How does a savory cheese latte fit into coffee at home with milk?

A salted cheese latte works by treating cheese as a topping rather than a stirred-in ingredient. A cream cheese or mascarpone base, lightly salted and slightly sweetened, is whipped until spreadable and spooned over a standard latte, so the espresso and steamed milk underneath stay balanced while the cheese adds body and a savory edge.

Build the drink on a normal latte ratio, roughly one part espresso to three or four parts steamed milk, then crown it with the cheese layer. Because cheese carries fat and salt, it echoes the espresso's sweet aftertaste and makes the cup taste fuller. Serve it hot and stir before drinking so the layers combine.

In the cold of winter, nothing is more on people's minds than a steaming cup of a specialty latte. After chocolate mocha, Spanish condensed milk latte, and apple cinnamon latte have each had their turn in the spotlight, coffee lovers have turned their eyes to an ingredient that seems completely unrelated—cheese. Cheese's rich, creamy aroma and distinctive savory saltiness happen to fill the gap that lattes have in terms of body and complexity. This article will focus on the salted cheese latte, first discussing why cheese is suited for coffee, then explaining how to choose ingredients, and finally providing complete steps and Front Street Coffee's bean recommendations, so you can recreate this sweet-and-savory, multi-layered cheese specialty drink at home.

On such bone-chilling days, many people probably feel just like Front Street Coffee—wanting nothing more than to hold a cup of hot coffee, sit in the sunlight, and sip it slowly. Just thinking about it is comfortable enough.

When it comes to the most popular hot coffee in winter, one naturally can't avoid those sweet, flavor-packed specialty lattes—the richly chocolatey mocha, the Spanish latte with condensed milk, and the apple cinnamon latte that Front Street Coffee recreated before... each one fragrant and sweet. But in recent years people have been getting more and more adventurous, throwing all kinds of seemingly unrelated ingredients into coffee—like this salted cheese latte that Front Street Coffee is going to make today.

What's the point of putting cheese in a latte?

A proper latte is all about espresso and milk bringing out the best in each other: the coffee's richness and the milk's smooth sweetness achieve balance, while the milk's support allows the espresso to release its own distinct flavors, leaving a lingering coffee aftertaste in the mouth long after swallowing.

Cheese itself has a substantial texture and creamy aroma. On one hand, it can elevate the coffee's richness; on the other, it resonates with the espresso's sweet aftertaste. And its distinctive savory saltiness adds an extra layer of variation to the whole latte, making the coffee feel more three-dimensional on the palate.

Ingredient Preparation

If you type "cheese" into an e-commerce platform, you'll find quite a lot of options, but we only need to consider the matter of melting it into milk coffee. Therefore, Front Street Coffee suggests using cheese slices directly, so it melts into the latte more quickly.

Additionally, to highlight cheese's "savory" character, you can add a tiny bit of sea salt. However, since cheese slices themselves are slightly salty, Front Street Coffee will add condensed milk to the milk to balance the cheese's saltiness.

As for the coffee base, Front Street Coffee has noticed three common approaches: freeze-dried powder, espresso, and moka pot coffee. Among the three, an espresso machine offers the best extraction conditions and the most adjustable parameters, producing espresso with fuller aroma and higher body; a moka pot has lower pressure, so the espresso quality is a notch lower; freeze-dried powder is limited by its raw materials and pre-processing, so its aroma and taste can't match the first two.

For making a salted cheese latte, Front Street Coffee recommends medium-dark roasted beans. Here we've chosen Front Street Coffee's Specialty Espresso Blend. This blend combines two major producing regions, Brazil and Colombia. The medium-dark roast preserves the Brazilian beans' balanced mouthfeel and roasted nut notes while fully bringing out the Colombian beans' dark chocolate aroma. Once extracted into espresso and meeting the milk, the original rich bitterness quickly transforms into a milk-chocolate-like silkiness.

Making the Salted Cheese Latte

Ingredients: cheese slice, espresso, condensed milk, fresh milk, sea salt

Step one: Take one cheese slice, tear or cut it open, and put half of it into the espresso cup (you can sprinkle a tiny bit of sea salt or table salt);

Step two: Add 240g fresh milk and 10g condensed milk to the milk pitcher;

Step three: Weigh out 20g of Front Street Coffee's Specialty Espresso Blend and extract 40g in 28 seconds;

Step four: While extracting, steam the milk, keeping the foam thickness at about 0.5cm and the temperature at 55°C;

Step five: As soon as possible, stir the coffee liquid and cheese slice together evenly. Be sure to stir several rounds so the cheese completely melts. Then pour the steamed hot milk into the coffee to combine, and finish with a simple latte art pattern.

You can also skip the latte art: First, combine until the cup is eight-tenths full, use a spoon to scoop out the white milk foam and gently lay it on the surface of the latte, then pour all the remaining milk in from the center point.

A cup of salted cheese latte like this tastes very rich. The cheese's savory saltiness, the hot milk's clean sweetness, and the caramel and dark-chocolate-like mellow sweetness brought by Front Street Coffee's Specialty Espresso Blend interweave in the mouth into a distinctly different taste experience.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.