A Better Way to Enjoy Pumpkin Spice
Can we fix the mistake of the pumpkin spice latte?
“This would taste better with some pumpkin,” said no one ever in the history of coffee drinking. Yet here we are, in the brisk days of fall, facing the return of pumpkin spice lattes, the seasonal drink some love and many love to hate.
The infamous beverage was introduced by Starbucks more than a decade ago, and the season hasn’t been quite the same since. Every fall the PSL is copied by countless coffee chains and echoed by an avalanche of pumpkin-spice-flavored products from Cheerios (meh) to peanut butter (not recommended) to Beemster cheese (really, really not recommended). Legend has it that Starbucks testers invented the pumpkin spice latte after sitting down to a snack of dark espresso and pumpkin pie, which — unlike the PSL — actually sounds delicious.
Much has been written about the fact that pumpkin spice lattes rarely contain pumpkin; Starbucks was famously shamed into adding a microscopic amount of pumpkin to their version of the drink in 2015. But pumpkin was never the point. The moniker “pumpkin spice” describes the spices we add to cooked pumpkin in a bid to disguise its blandness. In the case of a Starbucks pumpkin spice latte, the blend includes cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, but pumpkin spice blends often include other warming…
