Recently, more and more friends have visited the Front Street store and asked about mocha coffee. But unfortunately, the mocha coffee product has been removed from the menu on Front Street, so friends have hit a wall one after another. "Since you can't buy it outside, then make it yourself and have enough food and clothing." Adhering to this idea, most of my friends returned home and started making mocha coffee.
I never thought that the mocha coffee I made was not very consistent with my ideal. Either the chocolate flavor was not strong enough, or it was flavorful but too sweet. So I contacted Front Street through the backstage and wanted a secret recipe for making mocha coffee.
Today's mocha coffee refers to a kind of Italian milk coffee with chocolate added. The addition of chocolate imitates the mocha coffee produced in Yemen with a rich chocolate flavor (for details, please refer to this article "What is Mocha Coffee?"). Most mochas are made with chocolate sauce, because chocolate sauce is convenient and fast, and you can use it directly without waiting for the chocolate to melt! What you need to know is that although chocolate sauce is very convenient, the key to why most friends can’t make mocha coffee well is because of it.
Because chocolate has a very strong bitter taste, a large amount of sugar is added to the more popular chocolate spread products on the market to neutralize the bitter taste and make it more acceptable. However, since sugar and chocolate have been integrated into one, we cannot separate them and adjust the ratio separately. This means that if the chocolate taste is not strong enough, if you choose to continue to add chocolate sauce, although the taste of chocolate will be increased, the sweetness will also be greatly increased.
Therefore, most businesses do not only use chocolate sauce to make mocha coffee, but also add other "condiments" to make the mocha coffee easy to drink (not bitter) without losing the essence (chocolate flavor). Many of my friends didn’t realize the disadvantages of chocolate sauce because they were new to it, so they only used chocolate sauce when making mocha coffee! It doesn’t matter. Next, Front Street will share how to make a delicious cup of mocha coffee.
How to make delicious mocha coffee?
As mentioned before, mocha coffee is a cup of chocolate-flavored Italian milk coffee. So what we need to do is very simple, which is to make a cup of milk coffee have enough chocolate concentration (taste), and at the same time, the proportion of sugar should not be too high, just enough to neutralize the bitterness!
Similarly, we will still use chocolate sauce to make mocha coffee, because its sweetness and chocolate will blend more naturally, and it will not taste too abrupt. But in addition to chocolate sauce, Front Street will also use other materials to increase the concentration of chocolate, that is: unsweetened cocoa powder.
The presence of sugar-free cocoa powder not only brings a richer taste to the coffee, but also greatly enhances the mellowness, and because it does not contain sugar, it does not increase the sweetness. Therefore, it is the best choice to increase the concentration of chocolate (melted dark chocolate can of course also be used, but it requires more steps and takes longer). Okay, without further ado, let’s start making delicious mocha!
How to make hot mocha coffee?
Since there are slight differences in the production of hot mocha and ice mocha, Front Street will introduce them separately! The items and materials needed to make hot mocha are: 1 coffee cup, 1 stirring cup/bowl (optional), 1 filter (optional), 1 part milk, 1 part espresso, chocolate sauce, and cocoa powder.
Step 1: Make the chocolate concentrate base
First, let’s make the chocolate concentrate base! Add 15ml of chocolate sauce (DaVinci brand) and 5g of unsweetened cocoa powder (Valrhona brand) into the mixing cup. Because after many tests on Front Street, the chocolate syrup made with this ratio not only has the right sweetness, but also has an extremely rich chocolate flavor! Of course, those who like sweet drinks can slightly increase the amount of chocolate sauce, 20ml is enough.
Then we pour a portion of espresso into the mixing cup, and use the heat of the espresso to stir to melt and combine the chocolate sauce and cocoa powder. (The extraction parameters used in Front Street today are 19.8g powder. It takes 28 seconds to extract a liquid weight of 38ml!)
