Soy, With Steam and Attitude

All trends start somewhere, and for the sake of argument, you could call this the cradle of the soy latte.

Colleen Crosby recalls making her first one in 1978, not long after she and her husband opened a coffeehouse here. A friend who was into two of Northern California’s signature passions--veganism and gourmet coffee--had wondered if the Italian drink of steamed milk and espresso could be done with no animal products. Crosby remembers shoving a pitcher of soy milk under her espresso machine steamer and thinking, “Hmm,” when it came out.

“It looked like silly putty,” she says, laughing.

Twenty-five years later, the drink that seemed fringe even to Santa Cruz hippies is moving suddenly, even deliciously, mainstream. Soy lattes are in high-end restaurants, in airport lounges, in Midwestern shopping centers. They are on the menu at all 3,300-plus Starbucks. In Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, some coffeehouses report, as many as 10% of their coffee-and-milk drinks are made with soy milk. Renee Zellweger reportedly drinks them, as do Britney Spears and the drummer for Weezer. The popular rock anthem “Drops of Jupiter” compares love to “the best soy latte you ever had.”

In America’s coffeehouses, however, the soy latte remains the bane of the barista.

“See? Look at this. It’s supposed to look like melted ice cream. Does this look like melted ice cream?” Anna Lorito ladles a big spoon into a pitcher of frothed soy milk. It is thick. It is beige. It is fragrant. But, apparently, it is not yet up to par. Lorito works at a Peet’s Coffee & Tea in San Francisco, and in her nine months at the bar, she has found soy lattes completely frustrating.

“Ask anyone,” she says, her silver nose ring glinting. “Giving good soy foam is hard.”

The taste of a soy latte differs considerably from a conventional latte, in which espresso is mixed with steamed milk, then topped with a cap of milk foam. For one thing, soy milk isn’t milk; rather it is an extract of ground, soaked and cooked soybeans. Some soy milks are bland, some are grassy; some are sweetened to suit the tastes of American consumers, others have the “beanier” taste preferred in Asian markets.

At its best, a latte made with soy milk is to regular coffee what a tall Guinness is to a draft beer--a heartier, almost maltier-tasting variation on the standard, with a thick, brown, creamy head.

Such heights, however, are difficult to achieve because soy milk is so much trickier to steam.

“You have to go into it kind of gently--it’s easy to scorch if you slam into it with full-strength steam,” says Patrick Main, the coffee bar quality manager for the Emeryville, Calif.-based Peet’s Coffee & Tea chain.

Harold McGee, who has written several books on food science, says this is because soy milk, unlike regular milk, is brought to a boil in its manufacturing process, which “presensitizes” its proteins to steam heat.

“Soy milk has already been beaten up pretty badly by the time it gets to the steamer,” he says. “So the proteins are less effective in doing what they need to do in a steamed milk product, which is to bond at just the right time to stabilize the structure of its bubbles.”

This is apparently why soy-latte-at-its-best can be tough to track down. And why soy latte, at its worst, can end up tasting like livestock feed and looking like old dishwater--wan and thinly bubbled and gray-brown. Elizabeth Briggs, a professor of culinary arts at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., offers a trick: “Don’t leave the steam nozzle in your soy milk for more than a minute and a half, total. Get it hot for a minute, pull the nozzle up to just below the surface and froth the milk for just maybe 30 seconds.”

In other words, get in and get out.

The rise of the soy latte is one of those random crossings of true believers that seem to occur with preternatural frequency on the West Coast. In this case, the collision was between vegetarian purists, who drank soy because it was a sustainable, non-animal product, and coffee purists, who, from the late 1960s, sought to raise mainstream consciousness about the virtues of fresh-roasted whole beans. Both groups have been influential for decades in Northern California, although it wasn’t until the mid-1990s--and the rise of the Bay Area’s neo-hippie, dot-com culture--that their convergence began to catch on.

Until then, coffeehouse owners say, the soy latte was a sort of sometime fetish that they chalked up to Nor-Cal eccentricity.

“For years, we had this woman who used to come in every morning with her own soy milk,” laughs Daryl Ross, who owns four Berkeley coffeehouses, including Caffe Strada and the Free Speech Movement Cafe on the UC Berkeley campus. “Really attractive blond woman. Professionally dressed. Mysterious. Trench coat. OK, I’m kidding about the trench coat. But really, she came in every day.”

Peet’s coffee bar quality manager Main says that his chain didn’t even put soy lattes on the menu until after 1995. People had asked for them occasionally, he says, but they were treated as special orders. Then Peet’s opened a coffeehouse down the street from Crosby’s Santa Cruz Coffee Roasting Co.

By that time, Crosby says, soy milk was a staple among coffee condiments in Santa Cruz, from the health-food stores to the coffee carts on street corners. “There’s an Earth-consciousness here you don’t find everywhere,” she says. “Santa Cruz is a hip town and you’d have been unhip not to carry it.”

So when Peet’s opened in Santa Cruz, Main says, they were deluged with orders for espresso and steamed soy milk.

“The requests were far above anything we’d seen before then, even in Berkeley,” he says. “In the first week, we got 120 requests and we figured we’d better do something. So we went out and bought every dairy substitute we could find--soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, oat milk, and we did blind tastings. In 1996 we rolled it out everywhere with Vitasoy Creamy Original soy milk, although we have since switched to Vitasoy Enriched Original because it’s a little bit lighter and more like milk.”

