Gingerbread Latte
Nearly every recipe for this makes a cinnamon and ginger latte and calls it gingerbread. What is missing is molasses, and without it you will never get there.
At a glance
- Espresso : milk
- 1:5
- Active time
- 10 min
- Total time
- 13 min
- Makes
- 1 large cup
- Serve
- Hot
- Kit
- Espresso machine
Ingredients
Note: For the syrup: 150 g dark brown sugar, 200 ml water, 40 g molasses, 2 tsp ground ginger, 1 tsp cinnamon, ¼ tsp cloves, ¼ tsp nutmeg, a pinch of salt.
Method
-
Toast the spices
Put the ginger, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg in a dry pan over low heat for about forty-five seconds, until they smell strongly.
Ground spices lose their volatile oils on the shelf. A short warming wakes them up, and it is the cheapest improvement in the recipe.
Toast 45 seconds -
Add everything else and simmer
Brown sugar, water, molasses and salt into the pan. Stir until the sugar dissolves, then simmer gently for five minutes.
It should darken to the colour of strong tea and coat the back of a spoon.
Simmer 5 minutes -
Cool and bottle
Let it cool and pour it into a bottle. It thickens considerably as it cools, so judge the consistency cold rather than hot.
It keeps three weeks in the fridge.
-
Build the latte
Forty grams of syrup in the cup, the shot pulled onto it, stirred, then 200 ml of steamed milk poured in.
Finish with a grating of nutmeg.
Why this works
Gingerbread is not a spice blend, it is a baked good, and what makes it taste the way it does is molasses. Molasses is what is left after sucrose is crystallised out of cane juice, and it carries the minerals, the slight bitterness and the deep burnt-sugar character that the sugar itself does not have. Take it out and you have ginger biscuits, which is a different and much lighter thing.
That is why so many recipes miss. A syrup made from white sugar, ginger and cinnamon produces a pleasant spiced latte that nobody would identify as gingerbread. Forty grams of molasses in 300 ml of syrup is what carries it over.
Dark brown sugar does part of the same job, since it is white sugar with molasses added back, which is why the recipe uses both. The brown sugar gives the base depth, the molasses gives the top note.
Toasting the ground spices is worth the forty-five seconds. The aromatic compounds in ginger and cinnamon are volatile oils that evaporate steadily once the spice is ground, so a jar that has been open six months has lost a great deal. Gentle heat mobilises what is left and makes an old jar behave more like a fresh one. Watch it closely: ground spice goes from fragrant to burnt in a few seconds.
Variations
- Iced: cool the syrup and espresso, pour over ice with cold milk.
- With a gingerbread biscuit on the side, crumbled over the foam.
- Stronger: 50 g of syrup and a third shot.
- Vegan: oat milk. The syrup contains no dairy.
Made it?
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Questions
Can I skip the molasses?
You can, but you will not have made a gingerbread latte. Molasses carries the deep burnt-sugar bitterness that defines gingerbread. Without it you have a ginger and cinnamon latte, which is nice and is not the same drink.
What can I use instead of molasses?
Black treacle is the closest and works directly. Dark maple syrup or date syrup get part way there. Golden syrup does not; it has none of the bitterness.
How long does the syrup keep?
About three weeks in the fridge. The high sugar content preserves it well. It thickens as it chills, so warm the bottle in your hands or add a splash of hot water if it will not pour.
Is this the same as a chai latte?
No. A chai latte is built on black tea with cardamom, cloves, cinnamon and pepper. This is coffee with a molasses and ginger syrup. The spice lists overlap; nothing else does.