About hot chocolate (hot cocoa, if you prefer). 4 October 2007 1:16 pm
Posted by Tracy in : America's Test Kitchen,breakfast,cooking,dessert,recipes,seasonality,vegan,vegetarian , trackback(I said I’d be all about the comfort food this week, didn’t I? It’s the least I can do to counteract this crazy sudden falling into winter we’ve got going on around here.)
A few Thursdays ago I shared a scary picture of what happens when you leave coconut milk in your fridge for three weeks (surprise surprise, it grows mold!) and the fabulous Chiara told me I should make chocolate coconut rice pudding. So far I have not found a recipe for such a thing, but I did spot Chocolate-Coconut Pudding on 101 Cookbooks, and it looks promising except that these days I only seem to want chocolate in hot cocoa form, because of the freaking fall, by which I mean the cold and the water falling from the sky.
Next, a little fangirlhood, albeit of the somewhat conditional love persuasion: As much as I love America’s Test Kitchen (enough to post a silly video about them yesterday), their newer magazine, Cook’s Country, is not one of my favorites. Too shiny, too glossy, too colorful, too much emphasis on all quick and easy all the time. I know it can be intimidating or inaccessible or whatever, but give me Cook’s Illustrated, with its black-and-white minimalism and line drawings and sometimes long, complicated recipes any day. Still, I’m subscribed to the free email list that gets me news about all of ATK’s publications, and I must admit that even the Cook’s Country messages are worth reading, for instance, this hot chocolate taste test from a few months ago (available to their email list subscribers only, but it’s free to join). I liked the somewhat scary fun facts about why the “just add water” mixes often turned out to make creamier cocoa than the kinds made for adding hot milk (answer: thanks to the magic of food additives!) In case you’d forgotten, I am a giant nerd.
However, my nerditude and my chocolate preferences are such that I only rarely use hot chocolate mixes of any kind (camping trips, of course, are a big exception — all hail the awesome power of backcountry flavor). Even the Cook’s Country reviewers prefer their cocoa “not too sweet,” and I’m happy to agree with them. Wholeheartedly. So I was happy to read that they liked Lake Champlain All-Natural Traditional Hot Chocolate, with its short and not too sweet ingredient list; I’ve been working on a container of their Aztec Spicy Hot Chocolate mix for almost a year, and it’s pretty good (less blazingly hot than Dagoba’s Xocolatl, but also not as sweet — I actually mix the latter with cocoa powder to dilute the sugar). However, I will always love plain old cocoa powder and sugar the very most. So, finally, without further ado, hot cocoa as I like it best:
Hot Chocolate From Scratch, Like Tracy Intends It
You need:
- cocoa powder (natural or Dutch process; either is fine)
- sugar (optional)
- salt (just a little and very optional)
- milk (cow or your favorite non-dairy: almond and hazelnut are both very delicious and the latter in particular is like drinking hot Nutella)
- a mug, a spoon, and some way of heating the milk (stove and saucepan or microwave are probably the most fun and easy).
I highly recommend the stove and saucepan method if you’re making more than one cup of cocoa, and in that case a whisk is a very nice stirring implement indeed, for breaking up cocoa lumpiness.
What you do:
Use the mug to measure the right amount of milk. Leave a little room for cocoa powder and sugar, especially if you’re heating the milk in the microwave, because overflow is no fun to clean up.
If you’re using the microwave, heat the milk until steaming, maybe a minute at a time to be on the safe side (again, the overflow is no fun to clean up and microwaves vary wildly in power and suchforth). Then mix in about a heaping tablespoon of cocoa for every 8 fluid ounces or so of milk. When in doubt, use more cocoa, unless you are one of those milk chocolate people in which case you might be better off using a premade mix, you big weirdo. Add a teensy pinch of salt if you’re feeling daring (and thank Alton Brown when it makes the cocoa more intensely chocolate-y). If you’re feeling really daring add a dash of cinnamon and/or cayenne (although personally I think these are overkill in cocoa made with nut milk). Also when in doubt, give it a few extra stirs because there’s always a few lumps of cocoa stuck to the bottom of the mug (and it’s an especially big bummer if you’re using extra spices and those don’t get mixed in right).
If you’re rocking the stovetop method (very highly recommended if making more than one serving of cocoa because I really don’t like to nuke more than one mug at a time), you can mix the cocoa and optional salt and spices right into the cold milk in your cooking pan, the better to have them well-stirred by the time the milk is hot. As mentioned before, a whisk is a fine tool to use for this task. You don’t have to stand over the cocoa the whole time it’s warming up, but as always, use a lower cooking heat if you’re going to be paying less attention. Burned cocoa (or worse yet, cocoa boiled over the stove and burned onto the cooktop) is a very sad thing indeed.
Note that your cocoa is not yet sweetened at this point. This is awesome, especially if you’re making cocoa for more than one person, because now everybody gets a mug and a spoon and access to the sugar container, and you can all sweeten your drinks to your own satisfaction, and enjoy.
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http://www.allchiara.com Chiara
