The Café Du Monde Experience: French Beignets and Café au Lait

Over the past few months, we ticked off our bucket list of visiting the colorful, jazzful, carnivalian (yeah, we just made these words up!) city of New Orleans, Louisiana. Throughout the USA, New Orleans (NOLA, as we like to call it) is known for its Bourbon Street bars, spicy Cajun food, and carnival wild parties during the ‘Mardi Gras’ festival. But also, the city is known for its French heritage, which is apparent with cobble-stone streets, a French quarter, ornate architecture, and perhaps the most famous coffee shop in the southern USA called Café Du Monde.

Chicory-based Coffee Beans

If you ever visit Café Du Monde’s, and we highly recommend doing so, there is at least a 30-minute-long queue of people waiting religiously to have this coffee, and just two things on the menu: Beignets (i.e., French donuts), and café au lait, which is a special chicory-based coffee with steamed milk. You can buy the Café Du Monde coffee in local stores around; in this blog, we will use the one bought from their stores. Specifically, the coffee powder, which is a mix of medium ground arabica beans with chicory, is something specific to the NOLA experience. Essentially, chicory is the root of endive (a type of lettuce), and it is dark roasted and ground to give a chocolate-like flavor to café au lait. Historically, NOLA was a French colony, and during the civil war, when coffee become scarce, around 20 % chicory was added to the coffee beans to increases the mass, and flavor of the brew. Ironically, this newfound flavor is a complementing behavior between the bitter dark French roast with a sweet chocolate nature of chicory.

What is Café au Lait?

We are pretty sure that you have been to coffee cafés, and seen café au lait on the menu, and wonder how to pronounce it, and what the heck is it? It’s very simple, it means ‘coffee with milk'. Yeah, that’s it! More precisely, it's half part of brewed coffee (espresso or drip coffee), and half part of steamed milk. Thus, if you do not want to fly to New Orleans, book an expensive hotel in the French quarter, and then wait 30 minutes in a queue to get into Café Du Monde then, we have the solution for you.

How to brew Café au Lait in the comfort of your home?

As mentioned earlier, you can make a cup of drip coffee, and just mix it with steamed milk and be done, or you can experience a much better cup and use an espresso machine. Fortunately, we procured an espresso machine, a basic one from Target or Walmart would do fine. It’s very interesting to see the working of an espresso machine, and we will go through the steps of how to use one.

1. The espresso, which is the coffee concentrate you get from subjecting the coffee powder to pressurized steam, can ideally only be made with 5-10 bar of steam. Basically, you need 5-10 times of the atmospheric pressure through a coffee-bean holder to adequately extract all its flavor in the cup. The image below is a schematic (courtesy Iam Nee), which will make things easier to understand.

2. The steam is generated in a heater within the espresso machine, and in the version of espresso machine we have, you need to have 2 cups of water to add to the heater.

3. Then, we need to fill up the ground coffee, in this case, the Café Du Monde chicory-based coffee in the filter. If we are making 2 cups of coffee, we need to fill the filter up to the 2-cup mark. An excess amount of ground coffee provides more cake resistance, and we get less extract out of it (Darcy’s Law, sorry we are nerds!).

4. Once you fit the stainless-steel filter, you just simply turn on the espresso machine, and wait for it to generate steam.

5. The steam pressure will keep on rising, and at a critical point it can break the cake resistance, and you will see the coffee dripping from the filter.

6. While the espresso machine is doing its magic, take the same amount of whole milk as the amount of water, heat it, and put it in a milk frother. If you do not have a frother or a steam pipe at the side of the espresso machine, then just simply heat the milk on the stovetop until it just starts to boil.

7. Finally, pour the coffee concentrate into the cup of your choice, we have a Texas-cup, yee-haw!!, and then add the steamed milk with froth to complete your café au lait.

The Verdict

Generally, we do not prefer coffees with high milk and syrup content because it combats the natural origin taste of the bean. Our previous blog post on Cuban Coffee can explain this approach in a bit more detail. The amalgamation of thick frothy steamed milk and not so bitter chocolaty chicory coffee makes the Café au lait a very relieving drink. Furthermore, as the Halloween season dawns closer, and the winter is coming!, the café au lait is the perfect warm fuzzy hot beverage that you can enjoy on a cold wintery morning. Our apartment has a cozy-small balcony, and the matutinal breeze accompanied by a snug knit sweater, a Monday motivation podcast, and a freshly brewed hot cup of café au lait is the perfect morning routine.

