There are many, many drinks all around the world that people enjoy. Out of all the things that you might come across at your local café or bakery, you might find that one of the most popular drinks that people will enjoy will be some variant on coffee.
After all, coffee is an immensely popular drink that people love both for its taste and for the fact that it can be a quick and easy way to keep yourself awake in the morning.
Because there are so many possibilities for what you can do with coffee, there are going to be countless different drinks that you can create with coffee, meaning that you will easily be able to find something that wakes you up when you need it, but will also have a pleasant taste going down.
In the United States, cafés will commonly have quite a few coffee variations, with some of the most popular being cappuccinos, macchiatos, and lattes.
All three of these drinks are incredibly similar in composition, but their taste can vary drastically. All of these drinks will make use of two ingredients, with those being milk and espresso.
Cappuccinos will usually have equal parts espresso, steamed milk, and milk foam, whereas lattes tend to be just a shot of espresso with steamed milk on top, and macchiatos will be a shot of espresso with only a splash of milk to take an edge off the bitterness.
Despite the similarity of all these drinks, there is one that will stand out above the rest as one of the most popular drinks, and that is going to be the latte. For those who may not know, lattes are the drink at cafes that usually have some form of art done with the steamed milk.
Lattes are not only popular for their appearance, but the steamed milk can take much of the bitterness out of the espresso shot, making it a quick and easy way to wake yourself up in the morning.
If you want to know more about the latte, such as whether it typically has sugar in it, and where it came from, then you are going to have a fair bit to learn.
After all, it is believed that lattes, while not in name, have been around for at least the past two centuries.
How Did the Latte Become What It Is?
The origin of the latte is a little bit more difficult to trace than one might think. This is because the latte’s name, the caffe latte, comes from the Italian phrase of “caffe e latte,” which literally means “coffee and milk.”
What this means is that, in the past, people have referenced “lattes” without necessarily referring to the drinks with art and steamed milk on top.
As a whole, the combination of coffee and milk has been a part of Europe’s cuisine for the past several hundred years. The idea of mixing milk and coffee together, in various proportions and with different kinds of coffee and milk, has been around for ages and has been commonplace for a very long time.
However, the phrase “latte” to describe these drinks has only come around in the past century, making it hard to pinpoint when people decided to call these drinks something different.
Traditionally, in Italy where the latte first originated from, lattes are prepared at home and are had as a breakfast drink exclusively. They use a moka pot to brew the coffee and that brewed coffee is poured into a cup of heated milk, with sugar being a very rare addition, if at all.
This is a fair bit different than the way the United States and other countries prepare lattes, but as with regarding the origins of any food or drink, it is important to note how the origin country prepares it.
Outside of Italy, the latte will usually be prepared in a glass beginning with a shot of espresso. The cup is then filled with steamed milk with a very fine layer of milk foam on top to allow for the art to be made and for it to be soft on the mouth when you first take a sip of it.
In the United States specifically, lattes are often sweetened whether you want them to be or not, with some of the cafes adding up to 3% sugar to the latte.
This means that whether or not your latte will contain sugar will depend heavily on where you are getting the latte from. If you are travelling abroad and you stop at an Italian café for a latte with your breakfast, there’s a good chance that it will not contain any added sugars.
On the other hand, when you visit most of the cafes in the United States, you can expect the latte to have a fair amount of added sugar in it.
Milk, Steamed Milk, and Sugar Content
On another note, milk naturally has sugars in it. This is completely normal and it is not something that you can easily avoid.
On this basis, all lattes are going to have at least some sugar in them from the presence of milk in them. For many people, the question becomes a matter of whether or not there is any added, unnecessary sugar in the drink as well.
Many people believe that there is more sugar in lattes than there really is, and this is because lattes rely on steamed milk, rather than any other form of milk, in the recipe.
Steaming the milk will change the texture and nutritional composition of the milk, and one of these changes is going to be that the natural sugars that are already present in milk become sweeter than they normally would be.
To go into more detail, sugar is usually the second most prevalent compound in your typical cow’s milk, after water at 87%. Sugar will make up around 4.8% of your standard milk, and most of this sugar content comes from a specific type of sugar known as lactose. If you or someone that you know is lactose intolerant, then you may have heard of this sugar.
Lactose is an important sugar in milks, and is responsible for the way that milk tastes. It is also responsible for the souring that happens to milk as it spoils because bacteria in the milk break the lactose down into lactic acid.
