Hi everyone!
It is getting pretty cold in Japan recently. I wonder how it is where you are. Anyway, it’s entering a good season to sit down with a good warm cup of coffee.
I usually take my coffee black most of the times, but it seemed like a good chance to prepare a sweet coffee drink some times. So today I will share an very easy Caffe Mocha recipe.
What is a caffe mocha?
A caffe mocha is typically a coffee (usually espresso) drink with milk and chocolate added. Starbucks serves them (at least in Japan), so you may have seen it on the menu.
Apparently, it originated from a drink which was trying to imitate the flavor of Mocha Coffee, which refers to coffee beans from Ethiopia and Yemen which had a chocolaty flavor. It’s confusing but a caffe mocha (coffee + chocolate drink) is very different from Mocha coffee (which refers to the coffee beans’ origins).
Recipe
We will only need three ingredients, a strong coffee, milk, and chocolate syrup. Any syrup that you like will do. I used this Hershey’s one.
I also tried a recipe using actual chocolate. But is was rather a fuss to melt, and if you cant melt it properly, you get chocolate particles floating in your drink. In a way that may sound quite good, and taste wise it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t look so great.
First prepare the coffee.
You want to brew a pretty strong coffee here. If you can get espresso awesome. But I assume most people don’t own an espresso machine. A moka pot is a good way to go in this situation. I used this moka pot from BIALETTI.
By the way, the word “moka”, appeared again here. But for the pot, it’s written differently. Don’t exactly know why.
It you don’t have a moka pot, no worries. Just brew your pour over with a little bit less water.
I wrote how you brew using a moka pot in this latte recipe, so it you a interested jump over there.
Let me just share a little trick I use with my moka pot.
If you use a hand grinder which is pretty slim like the TIMEMORE SLIM PLUS, you can take the moka pot basket and cover your grinds catch and flip it over at once to load the coffee into the basket neatly. When you flip, a bit of the grounds tend to fall out the other side, so watch out for that. Just over the hole with your finger.
These moka pot baskets were always a bit annoying to load but this trick made things a lot easier. About 9g of coffee seems to be good for my 2cup moka pot.
Put the pot on the stove and start heating. I always like staring at the coffee coming out.
You want to get about 40g ~ 60g of strong coffee.
Next, let’s heat up some milk.
Get about 140g of milk in a microwave safe cup, and heat it up. With my 600W microwave, 1min20sec seemed to be a good amount. Please do not over do this, since milk will break down and start to taste/smell wired from above 65℃.
Once your milk is ready, pour the chocolate syrup in to the cup. I wanted to make some layers, so gently poured the syrup at the center of the cup. I put in about 10g of syrup. (adjust to taste)
Too much syrup will over power the coffee flavors, so I didn’t put too much in. But clean layer did form at the bottom of the cup.
Finally we will add the coffee.
If you are going for layers, take a spoon and place it right above the surface of the milk. Pour the coffee aiming for the spoon, so as to soften the impact and prevent it from mixing. (Sorry I forgot to take a photo of this step, so here is one from my espresso tonic recipe. its the same idea)
I ended up with pretty clean 4 layers.
To be honest, you need to mix it before drinking. So if your not serving it to someone else, would be easier to just mix the whole thing from the start. But it doesn’t look nearly as interesting.
How does it taste?
It was pretty good. By using good coffee beans you get the good flavors of the coffee, and with a bit of the chocolate tastes and added sweetness, it makes for a very nice drink.
I tried the recipe with a couple of different coffee beans. I like the one made with a dark roasted Mandheling beans.
Please give it a try. It couldn’t be simpler.
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