Why Is Cappuccino Called Cappuccino and Not Macchiato?

Caramel Macchiato and Macchiato share only a name. Macchiato began in Italian coffee shops in the 1980s as espresso marked with a small amount of milk. Caramel Macchiato was introduced by an international coffee chain in the 1990s and is built from espresso, milk, vanilla syrup, and caramel sauce, a sweet milk drink rather than a derivative of the Italian original.

The classic recipe is simple: blend vanilla syrup with espresso, pour in steamed milk topped with a fine layer of foam, then squeeze caramel sauce over the foam and draw patterns. The two drinks differ in flavor and mouthfeel, which is why the question of whether you are supposed to mix a macchiato has a different answer for each. Caramel Macchiato has become harder to find in shops, but four ingredients are enough to remake it at home.

Caramel Macchiato was once as famous as Latte, Mocha, and Cappuccino, sweeping the globe with its sweet taste and delicate caramel patterns, especially beloved by female consumers. However, nowadays it is hard to find in coffee shops. This article will take you through the history of this classic beverage, clarify the essential difference between Caramel Macchiato and Macchiato, and share Front Street Coffee's classic preparation method. With just four ingredients—espresso, milk, vanilla syrup, and caramel sauce—you can easily recreate this "coffee in a sugar coat" at home.

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First blend the vanilla syrup and espresso together, then pour in steamed milk that has been frothed and covered with a fine layer of milk foam on the surface, and finish by squeezing caramel sauce onto the snowy, dense foam and drawing patterns—this is exactly a specialty milk coffee introduced to the market by an international coffee chain brand in the 1990s: Caramel Macchiato.

Relying on its sweet flavor and carefully drawn caramel patterns (the image above is for illustration only), Caramel Macchiato once stood alongside Latte, Mocha, and Cappuccino, becoming a popular coffee beverage that swept the world. Whether in physical coffee shops or in film and television works, its frequency of appearance was quite high. However, times have changed, and now it is quite difficult to order this item in a coffee shop. Just yesterday, a customer at the Front Street store was lamenting this situation.

Fortunately, the threshold for making Caramel Macchiato is not high! As long as you have all the required ingredients ready, we can easily recreate the taste in our memories at home. So today Front Street will talk with everyone about how to make a standard version of Caramel Macchiato!

However, one point needs to be explained first: the name Caramel Macchiato contains the three characters "Macchiato," so many friends mistakenly regard it as a derivative of Macchiato. But friends who often read Front Street's posts should know that the only thing these two coffees have in common is the name; from flavor to mouthfeel, their "core" can be said to be completely different.

Macchiato was born in Italian coffee shops in the 1980s. In the article "Why Italians Don't Drink Pour-Over Coffee," Front Street mentioned that since the advent of pressurized espresso machines, espresso has become Italians' beloved. As everyone knows, espresso is extremely concentrated, with concentrated and intense flavors, and not everyone can easily accept it.

But Italians' pursuit of espresso goes far beyond this; they have even stricter standards for taste. For this reason, the beans used in Italy to make espresso usually include Robusta and are roasted darker, so that the extracted coffee tastes even more intense.

But not everyone can adapt to such strong coffee from the start, so some people would ask the barista to add a small amount of milk to the espresso to soften the bitterness. Because the amount of milk added was very small, the finished product looked almost no different from ordinary espresso to the naked eye. To avoid confusion in the product, the barista made a mark with milk foam on the surface of the espresso with milk added.

With this mark, the barista could distinguish it from ordinary espresso. This is the origin of the name Macchiato—in Italian, Macchiato means "mark, brand."

The rest of the story is as Front Street said at the beginning: by the 1990s, a beverage called "Caramel Macchiato" was born. After reading the introductions to both, it is not hard to see that one is espresso with a small amount of milk added, while the other is a "latte" mixed with multiple syrups, completely belonging to two different concepts. Therefore, between Caramel Macchiato and Macchiato, apart from the similar names, almost no other common points can be found.

But it cannot be denied that Caramel Macchiato is indeed very delicious. Because the surface is covered with a layer of caramel sauce, the first thing you usually feel when drinking it is the sweetness of caramel, then the softness of the milk foam, and finally the vanilla-flavored milk coffee emerges, giving it a very rich layering. Caramel Macchiato is therefore often called "coffee in a sugar coat." All right, enough idle talk; next, Front Street will share the specific method for the classic version of Caramel Macchiato~

How should Caramel Macchiato be made?

Making Caramel Macchiato requires four core ingredients: espresso, milk, vanilla syrup, and caramel sauce. A reminder here: the caramel sauce should not be too viscous; it should have a certain fluidity, but of course it should not be as thin as pure liquid syrup.

First, we need to extract the espresso! For this extraction, Front Street selected the Front Street Classic Blend from the bean list. This blend is composed of beans from three origins—Brazil, Indonesia, and Vietnam—and uses a dark roast, which can maximize the coffee's rich aroma and also make it easy to extract thick, dense crema. It is suitable whether making an Americano diluted with water or a Latte paired with milk, and can be purchased at the Front Street Taobao store or the Front Street Tmall flagship store. The espresso extraction parameters are 20g of grounds, extracting 40ml of coffee liquid in 30 seconds.

After the coffee liquid is extracted, set it aside for later use, then begin frothing the milk. Front Street uses 200ml of milk here. Since the milk foam will later carry the caramel sauce, you can introduce a little more air when frothing, making the foam a tiny bit thicker than for a regular Latte.

After frothing is finished, you can proceed to "assemble" the Caramel Macchiato! Step one: pour 12ml of vanilla syrup and the frothed milk into the prepared cup, filling the cup directly to the top with milk.

Then, pour the espresso in from the center! This method of pouring the espresso last makes the overall appearance more beautiful, but it has one small drawback: before tasting, it is best to stir it evenly with a spoon first, then start drinking.

After pouring the espresso, you can immediately drizzle the caramel sauce! Before use, the caramel sauce can be chilled appropriately, which reduces its fluidity and makes it easier to draw patterns!

Front Street has drawn a simple pattern here. Once the pattern is completed, the Caramel Macchiato is considered finished.

As for the taste and mouthfeel when drinking, as Front Street introduced earlier, there is no need to repeat it here. Besides this simple pattern, there are many intricate and beautiful fancy patterns, and Caramel Macchiato also has other versions, which Front Street has shared in previous articles and will not expand on here~

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