Simple Cappuccino Recipe How to Make Cappuccino Coffee at Home Using a French Press

Making Perfect Cappuccino at Home: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you want to enjoy a perfect cappuccino or flat white, the best choice is always to select a café from FrontStreet Coffee or our website and let professional baristas craft it for you. However, sometimes you might want to try making coffee yourself, which means understanding coffee brewing methods becomes essential.

Fortunately, there's a simple method that doesn't require building a kitchen espresso setup from scratch. This brings us to our step-by-step tutorial for making cappuccino at home, even without using an espresso machine.

Getting Started: Brewing Coffee

The reality is that you cannot brew espresso without an espresso machine. However, since we'll be mixing coffee with milk in the next step, we don't actually need to achieve all the characteristics of true espresso to get a delicious cappuccino at home.

That being said, here are the key factors to consider when choosing coffee to ensure optimal results for your cappuccino.

Choosing the Right Coffee

Let's start with selecting the right coffee beans. As always, you want freshly roasted coffee. For this recipe, you might even want to look more carefully at espresso roast categories. Because you'll be diluting the coffee with milk, you want to choose coffee with higher body so you can still taste it through the milk.

Calculating Espresso Concentration

The next question to ask yourself is how to brew espresso? Consider coffee concentration based on the percentage of coffee in the total brew.

Compared to filter coffee (typically between 1.2% and 1.8%), espresso has a much higher percentage (approximately between 7% and 12%). In an espresso machine, you achieve higher concentration by applying high pressure to extract coffee quickly and using a coffee-to-water ratio typically between 1:2 and 1:3.

To achieve espresso concentration without an espresso machine, we need to adjust the brew ratio while increasing extraction by adjusting grind size, applying pressure, increasing agitation, raising water temperature, or extending extraction time. The combination of these techniques will provide you with coffee of appropriate concentration without using an espresso machine.

French Press Espresso

We'll use 30 grams of coffee. Grind it finely. Then add 100 ml of 98°C water.

Stir for 20-30 seconds, then let it steep for 4 and a half minutes.

Then, once the coffee has steeped, push down the plunger and pour the coffee into a cup.

You'll end up with 30-35 grams of coffee.