Bobby Flay's Pumpkin Lattes | Brunch @ Bobby’s | Food Network

Let's get going on to our pumpkin latte. I'm making a brown sugar simple syrup. So it's white sugar, brown sugar, and some water, kind of equal parts. And then I always use the canned pumpkin. You know, pumpkin is squash, so this is just basically poached squash that's cooked. It's always consistent, and actually, it's a very good product. One of the things that I always say about pumpkin, pumpkin doesn't really have a lot of flavor. It's the spices that we think of as the pumpkin flavor. That's why they call things pumpkin spice. You see pumpkin spice everything these days. I did a TV segment once. I asked people what pumpkin tastes like, just like kind of man on the street kind of thing. Like, I mean, I'll ask you, what does pumpkin taste like? And you're going to tell me it tastes like cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger and all those pumpkin spices. But pumpkin itself has very little flavor. So you really need to pump up the flavor of pumpkin with those spices and things that are sweet, like maple syrup and honey. And pumpkin is sort of like, it's almost like a vehicle for flavor. I'm going to start by using about a third of a cup of our pumpkin in here. We're going to take our pumpkin spice. This is a combination of ingredients like cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, maybe a little bit of allspice. If you want to make your own pumpkin spice, you know, be my guest, but, you know, now there's so many good quality spice blends like pumpkin spice, so you might as well just use it. So I'm going to put a little bit of that spice in there. So I'm just going to let the moisture from the pumpkin heat up a little bit and actually open up the oils of all those spices in there just to kind of bring out the flavors. Now, I don't know about you, but I like to eat pumpkin during the season of pumpkin. You know, as soon as the summer's over, you start seeing the pumpkins go on the side of the road. Then you'll start seeing like the pumpkin spice lattes in your local coffee shop. There's pumpkin in basically every single thing. If you're making it, somebody's doing a pumpkin version of it somewhere. So we're just going to kind of stir this and we're not going to bring it to a boil. We don't want it to get cloudy. We're just going to let the brown sugar, simple syrup, the pumpkin and the pumpkin spices just kind of hang out together, and then we'll strain it out. So for the pumpkin spice latte, I'm going to add a little bit of vanilla extract and then I'm going to strain this out. I want to strain out basically the pumpkin. If you don't have cheesecloth, which I'm using here, a really fine strainer will work just as well. And then you just want to like very gently push it through. So basically you're just getting pumpkin spice syrup. So this will keep for a very long time because there's lots of sugar that will preserve it. And you can use this syrup over ice cream. I think it will work really well. You can put it in your, of course, your coffee or your tea. And you can also use this on the like yogurt or even like the parfaits that we're going to be making later. With the granola, with the yogurt, a little bit more of this syrup. We're going to put this in the refrigerator and let it cool. I'll be honest, I love making espresso like this. I mean, it's kind of cool. You don't need some expensive espresso machine. Put some water in the bottom. And then we're going to just pack in the espresso. My feeling is if you're going to drink coffee, you want to taste it. You want to feel it. Screw the top on. Just put it on the fire. And I need to froth some milk. So all we do for this, we're going to scald the milk. And then these three ingredients, pumpkin spice syrup, the espresso and the frothy milk, that's going to make our latte. Latte time. I'm going to pour some of our scalded milk into our frother. Pump some air into it. Gets it nice and light and frothy, which is exactly what you want. So we're going to start by putting a little bit of the pumpkin syrup in the bottom. Some of our espresso. And now some frothy milk. Looks good. Look at that. Pumpkin spice latte. You know what the key to this is? You want it to taste like latte or espresso with just a hint of the pumpkin spice running through it. That's all. You don't want it to be overbearing. You just want it to smell like Thanksgiving. And that's the key. And that's what this does.