By the end of the decade, soy lattes were such a Bay Area fixture that customers could be overheard demanding to know the brand of soy milk, if it was from whole beans or “isolates,” if it was organic and if it was Asian-or American-style.

In Berkeley, Daryl Ross broke down and put his mystery woman’s soy latte on the menu; soy milk orders, he says, have shot up 51% in the last four years. In San Francisco, coffeehouse regulars claimed they could tell at a glance who’d order a soy latte: “Just look for the SUV and the ponytail and the Nikes,” offers North Beach artist Bob Jones, “and the backward baseball cap.”

Meanwhile, the trend spread East.

“By the fall of last year, we got such a groundswell of demand that we had to put it on the menu and roll it out in all our stores,” says Mark Jameson, executive vice president of Bucks County Coffee, a Philadelphia-area coffeehouse chain.

“Now it’s 3% to 5% of our suburban business and probably 8% to 10% in our campus markets. I hear it’s a primarily female-driven product, although I can’t really say for sure--I’m not female and I’m not much of a soy milk drinker. But it’s turning out to be what low-fat milk used to be.”

At the Midwestern coffeehouse chain Caribou Coffee, sales of soy cappuccinos, mochas and lattes have risen by about 60% in the two years since they were put on the menu, says marketing director Chris Toal.

Tom Barr, director of hot beverages for Starbucks Coffee Co. in Seattle, says the chain has seen “strong growth in the use of soy milk” in the last two or three years. Though none of the chains would release sales figures, Barr estimates that Starbucks sold “several million” soy milk drinks nationally last year.

The attraction appears to be part fashion, part philosophy and part midlife fear factor. First, soy is a vegetarian staple, and, according to a recent poll by Teenage Research Unlimited, 25% of American teens believe vegetarianism is “cool.” (“Drops of Jupiter,” the song with the soy latte reference, climbed to No. 4 on the U.S. singles charts last year.)

Second, soy milk has held its appeal for the true believers. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, soy milk and espresso is known as a “vegan latte.” Jeff and Sabrina Nelson, owners of the San Fernando Valley-based vegetarian Web site VegSource Interactive Inc., say soy is the perfect creamer for people with lactose intolerance and animal-rights issues.

“I only drink decaf coffee and I put soy milk in it,” says Sabrina Nelson. “I know--people think, ‘Good God, decaf with soy milk? You’re not even drinking coffee!’ But see, you don’t have the fat, you don’t have the caffeine and you don’t have the dairy, but you still have the taste of coffee. My only complaint is that Starbucks charges 40 cents more for their soy lattes.”

(Barr, the Starbucks executive, says they charge more because soy milk is more expensive and because switching from milk to milk substitute creates “a shift in the deployment of labor.” Most other chains upcharge for soy as well.)

The biggest growth engine, however, appears to be the health concerns of aging baby boomers. Peter Golbitz, a food company consultant who publishes an annual directory to the soybean industry, notes that sales of soy foods in general have grown at about 20% a year for the last five years.

“Growth for an established food product is usually around 2% a year, and is based pretty much around population growth,” Golbitz says. “Soy foods, though, are skyrocketing because of a major shift toward vegetable proteins. In a sense, the demographic involved is the same as the gourmet coffee drinker--upscale, and either young and attuned to natural food movements, or baby boomers who are changing diets for health reasons, or who were granola crunchers from way back.”

Interest in soy as a health aid has been especially intense since 1999, when the federal government gave food companies the go-ahead to claim that soy protein reduces cholesterol and the risk of heart disease. At the same time, other research suggested soy could prevent bone-density loss and ease some symptoms of menopause. Cancer also entered the picture as health activists expressed concern about the possible risks of drinking the milk of cows that had been fed growth hormones.

Soy has health risks, too; some research, for example, indicates there may be an increased cancer risk for post-menopausal women who consume the supplement form of certain soy components known as isoflavones. Nonetheless, Golbitz says, the quest for health has been a boon, and one of the biggest drivers has been soy milk, which tastes better than it used to thanks to improvements in processing and plant breeding. Soy milk sales reached $550 million last year.

Not surprisingly, coffeehouses make up only a fraction of those sales; most soy milk is sold in supermarkets and health food stores. “But coffeehouses are high visibility and mainstream,” he says. “Some consumers ask for it, so they put it on the menu and more consumers see it and figure they’ll try some in their coffee, just as a start.”

In fact, the coffeehouse niche has become such a marketing opportunity for soy milk companies that one--White Wave, the producer of Silk soy milk--is soliciting alliances with coffeehouses to promote Silk by name on their menus.

“Millions of gallons are going through these coffeehouses and nobody’s marketing. We want to brand the category,” says Steve Demos, president of White Wave.

Such plans, however, don’t make life easier for the hard-working steamers of all that soy milk.

“OK, look,” says Peet’s Lorito, shoving another pitcher of Vitasoy under the steam nozzle. “I’m easing it in ... I’m keeping it high ... I’m getting the milk going in a spiral ... but see?”

Actually, it looks terrific. But there is soy and then there is soy in Northern California, a fact that has led some baristas to avoid soy lattes altogether.

“Yeah, people ask for ‘em. We don’t do ‘em,” says Ida Zoubi, whose family owns the venerable Caffe Trieste in North Beach. “I mean, soy milk?” She shrugged, wiping the glass counter.

“Ruins the taste of good coffee, I think.”