A chocolate chip cookie or biscotti to go with coffee is the ubiquitous choice, but as you might have guessed, we are a bit nerdier and enthu-passionate about the magic of the brew, and so we procured the authentic beignet mix (i.e., French donuts) from café du Monde in NOLA, and will bake (or in this case shallow fry it).

Beignets: Sugar-coated happiness in a square shape!

A beignet (pronounced as BEN-YAY) is a French deep-fried, fritter-like, square-shaped pillowy pastry that is usually made from a choux pastry dough (pâte à choux). It’s coated with powdered sugar at the end which gives it the major taste. It was brought to the US and NOLA especially in the 18th century by French colonists. Primarily prepared as a breakfast pastry, it can also be served as a post-meal dessert, as the Creole cuisine reports.

How to make Beignets in the comfort of your home?

Café Du Monde has made it very easy for us to enjoy beignets (just like the ones we get at the café in NOLA) at home by selling a dry pre-mix of the delicacy. Although we bought it from the café itself, it’s also available on Amazon as a single pack or a pack of two. The premix also comes with easy-to-understand detailed instructions on making the beignets by yourself and with basic bakeware at home. In this blog, we will be going over the beignets recipe for premix as well as from scratch since some of us would love to achieve the same flavor and texture of beignets from scratch as compared to premix. Let’s begin with beignets from the premix: this process makes about 40 beignets.

1. We begin with a medium-sized bowl and empty the contents of the beignet premix with 1.5 cups of water. The amount of water is the key here since it can alter the final dough consistency.

2. Mix the ingredients and water with an egg whisk to achieve homogeneity, no chunks of flour mix should remain, and it should form a smooth and soft dough. If it looks stiff like a shortcrust pastry (pie dough), add a spoon of water to soften it.

3. Now, take some additional flour in a bowl for rolling it into a sheet and sprinkle some on a kitchen surface. It’s time to get the baker’s hands i.e., floury hands and rolling pin to flatten the dough. Transfer the soft dough from the bowl onto the surface for the rolling process.

4. The dough might stick to our hands and the rolling pin and here the additional flour that we kept aside in a bowl comes to great use. Flour keeps the dough from sticking to surfaces. This dough needs plenty of flour.

5. Flatten the beignet dough using the rolling pin to about 1 mm thickness (use a ruler to measure it precisely) and cut 2-inch squares using a pizza cutter.

6. Usually, we use the scraps of left-over dough from the edges just to be frugal. In this case, if we remix these scraps and cut them into squares, we will end up with hard, tough, and chewy beignets.

7. In a bigger frying vessel, take enough quantity of non-flavored and non-fragrant cooking oil, an example could be canola oil, and let it heat up.

8. Add just enough raw beignet squares to the hot oil once it is heated so that the temperature of the oil does not drop too much while frying. Do not add too many pieces to the oil or else the oil temperature will drop, and your beignets will be fried flat and not puff up.

9. Meanwhile, prepare a large bowl/plate with some paper towels to soak any extra oil after frying. Once the beignets get golden to light brown color after fluffing up, they’re ready to be taken out of the fryer. Take them out of the fryer and over onto the bowl/plate with paper towels to soak residual oil.

10. Finally, we take ½ cup of powdered sugar (or confectioner’s sugar) in a closed container. Add some puffed beignets to this container and shake them gently, such that the powdered sugar gets coated on the beignet’s surface homogeneously and uniformly.

The Verdict

The Beignets, and deep-fried, sweet, square-shaped pieces of dough that taste like classic donuts that have a sugar glaze on top. As donuts and hot coffee go well together, beignets equivalently pair very well with a cup of hot coffee. A Café au lait along with the beignets is a cherry on the cake and maybe that’s why Café Du Monde has been making profits through in-store service of the coffee and beignets as well as the sale of beignet premix with coffee powder. A relieving chocolate chicory coffee paired with the sugary beignets is a gourmet combination made for the ultimate comfort of your drooling tastebuds. Anyone with even a wee bit of sugar tooth will smile upon tasting these beignets, they’re so good! Especially as we need to keep ourselves warm in this cold Texas weather, a tiny layer of fat from the beignets would help, I guess. These beignets can be stored in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours after making the dough if covered with a plastic wrap. To serve, just deep fry them freshly at the last moment and coat them with powdered sugar, this will be the only way to prep ahead.