- Summer is gone, the nights are closing in,
the leaves are turning.
It must be time for the Pumpkin Spice Latte.
And it is.
And today we're gonna make the ultimate Pumpkin Spice Latte,
but to start with, I'm gonna benchmark.
I'm gonna get to Starbucks and buy one.
Success.
So we're down at Tower Bridge because this is where
the nicest Starbucks in London is
and it seemed the best place to go and get one of these.
And let's have a taste.
Ginger, a little bit of cinnamon.
The other spices are way down, very sweet, incredibly sweet.
Technically some pumpkin is in the Pumpkin Spice Latte
for reasons I don't truly understand.
So now I wanna make my own ultimate version of this.
If we're gonna put pumpkin in this,
well we should work out which pumpkin we should put in it.
So we're gonna go to Borough Market,
try and buy a bunch of pumpkins
and then head back to the studio and start cooking it up.
(upbeat music)
Let's start with pumpkins.
And I know that's kind of weird
because I'm pretty sure Pumpkin Spice Lattes started
without pumpkin in them.
They were just like a Cafe Latte
with the spice mix that people use for Pumpkin Pie.
And that's a classic spice mix
that we're gonna touch on in a minute.
But at some point people started
putting pumpkin in the drink.
Stop, stop, stop, stop stop.
What I was doing I think was all wrong.
Let me explain.
The original idea of the video was to kind of make a sauce
that tasted just like Pumpkin Pie.
This is really popular approach online.
And ultimately, I don't think
that's the right approach for me.
You know, I wanted to find the perfect pumpkin
taste a bunch of different ones,
use that to create a Pumpkin Puree,
but by the time I was sieving out my blended Pumpkin Puree,
I just wasn't happy.
I felt like I was complicating other people's work
and there had to be a different, a fresh approach.
Now this whole thing had started
when I'd gone to the website,
I looked at Starbucks' ingredients
for their Pumpkin Spice Sauce.
And you can see things like Pumpkin Puree
or condensed milk in there,
but I was haunted by this.
A little sample of the syrup
that they had given me in Starbucks.
This, aside from being a tremendous color,
well, it doesn't have Pumpkin Puree in it.
It's a clear sauce.
It doesn't have condensed milk in it.
And then I realized this year, they're launching in the UK
a kind of vegan version because this, if you taste it,
it's really just like a cinnamon syrup
with a hint of a few other spices.
But I liked the idea of something that worked for everybody,
something that didn't exclude people
who don't wanna drink dairy.
Now, I do kind of love the color of that,
but I also love the color of pumpkins.
And so what I wanna do is capture
some of that color of pumpkin, but I don't want solids.
I don't want any pureed pumpkin.
I don't wanna have to cook bits of pumpkin.
None of that is interesting to me.
So what we're gonna do from the beginning
is juice a pumpkin.
What's gonna make this recipe notable,
I think, is the spice selection.
So pumpkin spice mix
is a is a pre sort of made spice mixture
you can buy much of the U.S.
that contains five different spices.
We're gonna go deep on saucing spices in just a second,
but to start with, I'm gonna take one of these pumpkin's,
I'm gonna juice it down, and that will be the beginning
of this whole thing.
Now when you're using a pumpkin,
know that you'll get about 50% yield.
If you juice 100 grams of pumpkin flesh,
you'll get about 50 grams,
a little bit less, of juice out of that.
So when you look at the recipe
and decide how much of this mixture you wanna make,
that will decide how much pumpkin you wanna start with.
You don't need one this big.
Go for something much smaller, like a little Kabocha
if you like the flavor of those a little bit more.
This Jar-head here is very big.
I'm not gonna use all of it by any stretch.
I'm gonna start with about 500 grams
of pumpkin flesh to give me about 250 grams
of pumpkin juice.
(knife chopping)
(blander buzzing)
I'm someone who thinks about things
through a lens of coffee,
so the idea that different spices should taste different
if they're grown in different places,
well, that makes total sense to me.
So I went out and I bought a ton of different spices
from different origins,
with as much traceability as I could find.
At the end of this there'll be links
to these particular spaces down below.
So the biggest component of a pumpkin spice blend
traditionally is cinnamon.
Now you can go two ways with cinnamon.
You can go down the traditional cinnamon quills route,
or you can use what's called cassia bark.
Now I wanna use both because they have two quite different
characteristics of cinnamon.
The cassia bark, in this case it's from Vietnam.
Smells amazing.
It's that kind of candy cinnamon.
