(relaxed music)
- Today, we're gonna be doing a classic drink recipe
for a beautiful summer coffee drink.
It's the caffe shakerato, shaken coffee.
Really, a very simple drink.
A few key tweaks, it can be absolutely fantastic.
Not only are we gonna do a classic version today,
but a couple of other twists
to give you some ideas of how you maybe can play
with it to create something a little bit more fun,
something that you'll really, really, really enjoy.
Now, historically, the caffe shakerato
had been in and out of fashion.
Some people are true believers.
Tim Wendelboe has served it in his cafe
in Oslo for a really long time.
I know the Coffee Collective served it
in their cafes for quite a while,
though they don't anymore.
It's one that's maybe forgotten a little bit
by the wider coffee industry,
and I don't think it should be.
I think it's really, really good,
not just because it's actually really, really simple.
So the idea is this, this is the classic drink,
you take an espresso or two,
shake it over ice with some sugar and some salt,
strain it, serve it in a chilled glass, deliciousness.
Super simple, super easy.
In the shaking, you give it a nice, thick, foamy head,
and it's really nice to drink.
If you nail the sweetness,
once it's chilled, it's really balanced,
really enjoyable, really intense,
just a great hot summer day,
start the day off right kind of drink.
So we'll start with this classic version of the recipe,
and, if you go online,
you'll see a few different things
and a few different techniques and that kind of stuff.
I'll tell you what's really worked for me.
Firstly, you'll see some people say you need
to use sugar, undissolved sugar,
in the drink to get a better head of foam.
That I have not found to be true.
In fact, I would recommend using some sort of syrup,
one, because it's practical, and two,
because it will all 100% dissolve.
In some of my testing,
the sugar didn't always completely dissolve,
which meant a varying sweetness in the finished drink,
and that's not okay.
Today, I'm gonna be using a 1:1 syrup.
So it's equal parts sugar and water to make the syrup.
You can make that in a blender,
you don't necessarily need to heat the water.
It doesn't last as long as a 2:1 syrup,
but it's really easy to be accurate with it.
You're not accidentally gonna slightly overdose
and make the drink a little bit too sweet.
We are gonna weigh everything.
Don't worry, that's how it's gonna go.
But it just gives you that extra layer of accuracy,
so I like it in this situation.
So let's start building the drink.
We're gonna use shaker tins today.
If you're using a smaller cocktail shaker,
there's a little twist to the technique,
just to stop bad things happening.
If you've got a shaker set like this,
you'll be totally fine.
So, into here, I'm gonna add 10 grams of my 1:1 syrup.
So that'll be about five grams of sugar, essentially,
in the drink.
To that, I'm gonna add two drops,
which is about 0.1, 0.15 grams of saline solution.
It's in 20 to 80, salt to water.
I've talked a lot in the past
about using salt in coffee drinks.
I think, especially when you're chilling coffee down,
it can just take the edge off the bitterness.
You don't wanna taste salt.
You just want to have a little bit of saline
to sweeten things up,
round things up a little bit more.
So now, I'm gonna pull my shot,
and I did test letting the shot cool down first,
before putting it in to see if
that reduced dilution made the whole thing more delicious.
Turns out it didn't really make much difference at all,
so don't worry about doing that.
So, while it's pulling, I will get my ice.
Don't forget, you need enough ice
to chill the drink down,
but also, have enough cubes left, unmelted,
that, during the shaking,
they're gonna do a lot of aeration.
You're gonna shake to chill
and shake to create foam.
So make sure you shake for long enough
when the time comes.
The one twist is that,
if you're using a small shaker,
once your coffee's in,
swirl it around a little bit
before you put the lid on.
Otherwise, when you start to shake,
a buildup of pressure can cause the lid to pop off slightly
and that makes a terrible mess.
Shout out to Klaus from the Coffee Collective
for that little tip.
But, with a large set of shakers like this,
I don't generally have any issues.
Let's go. (drink shaking)
Obviously, a nice, cold glass.
(drink pouring out)
And there, you have a classic caffe shakerato.
How is it? Nicely chilled.
In terms of coffee flavor, not too sweet.
That's really important to me.
I don't want too much sweetness.
