How To Make Hot Chocolate

Regarding the future of solar-generated electricity: We’ll never go to war to get another country’s sunshine.

You don’t know how to make hot chocolate.

Whaaaaat? I know you’re thinking, you know perfectly well how to make hot chocolate.  In fact, you know several ways of making hot chocolate ranging from buying a container of chocolate milk in the grocery store and microwaving a cup of it to pouring a good slug of my acclaimed Callebaut chocolate sauce into a cup of milk and stirring and microwaving.  Well, I’ve done it both ways as well as mixing into the milk various chocolate powders, by far the best of which being the Suchard powder that was imported for a few golden years back in the late sixties – early seventies.  Eat your heart out, Swiss Miss.

But while using my chocolate sauce does make an excellent cup of hot chocolate, i’ve gone farther, and so can you.  Here it is, step by step.

First get your chocolate.  Since i recently bought a 5 kg. slab of Callebaut 100% unsweetened chocolate, i’m using that.  Otherwise, get the best chocolate you can buy, like the divine stuff from Dandelion Chocolate or Tcho or any of your other fine boutique chocolates, ideally unsweetened.  Yes, they cost more, but you’re worth it.

First, put a little pat of butter into the bottom of your chocolate mug.  The standard little pat weighs 15 grams although this one, as we see, ran a little light.

Using a sharp knife, shave 15 grams of chocolate off your chunk or bar and add it to the mug.

Add a squirt of blue agave nectar.  The standard squirt weighs 15 grams.

Put the mug into the microwave for 22 seconds.

Retrieve and stir well with a teaspoon until you get an even consistency.  Then stir a little more to make sure.

Grasp a milk carton in your left hand and, while stirring vigorously with the right, allow small dribbles of milk to fall into the mug.  To get the proper texture, it is critical to add the milk in very small amounts at the beginning.  Continue stirring and dribbling with larger and larger amounts of milk until the mug is full.  Actually, high speed mixing and small amount dribbling are so critical to the finished product that i recommend your buying one of those battery-operated twirly thingys (technically called “milk frothers“)to add to your batterie de cuisine.

Stick the mug in the microwave for 1 minute and 25 seconds.

Remove and stir in a teaspoon of sugar (I use instead a mixture of equal parts erythritol, xylitol, and stevia, with a dab (1/8th tsp. in a quart batch) of sucralose so as to reduce the carbohydrates.)  Be sure to run the tip of the spoon all the way around the bottom of the mug to dislodge any remaining bits of the initial paste.

Sip with great pleasure.

OCD?  Moi?

But yes, it’s worth the trouble.