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As a millennial, I am one of the people whose Starbucks purchasing habit has been thwarted amid quarantine, so of course I can now afford to own a modest condo in an attractive metropolitan area.
Just kidding.
But I have learned how to make sweet, sweet chain coffee drinks at home.
There are two kinds of people at home during quarantine—people like my sister, who in the last 24 hours has baked two loaves of bread, tried a new martini recipe, roasted artichokes, and sieved homemade ricotta through a cheesecloth. And there are people like me—I have toasted four slices of bread.
But after I developed a religious commitment to making the trendy, very easy, very fluffy dalgona coffee, I suddenly feel like a cross between a homesteader and a food scientist. I do not have the temperament to see a focaccia recipe through, but I can and will mix sugar and coffee together to produce something that looks nice on Instagram. Making Starbucks drinks is one of the most rewarding activities possible for people in group two: it essentially involves dumping things into a cup and feeling productive.
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Remember coffee? Remember going places? Remember assembling various objects into a cute picture to prove to your friends that you were going places?
There is a lot of information online about how to make Starbucks drinks at home. I don’t know how to break this to you, but Starbucks is popular. Wanting to make the most authentic (well, authentic to the giant chain’s version) drinks possible, I scrolled Reddit forums, read food blogs, watched YouTube videos from Starbucks baristas, and tested recipes in my kitchen.
The biggest takeaway: Starbucks drinks (okay, Starbucks-adjacent drinks) are easy to make. Everything that’s in a typical drink—coffee, milk, sugar, basic flavoring—is already in your house. You need very little special equipment. You can make anything dairy-free or low-sugar, and you can swirl on as much caramel as you want.