Really nice and balanced, chilled,
tons of intensity of flavor, nice texture.
That little foamy head is lovely.
This, on a bright, sunny morning, perfect.
Your preferences may vary.
I would be tempted to double-strain this,
to use a finer-mesh sieve as well,
just to catch any ice chips if you don't like those.
If you don't really care about it, you're fine.
But this might be one to double-strain
if you're a little fussy about texture.
Now, I was thinking about this drink
and thinking about ways you could twist it or mix it up,
or play with it a little bit to enhance a particular coffee
that you might be using.
So the next recipe is one I hope is inspiring for you
to go and play with,
a certain coffee that you love
and make a little shakerato out of that.
Here's the plan.
Firstly, we're gonna tweak the syrup.
Here, I've made an Earl Grey syrup.
It's still a 1:1 syrup,
and it's just been infused
with really good quality Earl Grey tea.
It's aromatic,
it's got that lovely bergamot tea quality, very delicious.
In addition, we're gonna also use some orange Angostura.
We are going to be very, very sparing with this.
Barely a dash, I'll give you the weights in a second.
But it adds, again,
some really lovely aromatics and complexity to the drink.
As for the coffee,
I'm gonna use a coffee from Rwanda.
You could use a coffee from Ethiopia.
A washed coffee from there would work really super well.
This has just got a little bit more fruit,
a little bit more texture,
and I think it'll be lovely.
Now, I'm gonna pull it in a way that's slightly updosed,
pulled very slightly short,
because I'm not worried about acidity.
I'm gonna balance the acidity out with my syrup.
So I want as much fruity punch
from the espresso as possible.
I'm not gonna make a bad espresso,
but I'm gonna make one that's very slightly unbalanced,
because I can correct that in how I put the drink together.
Earl Grey syrup, I'm gonna use 12 grams this time,
because, as I said,
we're gonna use a bit more sweetness
to counteract a slightly more acidic espresso.
Plus, I want as much Earl Grey flavor as possible
in that drink.
I want it to have some nice aromatics
of that bergamot coming through.
0.2 grams of Angostura orange.
This is for a single drink, a little goes a long way.
And, of course, our two drops, 0.1-ish grams of saline.
Now, we'll pull our shot,
ice in, give it a shake,
and make something pretty tasty.
(drink pouring out)
That smells very pretty.
A little of the Angostura orange,
a little bit of the Earl Grey.
That is lovely.
That plays into the complexity of the coffee very nicely.
It's that little bit sweeter.
Not gonna lie, it's a little bit sweeter.
But it's nice. It's really good.
This is a little afternoon pick-me-up.
It's just a lovely, sat outside,
being happy to be in the sunshine kind of drink.
The fruit qualities of the coffee marry really nicely
with the tea syrup,
with the Angostura.
That is a great drink.
I would recommend that, actually.
If you've got a suitable coffee,
it doesn't have to be something like a washed Ethiopian,
but something, fruitful wood, nice and sweet.
You might wanna bring the sweetness back a touch.
That's your call.
I really like it where it is.
You could garnish this if you wanted to.
I wouldn't, I would just let the foam be the garnish on top.
It's interesting, unusual, different to most coffee drinks,
and just makes the whole thing a real pleasure
to drink from a textural perspective.
Really, super enjoyable.
All of the recipes for today are linked down below.
I put them on my website
where I keep all my recipes,
and you can go and check that out.
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So, drink three, version three.
Initially, I just wanted to have some fun
with some more modernist approaches to this thing.
But, actually, it ended up being a project
about practical drink builds.
In talking to Klaus at the Coffee Collective,
he said they'd stopped serving it,
because it was just frustrating from a service point of view
in a busy coffee bar to stop,
put it all together, shake it up,
strain it out, do all this kind of stuff.
It's just not how coffee bars are built.
So I began to think about two different things.
One, could you play with the texture of the foam
on the drink a little bit?
And, two, was there a more practical approach
for a coffee bar service?
I began to think about using one of these.
It's a cream whipper.
And we can use nitrous for this,
and that can be a little bit like nitro cold brew.
You can get a nice head that way.
And I thought maybe we can tweak the texture slightly,
and I'll talk about that in a second.
