The two get mixed up because both are small espresso drinks with a little milk, and cafés don’t always agree on what either word means. The short version: a macchiato is espresso with a spoonful of foam, and a cortado is espresso with about as much warm milk as coffee. One is marked. The other is cut.
What Macchiato Means
Macchiato is Italian for stained or marked. A caffè macchiato is a single espresso marked with a dab of milk foam, just enough to leave a pale spot on the crema. The usual story is that Italian baristas marked the cups with milk so waiters could tell them apart. True or not, it describes the drink well: it’s an espresso, and the milk is almost a label.
A cortado goes much further. The milk roughly equals the espresso, usually a double shot, so it changes the body of the drink and softens the bitterness all the way through. You can taste the milk in a cortado. In a macchiato you mostly see it.
The Starbucks Problem
A lot of the confusion comes from the chains. At Starbucks, a Caramel Macchiato is vanilla syrup and steamed milk with espresso poured over the top and caramel drizzled across it, in cup sizes up to a venti. It’s a flavored latte built upside down, and it has very little to do with the Italian drink. Ask the same counter for an espresso macchiato and you’ll get something much closer to the original.
There’s one more macchiato to keep straight: the latte macchiato, a tall glass of steamed milk with espresso poured in so it layers. That’s the idea run backwards, milk stained with coffee.
Size and Ratio at a Glance
| Caffè macchiato | Cortado | |
|---|---|---|
| Espresso | Usually a single shot | Usually a double shot |
| Milk | A spoonful of foam | About as much warm milk as espresso |
| Total volume | About 40 to 60 ml | About 120 to 130 ml |
| Served in | Espresso cup | Small glass or cup |
Where the Lines Blur
Travel a little and the names start to overlap. In Argentina, the cortado people order all day is closer in size to a macchiato: a small cup of espresso cut with a little milk. In many Spanish bars, a cortado is a single espresso with a splash of warm milk, again nearer the macchiato than the one-to-one glass specialty cafés pour. And in Portugal the pingado, an espresso with a drop of milk, does the macchiato’s job.
If you want to know what you’ll get, look at the cups behind the counter before you order. An espresso cup means a macchiato-sized drink. A small glass means the milk will be doing more of the work.