My favorite latte, I learned a lot

Latte is a classic blend of Italian espresso and milk. Italians also like to drink latte for breakfast. Italians who drink latte prefer milk rather than Italian espresso. Only espresso can give ordinary milk an unforgettable taste.

Italian latte requires a small cup of espresso and a cup of milk (150-200 ml). Latte has more milk and less coffee, which is very different from cappuccino. The method of making latte is very simple, that is, pour nearly boiling milk into the freshly made Italian espresso. In fact, there is no fixed rule on how much milk to add, and it can be freely adjusted according to personal taste.

If you add some frothy cold milk to the hot coffee, you get an American latte. Starbucks' American latte is made in this way, with Italian espresso at the bottom, milk heated to 60-65°C in the middle, and a layer of cold milk foam no thicker than half a centimeter.

If you don't add hot milk, but directly decorate the Italian espresso with two tablespoons of milk foam, it becomes the macchiato coffee called Espresso Macchiato by Italians.

The origin of "Latte":

The first person to add milk to coffee was the Viennese Kosciuszko.

This is a story from 1683. In that year, the Turkish army attacked Vienna for the second time. At that time, Emperor Obold I of Vienna had an offensive and defensive alliance with King Augustus II of Poland. As long as the Poles learned of this news, reinforcements would arrive quickly. But the question was, who would break through the Turkish siege and deliver the message to the Poles? Kochilski, a Viennese who had traveled in Türkiye, volunteered.

Using fluent Turkish to deceive the Turkish army besieging the city, they crossed the Danube and moved in the Polish army. Although the Ottoman army was brave and good at fighting, it still retreated in a hurry under the attack of the Polish army and the Vienna army. When they left, they left a large number of military supplies outside the city, including dozens of sacks of coffee beans - the coffee beans that the Muslim world had controlled for centuries and refused to flow out easily fell into the hands of the Viennese. But the Viennese didn't know what this was. Only Kochilski knew that this was a magical drink. So he asked for these dozens of sacks of coffee beans as a reward for breaking out and asking for help, and used these spoils to open a cafe in Vienna - the Blue Bottle. At the beginning, the cafe's business was not good. The reason was that Europeans did not like to drink the coffee grounds like the Turks. So the clever Kochilski changed the recipe, filtered out the coffee grounds and added a lot of milk - this is the original version of the "latte" coffee that is common in cafes today.