It's that jelly beans cinnamon that very bright,
lively, hot, spicy cinnamon, almost cartoonish.
You know what I mean?
It's almost artificial but so, so incredibly good.
But it needs some balance.
And what I loved about these,
these are Sri Lankan cinnamon quills
is that you've got that warmer slight earthier,
slightly rounder experience of cinnamon.
They're absolutely cinnamon
but it's a totally different thing.
And by combining equal parts of these two,
we get this broad spectrum of cinnamon's taste
and aromatics that is incredibly enjoyable.
So second ingredient that's really important is ginger.
This is something I tasted quite strong
in the Starbucks drink.
Though I might've just put it there with my mind.
It's hard to find traceable ginger powder.
A lot of what I tested came from India
and that was the kind of heavier, almost earthier ginger.
This from China, I really liked.
It was a bit more aromatic, kind of zestier,
fresher, brighter, still a good bit of heat from that too,
really very enjoyable.
So that's gonna be a secondary component.
Clove is a difficult one for me.
I had an accident sort of
with a kind of super critical extract of cloves
which scarred me for life.
I find it quite challenging smell and taste
and ultimately cloves easily overwhelm everything.
So we're gonna use this extremely sparingly.
These ones are Sri Lankan.
A lot of it comes from Indonesia too
but I just slightly preferred these for Sri Lankan ones.
All of that pungency that you want from clove
but almost a little bit sweeter, which was very nice.
Now, nutmeg is one of my favorite spices
just 'cause it looks beautiful when you cut open into it.
This one is from a French company called
(speaking in French)
I think it's from Grenada and it smells amazing.
Now this in particular, you need to grind fresh
or grade fresh in many dishes
because it fades very fast, but we're coffee people.
We used to grinding stuff to order.
The last spice in the mix is allspice.
I don't know a ton about it.
I struggled to find much variety of it
and the ones that I did get
really there wasn't a huge variation
so don't stress out too much hunting
for the perfect allspice with my experience so far.
Now, like I said, we're coffee people,
we think like coffee people.
What's gonna make this whole recipe much more interesting
is that we're gonna grind our spice mix to order.
Now, maybe like me,
you've got an old blade grinder lying around
and that is completely perfect.
This is just the cheap Krups one.
I think it was like 15 Pounds.
It's what we're gonna be using today.
Everything in the grinder,
grind until it's a nice, fine powder.
May take a little while and give it a shake
now again as you go.
(grinder spinning)
Onto the next stage where we're gonna make the spiced syrup.
We're gonna take a weight of pumpkin juice here
and we're gonna add an equal amount of water.
(water pouring)
Use the same jug, it's okay.
Now the ultimate syrup, the way move forward,
is gonna be more akin to a two to one syrup.
Where it's two parts sugar, one part of water.
But to start with, we're gonna make it a one to one.
So here I've got about 450 grams of liquid.
So I'm gonna take 450 grams of Demerara sugar.
You can get something a little Browner if you want to
but I figured that's just Brown enough
to be that little bit of softening that we like
and then we gonna cook it to reduce it
until it's closer to a two to one syrup.
That cooking process will transform the flavor
of the pumpkin juice from being that kind of very fresh
but slightly vegetal-green kind of flavor
into more of a cooked flavor.
And it will be pretty muted as flavor goes
by the time it's all kind of finished
and we're gonna add to this about 20 grams
of the spice mixture
and we're gonna cook it all down together.
So onto the heat and give it a little whisk to stir
get that sugar dissolved.
(stirring mixture)
So we cooked stuff down now
but the important phase we need is a bit of separation.
I don't want any bits in my syrup.
Now I'm a bit unusual
and I have a very fine drum sieve lying around
'cause I'm a bit weird.
So I'm gonna pass it through this.
It's about 19 microns, so extremely fine
but it would be perfectly acceptable to use
something like a cheesecloth or Muslim.
(mixture pouring)
And then when strained and happy
you can transfer to your squeeze bottle.
We're good to go.
Let's make a drink.
Now, It's not entirely up to me
to tell you how much syrup to use.
I don't like things too much on the sweet side.
So in what is an eight ounces drink, I'm gonna max out.
For me at about 15 grams syrup,
but I'm just gonna mix into my espresso
before adding that a steamed milk.
(grinder grinding)
At this point you could be using a plant milk of some sort.
It depends what you like, be it old or anything else.
Having a lovely very simple little experience.
For some people maybe too sweet,
for some people not sweet enough.
The spice level is very pleasant.
It's very balanced.
