To bring any of those who aren't up to date with their coffee lingo up to speed, to have a drink "dry" means that only foamed milk and espresso are used, when making it there is no hot milk, the result is that the only liquid in the drink is the espresso.
Now that we got our vocabulary lesson out of the way I'd like to explain why I dislike the dry drinks. My first experience with the dry latte was making one for a customer at Noah's Bagels. At first I didn't know what they were talking about (as you can see "baristas" at Noah's don't really get that extensive of training when it comes to coffee). The customer explained what they wanted and I went about preparing it. What I first noticed was that it was very hard to get the foam I needed, you see the consistency of the foam is very important in espresso drinks, when I tried to make it I kept getting milk bubbles like this as opposed to nice foam like this. It was very frustrating and to top it all off I gave myself a good burn on the steam wand while making this monstrosity. Ultimately I was able to produce an adequate drink for the guest but not before mentioning to them that they might want to take these kinds of requests to Starbucks in the future.
My second gripe with the dry latte is that I don't really view it as a latte. Now this may be splitting hairs but if you look at this chart the middle left shows a latte and the bottom left shows a cappuccino. Now while their differences are minor you'll notice that a cappuccino has equal parts steamed milk and milk foam while the latte just has a small dollop of foam on the top. I always thought this drink should be called a dry cappuccino as the foam is more important, but maybe that's a rant for another day.
Well now that my bitching is out of the way let's get onto the drink. I'll start with the recipe (if you haven't already figured it out):
Dry latte (Cappuccino)
- 1 oz. espresso
- fill rest of cup with foamed milk
- add the flavored shot of your choice (optional)
The drink itself looks great, it looks like you're drinking a cloud (and in truth I'm pretty sure it's about as close to that sensation as you can get). What I will say is that you'll need a spoon because once your espresso shot is gone the foam is very reluctant to slide out of the cup. Because of the nature of the drink you don't really taste any milk while drinking it unless you shovel frothed milk into your mouth while drinking it, but even then the milk taste is very mild. The result of this is pretty much just an espresso shot flavor, but the interesting part of this drink is the texture. The foamed milk is lighter than whipped cream but heavy enough to still fill your mouth, it's very strange and if you let it sit in your mouth you can almost feel the little foam bubbles dissolving. I personally left the rest of the foam until the end and ate it with a spoon, it was fairly tasteless so I decided to eat a small piece of rolled wafer before each spoon full. It was pretty tasty.
I guess my end result was good, it had a nice texture, the espresso was good, and it really looked pretty. If you've never had a dry latte I guess I would say you should try it out once, if you're expecting a latte you will be surprised. However I would like to say if you are going to order this go to a place that specializes in espresso drinks, not a place that just has an espresso bar. Real Baristas are supposed to know how to do these drinks, you're only going to piss off the less experienced
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