What is a cortado coffee, or a café cortado?
What is a cortado? How is it different from a macchiato? And why are people everywhere asking for it in coffee shops these days?
There’s a definite trend in coffee consumption towards stronger drinks with more coffee and less milk. As coffee gets better generally, our tastes is for more flavour in our cup and less dilution, thus, the latte is giving way to the flat white, the cafe au lait is yielding to the macchiato and we are looking for new alternatives, as we seek to make our caffeine fix smoother and stronger.
The most recent player in this trend is the cortado, which emanates from the Basque Country in Northern Spain, where cortado (past participle of cortar, meaning cut) or café cortado describes a strong coffee drink which is half espresso and half heated milk. The milk “cuts” through the acidity of the coffee leaving enough bite to make the coffee interesting and satisfying, but steering away from bitterness and allowing the milk fats to coat and round out some of the carbon notes in the (often over-roasted coffee) served in the region. The term is widely used in Spain, Portugal and Cuba and in the past year or two it has spread through the hippest coffee spots of Europe and the USA.
What’s the difference between a cortado and a macchiato?
The key difference between a cortado and a macchiato is that there is a little more milk in a cortado and the milk isn’t textured, whereas it is always foamed in a true Italian macchiato, no matter how small the serving of milk might be. Macchiato means “marked” in Italian so it’s basically an espresso marked with a little hot foam whereas a cortado has coffee and milk on a 1:1 ratio. The milk tends not to be as hot in the cortado, just gently steamed to heat it up and it’s usually served in a small heavy glass instead of an espresso cup.
Australian coffee aficionados have embraced the idea of the cortado too, although they call it the piccolo there, or the latte piccolo (literally, small latte), or a low-tide latte. Again, these are served in a glass, like the cortado.
A cortado can save the day
Sometimes when we’re travelling or when we’re out and about away from our usual haunts, we find ourselves in strange coffee shops that we have nebver visited before. Sometimes, there’s only one option if you want to get a cup of coffee. As a general rule, when I’m out and about or in a place where I have never been before, my usual drink is an espresso, especially if the coffee is mostly African or Asian. If the coffee is South American I’ll often order a macchiato, as the milk will open up the flavour profile of many Brazilian and South American coffees. I realise these are very crude generalisations but they can be useful sometimes when you have very little information about the coffee.
Often, my heart sinks when I go into a coffee shop and see oily, black, dark-roasted beans in the hopper. You know the coffee is over roasted and it’s going to be terrible. This is a good time order a cortado. The milk will help to mask the worst umpleasantness of very bad coffee. It won’t make bad coffee good but it will help make it drinkable (in a life or death situation). I don’t mean that cortado coffees are only good for bad coffee. That’s absolutely not true. I especially love a cortado made with our Rising Tide or French Roast coffee.