Keep in mind that dairy-free milks do not always equate to sugar-free milks. Most dairy-free milks will have less sugar in them than cow’s milk, but they will still have sugar in them, and in some cases, may even have more added sugars in them to try and replicate the cow milk flavor.
This means that as long as you are using milk in your latte, which is one of the core ingredients, it is going to have at least some sugar in it.
Steaming the milk changes the milk on a chemical level, as you are both introducing air into the milk and heating it beyond a temperature that most milk will usually encounter. As you heat the milk during the steaming process, that heat will break down the long chains of carbohydrates (the sugars in milk), turning them into much simpler sugars.
To the human body, when the carbohydrate has been turned into a more simplistic form, it will be easier for your body to taste and recognize. This is why steaming the milk, even if it doesn’t add any sugar to the milk, will create a sweeter-tasting milk than what you would normally have.
Because of this, many people who have a latte with properly steamed milk do not feel the need to add extra sugar to the drink, as the steamed milk already takes much of the bitter edge off the espresso.
How Commonplace Is it to Add Sugars?
Now that you know more about what exactly lattes are and what the process behind making them is, you might be torn about the idea of adding sugar to your own latte.
Most people who are not already accustomed to the overly sweet versions of lattes that are found in most cafes are perfectly fine without adding any extra sugar to their own lattes.
This is because the process of steaming milk will help immensely to increase the sweetness, which puts off the harsh taste of the espresso underneath it.
With that being said, because it is so common in the United States to add sugars to the latte already, many people have become accustomed to that taste and believe that this is how a latte should taste.
When someone believes that the way a latte should taste is a way that has too much sugar in it, then when that person tries the latte again without the added sugar, there’s a good chance that he or she will find it too bitter for their liking.
Because of this cycle, there is very little chance of the United States stopping the habit of adding sugars to their lattes. If you are planning on getting a latte within the United States, you can expect there to be a fair amount of added sugar or syrup in your latte.
This practice is not as commonplace outside of the United States, but some cafes may still practice doing this. It is really only in Italy where you will find that people rarely, if ever, add sugar to their lattes.
Most people will ask for their lattes to be sweetened, and many places will already add sweetener in one form or another to the latte.
If you are someone who can only have a limited amount of sugar at a time, or if you have to pay attention to your blood sugar levels, you will need to keep this in mind the next time you plan on ordering a latte from anywhere outside of Italy.
Additionally, there are plenty of people who will order their latte with some form of flavored syrup added to it. This added syrup can be any flavor that the person wishes it to be, but some of the most popular flavors of syrup include vanilla, caramel, toffee nut, and hazelnut.
As you might be able to imagine, all of these syrups are made out of nothing but sugar and flavoring agents, meaning that if you ask for it to be added to your latte, you are going to be adding even more sugar into the mix.
While there isn’t going to be much of the syrup added to begin with, when you factor in the reality that many places will already add sugar to the latte during the mixing process, and that people will ask for their lattes to be sweetened on top of that, you begin to realize exactly how much sugar is added into these drinks that do not even require sugar to be added in the first place.
Chances are that if you order yourself a latte, then you can assume that there is going to be a fair amount of sugar added into it unnecessarily.
When all is said and done, all lattes are going to have sugar in them, simply by the fact that milk is a required ingredient in the latte itself. Even if you are not using the standard cow’s milk to make the steamed milk, other dairy-free alternatives to milk are going to have some amount of sugar in them, albeit a relatively small amount.
This naturally occurring sugar in lattes will have its taste exaggerated by the steaming process, which will turn the complex sugars into simpler forms that your body can more easily register, meaning that it will perceive a sweeter taste even though you aren’t actually adding more sugar to the milk when you steam it.
On top of this, most places will add some amount of sugar to your latte.
For some people, this additional sugar will be in the form of sugar mixed and dissolved into the drink itself. For other people, this could be an additional helping of sugar that was just added to the mix, or it could be in the form of a flavored syrup added to try and enhance the flavor of the latte itself.
No matter what kind of latte you choose to order, you can expect it to have some degree of sugar in it, no matter what.
I have a bachelor’s degree in Film/Video/Media Studies, as well as an associates degree in Communications. I began producing videos and musical recordings nearly 15 years ago. I am a guitarist and bassist in Southwest MI and have been in a few different bands since 2009, and in 2012 I began building custom guitars and basses in my home workshop as well. When I’m home, I love spending time with my three pets (a dog, cat, and snake) and gardening in my backyard.