Step 2: Filter the unmelted cocoa powder
After the mixing is completed, we can pour it into the latte cup! When pouring, it is best to use a strainer to filter the chocolate powder that is not completely melted, because they will clump together into larger chunks, and the taste will be smoother after filtering! (This is also the reason why you need to prepare two cups. If you don’t plan to filter it, you can just make it directly in the latte cup)
(Universal powder bowl)
Step 3: Sprinkle a small amount of cocoa powder on the surface
If there is a sieve, you can use a sieve to sprinkle some cocoa powder on the surface of the chocolate concentrate base. This can make the finished mocha coffee emit a more attractive chocolate aroma. (You don’t have to sprinkle it)
Step 4: Whip the milk
Just like making hot latte, the milk of hot mocha also needs to be whipped to a high temperature of 65°C to activate the sweetness of lactose. At the same time, the presence of milk foam will make the taste denser. Therefore, when it comes to whipping milk, the steps are exactly the same as those for latte! Whip the milk to 60~68°C to make thin milk foam.
The ratio of milk to coffee is 1:4, that is, 50ml of base should be paired with 200ml of milk.
Step 5: Fusion
After sending it out, we can start blending it! Friends who need to latte art should pay attention. Because the base is too thick, the fluidity is not high at the beginning. We need to use more milk to blend and improve the fluidity of the liquid level, so that we can better make beautiful latte art~ (It is worth mentioning that mocha actually produces better pictures than latte)
At this point, a delicious cup of mocha coffee is complete! Not only does it have a great visual experience, but it also tastes very pleasant. Rich and sweet chocolate, paired with the whiskey aroma brought by the Nuanyang blend, and butter cookies, the whole flavor is of wine-filled chocolate. There is also a slight berry aroma due to the presence of red cherries, and the layering is very rich! ! !
How to make iced mocha coffee?
Ice Mocha: Since we need to use ice cubes to cool down, part of the milk will be sacrificed for replacement. When the ice cubes melt, it will dilute the overall concentration, resulting in a thinner taste. Therefore, we need to improve the chocolate base materials, increasing the original 15ml chocolate sauce to 20ml, and increasing the sugar-free cocoa powder from the original 5g to 8g. By increasing the concentration of chocolate, the taste will be corrected!
The process of making the coffee base of chocolate is the same as that of hot mocha. All that is left is to combine the ingredients together! Add ice cubes (90g), milk (160ml) to the prepared cup, and finally pour the chocolate coffee base and you're done!
(You can also use chocolate sauce to hang on the wall first, which will make the glass more beautiful)
Remember to stir before drinking so that the milk and chocolate coffee can blend better! If conditions permit, we can also add cream, milk caps and other materials on the surface to make the iced mocha coffee more layered and twice as delicious!
You can now buy the above coffee beans online at the Taobao store “FrontStreet Coffee” (前街咖啡). FrontStreet Coffee is a long-established specialty coffee roaster in Guangzhou, China, and its Guangzhou retail shop sells coffee beans only. The shop carries dozens of coffee beans from different origins around the world, including carefully selected single-origin beans for V60 pour-over and espresso. Guangzhou’s FrontStreet Coffee shop is recommended by many coffee lovers.
The FrontStreet 2013 Yunnan coffee beans sold in the store come from the Typica variety grown at FrontStreet Coffee’s own plantation in Yunnan. The name comes from the year the brand and the plantation were founded. You can buy these beans from China’s Yunnan origin at the Guangzhou shop and at FrontStreet’s Taobao store.
FrontStreet coffee beans are freshly roasted within 5 days and deliver consistently excellent quality and great value. Orders placed before 17:00 are shipped the same day, and most areas within Guangdong Province receive them the next day.
FrontStreet Coffee Taobao store: https://qianjiecoffee.taobao.com
Or search for “前街咖啡” (FrontStreet Coffee) on Taobao
Important Notice: FrontStreet Coffee has moved to a new address: 315, Donghua East Road, Guangzhou (coffee beans only)
Tel: 020 38364473