Even with dairy in this particular drink,
you can get the extra layers
of complexity of kind of flavor
or at least that come with some really great spices
sourced from different parts of the world.
I would absolutely beg you go,
go and source some interesting spices from different places.
Taste the difference, it's eyeopening.
What I didn't do yet was actually do a direct comparison
between what I have here and what I have here.
That with a little taste of the Starbucks syrup.
What a color?
Kind of a very simplistic cinnamon,
very big whack of cloves,
which I've just not chasing personally.
Interesting acidity there.
I suspect that might be part of it's preservative,
you know, component there.
Let's compare it to something a little bit more
traceable, homemade, aromatic.
Worlds apart.
So much complexity, warmth, depth, breadth of flavor.
Room for each of those spices to come out.
That is very nice.
That is really nice.
'Cause this got good ingredients.
It's the lesson that coffee, I hope, teaches all of us.
Which is good ingredients
are kind of the key to everything else.
We can go further.
We should go for like a more complete build of this thing.
Now, if you're curious about any of this stuff going on here
there's links to it down below,
there's a recipe linked on a website.
A website that I built with this video sponsor.
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So the last part of this drink built,
to make it the ultimate Pumpkin Spice Latte
is gonna be some Whipped Cream.
Now, maybe like me, you're kind of put off by that because
at this point we've got quite a lot of milk of some sort,
plus sugar, plus spices.
The coffee's kind of getting obliterated
by all the stuff going on here
and having a Whipped Cream on top.
Well actually that's only gonna make it worse.
So here's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna do a special coffee-infused Whipped Cream
to go on top to make it extremely delicious.
Just think about this as a Pumpkin Spice Latte
topped with a little almost coffee ice cream.
Start with, we're just gonna use 10 fluid ounces
or 280ml more sensibly of double cream.
To that we're gonna add the seeds
and half of vanilla bean pod.
You could use paste if you wanted to,
but if you have a vanilla bean pod lying around
it's very useful.
Pour it in two.
And then for Whipped Cream,
I generally like about 5% weight of sugar.
Just white sugar is totally fine.
And then we're gonna add 10 grams
of pretty costly ground coffee.
We want a nice and easy to stray out later
so don't bother going too fine,
it's gonna give up its flavor pretty quickly
and will be delicious.
Throw that on the heat gently just to warm it up
just a little bit, to get some infusion going on.
So once it's done, you're just gonna strain it out.
It's taken on some very nice color.
This is gonna go into your Whipping Siphon.
I'm gonna chill it down, charge it,
and then we're ready for the final drink build.
(Siphon whipping)
For estimate my milk would just get our syrup in.
Now when it comes to steaming the milk,
if you're gonna add whipped cream know that
your foam is still gonna be light than the Whipped Cream.
So the Whipped Cream was sink into the foam.
So you want a little foam as you can get away with
just like a nice silky texture
that you might use for a flat white or a latte.
We don't need to worry about latte out either.
And then a little dusting
of our spices.
And what we have here is an oozing and decadent treat.
There is a lovely little hit of coffee up front
from that cold-sweet vanillary coffee cream.
Then that kind of warm spiciness underneath.
It's sweet, but it's not overwhelming.
It's autumnal.
It's what you want Autumn to taste like.
A little bit messy but it's just delicious.
There it is, the ultimate Pumpkin Spice Latte.
I am very pleased with the result.
If you didn't wanna do the Whipped Cream
but a vegan version using say coconut,
do the same thing in terms of the amount of coffee
and the amount of sugar
and the amount of vanilla bean going in there.
And you'll have a very similar result.
Did it taste of pumpkin?
No, not really.
Did that count as one of my five a day still?
Probably not also.
Was it delicious, was it fun to make, was it interesting,
was it beautiful?
I think so.
And I think you should give it a go too.
I think this is so interesting to me
to look at other ingredients through the lens of coffee.
Right? To think about spices like you think about coffee
and in doing so I learned a ton.
I discovered what I like.
I discovered a whole new range of flavors
and I made an end result that while many considered trashy
I think shows a kind of taste of place.
It shows providence,
it shows some transparency in its flavors.
And I think that's kind of cool
as well as just being incredibly delicious.
But let me know your thoughts.
Let me know if you give this a try.
Let me know what you think.
Let me know if you struggle to find some spices you like.
Let me know if you do a little spice tasting
and your mind is blown like mine was.
I would love to hear from all of you
down in the comments below.
There's a link to the recipe,
to all of the ingredients down in the description.
But for now, I'll say thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.