Kitchen Secrets with Our Cuban Chef – Cortadito, Colada or Cafe con Leche

Cuban coffee is not one drink. It is one very dark espresso served four different ways, and the name you use depends on how much milk is in the cup, how big the cup is, and what time of day you are drinking it.

The system is simple once somebody explains it. The trouble is that nobody explains it, because everyone standing at the counter learned it as a child and assumes you did too.

So here it is. What espumita is and why it matters, what separates a cortadito from a cafe con leche, and why a colada was never meant for one person.

How coffee reached Cuba, and then Tampa

Coffee arrived in Cuba around the middle of the 1700s and stayed a minor crop for decades. It became an industry at the end of that century, when planters leaving the revolution in Saint-Domingue settled in the mountains of the east and brought their methods with them. They cut terraces into the slopes of the Sierra Maestra and built stone drying platforms into the hillsides. The ruins of those estates are still there.

What is served today is much newer than the plantations. The small cup, the very dark roast, the fine grind and the sugar beaten into the first drops belong to the twentieth century, to city cafes and street counters and the espresso machines that arrived with them. Cubans took an Italian machine and changed how it is used.

It reached Tampa with the cigar workers. From the 1880s Ybor City filled with families out of Havana and Key West, and the factories, bakeries and boarding houses around them ran on small cups of sweet coffee from before dawn. Cuban bread and cafe con leche were a normal breakfast in this city long before anyone thought to call it a tradition. It is still on the counter at five in the morning, a few miles from where those factories stood.

Espumita, the step that makes it Cuban

Espumita is the pale tan foam on top of a cafecito. It is not crema off the machine. It is sugar and coffee beaten together by hand, and it is the one step that turns espresso into Cuban coffee.

It works like this. Sugar goes into the jug first, roughly a spoonful for every shot. Then the first few drops of the extraction go on top of it, and nothing else. Those first drops are the darkest and thickest part of the coffee, and they are all you get to work with. You beat the sugar and those drops with a spoon, hard, for a minute or so, until the mixture lightens from dark brown to a pale caramel colour and thickens into a paste. The rest of the coffee is poured in on top and the paste rises back through it as foam.

Two things come out of that. The sugar dissolves completely, so the sweetness is even from the first sip to the last and there is no grit left in the bottom of the cup. And the foam takes the edge off a roast that would otherwise be sharp. Coffee sweetened by stirring sugar into the finished cup tastes rougher and looks flat. Anybody who drinks this every day can tell in one mouthful.

The four drinks and what each one means

Cafecito

A single sweetened shot with espumita on top, served in a cup about the size of your thumb. This is the base of everything else on the list, and it is what arrives if you walk up to a Cuban counter and ask for an espresso. It is also called cafe cubano.

You drink it in one or two mouthfuls, standing up, and then you keep moving. It is not a cup you sit with.

Colada

The same coffee, four to six shots of it, poured into one larger cup with a sleeve of small plastic thimbles tucked alongside. A colada is not a large coffee for one person. It is a round for a group, and the thimbles are the giveaway.

Cortadito

A cafecito cut with hot milk, roughly half and half, sometimes with a little less milk than that. Plenty of kitchens use evaporated milk, which is thicker and carries a faint sweetness of its own. It comes in a small glass, and you can see the coffee and the milk in bands before anyone stirs it. Not every counter lists it on the board.

This is the mid-morning drink. Too much coffee for the afternoon, not enough milk for breakfast.

Cafe con leche

Mostly hot milk with a shot or two of sweetened espresso stirred through it, in a full-size cup. Cafe con leche is breakfast, and for a lot of people it is the only coffee of the day that comes with a chair. The espresso is sweetened before it goes in, so taste it before you reach for anything else.

How a colada actually works

Somebody announces they are going for coffee, counts heads, and comes back with one cup and a stack of thimbles. That person pours, and pours for everybody else first. You do not reach in and serve yourself, and you do not fill a thimble to the brim, because the cup has to reach the end of the line.

The whole thing takes three minutes. Everyone is standing, nobody sits down, and then it is over and people go back to work. That is the point of it. A colada is a break that a whole shop or job site takes at the same moment, and the coffee is the excuse. Mid-afternoon is the classic hour, when the morning has worn off and dinner is still a long way away.

Chef’s notes

• A colada is four to six shots. Ordering one for yourself is not exactly a mistake, but you will feel it for the rest of the afternoon. If you want one strong cup, ask for a cafecito.
• Sugar is part of the method here, not a topping. Order a cafecito with no sugar and you get a plain dark espresso with no espumita at all, which is a different drink. If you want it less sweet, say so at the counter and the sugar comes down, but some has to go in or there is no foam.
• At home the espumita fails when you use too much coffee at the start. A moka pot gives you about a teaspoon of that first dark liquid, and a teaspoon is enough. Tip in half the pot and you end up with sweet coffee and nothing on top.
• Do not reheat it. Cuban coffee turns bitter and flat once it has stood, and warming it up again makes it worse. Make it fresh. The whole thing takes four minutes.

What to eat with it

Cafe con leche goes with bread. Cuban bread specifically, split, buttered and pressed flat on a griddle until the crust crackles. You dunk it in the cup. That is not bad manners here, it is close to the reason the cup is that wide, and the bread comes back out soft and warm with butter and coffee in it.

Mid-morning, a cafecito wants something sweet and flaky beside it, which is where pastelitos come in. A small cup also closes a meal. After roast pork, black beans and rice, nobody wants a large cup of anything, so it comes small and sweet, sometimes next to a slice of flan, and that is the end of lunch.

Come and get one

The machine is on from five in the morning Monday through Friday, six on Saturday and eight on Sunday, at 5555 S 78th St in Tampa. Order a colada for the office, a cafecito on your way past, or a cafe con leche with Cuban toast and take your time over it. Call ahead on (813) 450-2176, or look through the full Cuban menu and add coffee to whatever else you are picking up.