But, if I filled this with espresso,
with my shakerato mix,
and then, I filled it with nitrous,
and then, discharged it and re-pressurized it again,
I'd have a very low oxygen environment in here,
which would slow the oxidation of the coffee,
and it should hold for longer.
In fact, what's in here is three hours old and,
having tasted it just now,
it tastes pretty much as good as it did
when we first made it.
So, for this, you're gonna need to scale up.
And, in this recipe,
this was five double espressos.
And everything else was just 5Xed,
so it's 50 grams of syrup,
about a little bit under a gram of saline.
That's what we're aiming to do.
Now, to tweak the texture, I used xanthan gum.
There's loads of different things you can use
to thicken liquids.
You could use some gelling agents,
but xanthan is easy, available, it's cheap.
It's not a freaky thing that makes people uncomfortable.
It's naturally derived, it's useful.
The tricky bit with xanthan
is the percentages you want to use.
Of the finished drink,
you're looking at 0.05% by weight
of that drink being xanthan.
And, if your drink weighs 50 grams,
well, that's not very much xanthan at all.
That's a fraction of a gram. How do you do that?
So what we did is we scaled it into the syrup mix.
So, to make a simple syrup of equal parts water and sugar,
we added the xanthan in there
to thicken the syrup very slightly.
But then, once you scaled that down,
once you diluted it into the drink,
you got the appropriate percentage by weight.
Don't do what I did and get the decimal point wrong,
and add 10 times more than you need.
That was a very unpleasant experience.
Now, you could probably go a little bit lower again
if you wanted to,
if you didn't love the texture.
It'll change the way that the foam stabilizes
and holds in the drink.
But, this way, I think it's really quite nice.
One other important thing
is getting the level of nitrous in here right.
Now, the easiest way to control for this
is actually just to weigh this after you charge it.
A typical canister weighs,
in my experience, about 7.6 grams,
in terms of the amount of gas it adds to this.
The first one you load in,
you're gonna discharge completely,
because that will get rid of almost all the oxygen in here,
which will really slow oxidation.
You're gonna add your second one,
and then, I would recommend somewhere
between three and four grams be retained.
It's confusing, and it's a bit frustrating.
You'll need to play around with it a little bit.
If you're making a larger batch,
you can retain more nitrous,
and then, it's obviously relevant to the size
of this thing overall as well.
But play, tweak, record what you're doing,
and then, it's really easy to replicate it
from that point on.
This has been kept in an ice bath up until now.
It still should be nice and cold.
Let me get a cold glass and get a drink going.
Now, remember, this is a pressurized vessel.
Don't open all the way, straightaway.
It's got a bit of force to it.
Give it a little shake, and then, just be gentle.
(drink pouring out)
Now, you can fill a little fuller,
because this actually has a bit more gas in it.
So the serve size isn't actually as big
as a normal, traditional shakerato.
This is a lot of foam,
and that will stay as foam for a bit longer.
This gives it a very light, fluffy, enjoyable texture.
You can see it very slowly starting to settle.
Now, this is nice in that it's
gonna be foam a little bit longer.
Again, with your coffee, your recipe,
feel free to tweak the xanthan level,
but it's definitely a fun aspect of this.
That texture is just very lovely. It's creamy.
Obviously, it's dairy free,
but it has that rich, creamy mouthfeel.
Really super enjoyable.
This foam will last longer
than a traditional shakerato,
but it won't last forever.
But get it to the customer,
get it in your face as quickly as you can.
Nice and cold, nicely balanced,
really, a lot like the first drink we made,
just with a little textural lift
that I think is really good.
It doesn't taste like it was made over three hours ago.
So, if I was doing this in a cafe
or doing it for a group of friends,
this is a really useful way to do it
if you've got a cream whipper lying around.
And there's one more point.
This can be made with a really good decaf,
and you can have a superb experience
as a nice hot summer evening after-dinner drink.
Decaf can be good and would work really well
in a drink like this.
I hope you'll try it, I hope you'll experiment,
and I hope you'll tell me what you thought
down in the comments below.
I'd love to hear from you.
What's your preferred coffee for a shakerato?
Have you tried it before, at home or in a cafe?
Let me know down in the comments below,
but, for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching,
and I hope you have a great day.