Drink · High Noon Espresso
Caramel pumpkin latte
Squash in your coffee sounds daft until you taste what it does to the texture.
Every autumn the coffee shops start charging four quid for this, and it is genuinely easy — but almost every recipe you find online gets one thing wrong, which is treating the pumpkin as a flavour. It is not. It is there for texture. Spice it properly, warm it before it meets the cold, and it will beat the chain version on both counts.
What you need
- 1 shot Western Tamp High Noon Espresso
- 2 tbsp (30ml) pumpkin purée — plain tinned purée, not pie filling
- 2 tbsp (30ml) caramel sauce, plus more for the top
- ¼ tsp ground cinnamon, plus a pinch for dusting
- A pinch each of ground ginger, nutmeg and clove
- 180ml whole milk, cold
- Ice, to fill
The roast for this High Noon Espresso From £11.95 How to make it
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Warm the purée and caramel together
Twenty seconds in the microwave or a moment in a small pan. Cold purée is stiff and will sit in lumps at the bottom of the glass no matter how hard you stir.
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Stir the spices in
Cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and clove into the warm purée. Doing it now, off the heat but still warm, gets far more out of them than dusting them on at the end.
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Pull the shot straight onto it
One shot of High Noon Espresso over the spiced purée, then stir until it is completely smooth. This is the base — get it right here and the rest is just pouring.
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Milk and ice
Cold milk in, then fill with ice. Adding the milk before the ice keeps the base from seizing up against the cold.
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Foam and finish
Top with milk foam if you have it, a spiral of caramel and a dust of cinnamon.
Why it works
Pumpkin barely tastes of anything — that is the trick of it. What you recognise as "pumpkin spice" is the cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and clove; the squash itself is doing a different job entirely. It is mostly water and starch, and that starch gives the drink a body and cling that milk alone will not, so it coats the mouth like a much richer latte without any extra cream. The caramel then bridges the two: its burnt-sugar bitterness meets the same note in the espresso, which is why it tastes integrated rather than like syrup poured over coffee.
Worth knowing
- Plain purée, not pie filling. Pie filling is already sweetened and spiced, and stacked on top of the caramel it makes the whole thing sickly.
- Warm the purée before it meets anything cold — it is the single difference between a smooth drink and a gritty one.
- Spice to your own taste. The blend above is a starting point, and clove in particular goes from warm to medicinal quickly.
- Serve it hot by steaming the milk instead and skipping the ice. The base is identical.
The recipe card
Save it, print it, take it to the kitchen.
Everything on this card is written out above as well, so you don’t have to squint at a picture to cook from it.
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