Café au Lait: The French Bowl and the New Orleans Chicory Version

Café au lait is brewed coffee mixed with an equal amount of hot milk. To make one, brew strong drip or French press coffee, heat the same amount of milk until it steams, and pour the two together into a large cup — or, in the French way, a wide bowl. In New Orleans the coffee is blended with roasted chicory and the milk is scalded, and it comes with a plate of beignets.

The name is French for coffee with milk. It differs from a latte in the coffee — brewed, not espresso — and from white coffee, which is coffee with cold milk.

The recipe

1. Brew the coffee strong — about 15 g of coffee for 150 ml of finished coffee — by drip or French press.
2. Heat the milk in a pan until it steams and tiny bubbles form at the edge, just below boiling.
3. Pour the coffee and milk together into a large cup or bowl, in roughly equal amounts.
4. Sweeten to taste, and serve with bread or beignets for dunking.

In France it is a breakfast drink, often a large portion in a handleless bowl. In American coffeehouses a café au lait is strong drip or French press coffee with steamed milk; Starbucks sells it as the Caffè Misto, a 1:1 mix of brewed coffee and frothed milk.

Why the coffee has to be strong

Half of a café au lait is milk, so whatever strength the coffee has is cut in half. Filter coffee is usually 1.15–1.35% dissolved coffee; mixed 1:1 with milk, that becomes roughly 0.6–0.7% — a pale, milky drink that tastes of little.

The fix is a stronger brew. Using about half as much coffee again as you normally would — around 15 g for 150 ml of finished coffee, against roughly 10 g at a typical filter ratio — keeps the coffee's character after the milk goes in. Many people also prefer a darker roast here, whose roasted flavours hold up against the milk. The coffee-to-water ratio guide explains how to adjust strength.

New Orleans café au lait

New Orleans made café au lait its own, and two things set its version apart.

The milk is scalded. Unlike the steamed milk of European cafés, New Orleans café au lait is made with milk heated over the stove to just below boiling, which gives a hot, smooth drink with little foam.

The coffee contains chicory. Roasted, ground chicory root is blended with dark-roast coffee. It adds body and a dark, slightly bitter flavour; Wikipedia's account of the Café du Monde describes it as adding a chocolate-like flavour. The bitterness is offset by the powdered sugar on the beignets that come with it.

The Café du Monde opened as a coffee stand in the French Market in 1862 and is the oldest coffee shop in the city. Its menu has barely changed: dark-roasted coffee with chicory, black or au lait, and beignets in orders of three. For more than a century its neighbour in the market was Morning Call, founded in 1870.

How chicory got into the coffee

Chicory as a coffee extender is much older than New Orleans. Root chicory has long been grown in Europe as a coffee substitute; in 1766, when Frederick the Great banned coffee imports into Prussia, a Brunswick innkeeper started manufacturing a substitute, and in Napoleonic France chicory often turned up as an adulterant in coffee or as a replacement for it. France still sells a 60% chicory, 40% coffee mixture under the name Ricoré.

In New Orleans the habit grew out of war. By the 1840s, the port of New Orleans was the second-largest importer of coffee in the United States, after New York. When Union naval blockades during the Civil War cut the port off, Louisianans began stretching their coffee with chicory root — and the taste stayed long after the blockade ended.

What chicory is

Chicory is a blue-flowered plant of the daisy family. Its root is rich in inulin — up to about 20% — a fibre-like carbohydrate with roughly a tenth of the sweetness of sugar, and its bitterness comes mainly from compounds called lactucin and lactucopicrin. Roasted and ground, the root is what goes into coffee blends.

It is a coffee substitute, not coffee, so it brings no caffeine of its own: coffee substitutes are usually caffeine-free. A coffee-and-chicory blend therefore has less caffeine than the same weight of pure coffee, in proportion to how much chicory it contains.

Caffeine and calories

At the USDA's 40 mg of caffeine per 100 g of brewed coffee, a café au lait made with 150 ml of coffee carries about 60 mg — less with a chicory blend, more if you brew extra strong. The caffeine guide compares other drinks.

With 150 ml of whole milk at the USDA's 61 kcal per 100 g, it comes to roughly 90–95 kcal before sugar.

For the Spanish and Latin American equivalent made with espresso, see the café con leche guide; for the espresso-and-microfoam version, the latte guide.