Let's look at the next ingredient to demonstrate what I mean by this.

The next row down has the cream cheese ingredient. I've put in one ounce by weight and entered the cost per that weight measure (ounces). The formula I write in the subtotal column looks like this:

=sum(C11*F11)

Pretty simple, really. In the old days, they'd do this with a calculator and note paper. Once you get comfortable entering the subtotal formulas, it goes pretty quick. By the way, if you have multiple ingredients in the same measuring column, simple copy the formula from one row to the next.

So what happens now?

The worksheet automatically adds up all the subtotals at the bottom. It also calculates the food cost percentage. These are handy numbers for you to know. You now know exactly how much a menu item costs in raw materials. You also know how much of the menu selling price that cost is; in this example, 36.6 percent.

Got questions? Feel free to comment below and I'll answer.

Jeff from Mocafe

I came across this chocolate brownies recipe in one of many supermarket magazines diligently collected during my supermarket shopping trips. I’ve never baked chocolate brownies before so I was really looking forward to results anticipating nothing but pure success.
After all the recipe promises a lot. I followed instructions to the dot but the result was far from what I expected. The brownies where too “wet”, they were not even baked properly in the middle despite the fact that I extend the baking time for another few minutes (you know… just in case). Yep, that’s not what I wanted to say the least!

I decided to make some changes. I swapped vegetable oil for butter, reduced the amount of cocoa and plain yogurt, added raspberries and vanilla to improve the taste. I modified baking time a little and after a few attempts I am really happy with the result but all this just shows how careful you have to be with recipes you get from books and magazines.

These yummy chocolate brownies have dry crust, they are not too sweet, have a moist texture, rich cocoa taste and wonderfully refreshing taste of raspberries. Of course, we tested them with coffee too but there is no
ultimate winner I guess. Cappuccino and espresso pair chocolate brownies really well but they would never be my “first” choice. Turkish coffee and cafe latte are much better if you ask me. Turkish coffee just
brilliantly teams with chocolate while cafe latte brings out milkshake like flavor from raspberries. Fantastic, I’m telling you!