Most vanilla lattes taste of vanilla and very little else, because the syrup is doing all the work. Make the syrup yourself, use a fraction of what a café would pour, and the vanilla sits behind the coffee rather than in front of it. The syrup takes ten minutes and keeps a month in the fridge.
What you need
- 18g of coffee, ground fine
- A 36g double espresso
- 200ml of milk
- 10ml of vanilla syrup
- A 250–300ml cup
For the syrup
- 200g of sugar
- 200g of water
- One vanilla pod, split and scraped
The method
- Warm the sugar and water until the sugar dissolves, take the pan off the heat, then add the pod and seeds and leave it to cool with the pod in. Strain into a clean bottle.
- Put 10ml of the syrup in the bottom of the cup.
- Pull the double shot onto it and stir once, so the syrup is dissolved before the milk arrives.
- Texture the milk to 60°C, a shade thicker than you would for a flat white.
- Pour steadily into the middle of the cup.
On the sweetness
Ten millilitres in a 250ml drink is about half what most cafés use. Start there. You can always add more, and if it needs more than 20ml then either the syrup is weak or the coffee is doing something unpleasant that sugar is being asked to hide.
If you have no pods
A good extract works. Use roughly half the volume, and stir it into the syrup once the syrup has cooled rather than while it is hot, or most of the aroma leaves with the steam. Avoid anything labelled vanilla flavouring — it tastes thin and it lingers oddly.
Which coffee
Vanilla wants something bright to answer it, or it just sits there. Lourdes brings citrus and a soft floral lift of its own, so the syrup has less work to do and the drink reads as bright rather than simply sweet.