Hot Chocolate Day !
The preferred formula for drinking chocolate is shared by two chocolate producers from North Carolina, along with how they enhance the traditional recipe by adding cayenne pepper, peanut butter, cinnamon, or all three.
Danielle Centeno asserts that the quality of your drinking chocolate is determined by the quality of the chocolate used to manufacture it. She would know, as she has been running Escazú, a craft chocolate boutique in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 2008. She sources beans from Venezuela, her home country, as well as other parts of Latin America.
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In addition to serving hot beverages, including a drinking chocolate, Escazú specializes in chocolate bars and confections, with the sea salt bar and the milk chocolate bar with goat milk powder as its best-selling items. Centeno describes the rich beverage as having a brownie-like scent. “It has some thickness, but not as much as ganache.”
The chocolate itself is the most crucial component of the recipe. According to Centeno, “use chocolate from your favorite small, bean-to-bar chocolate maker.” Choose a bar consisting solely of cacao, sugar, and possibly a third ingredient, cocoa butter, which is the cacao bean’s fat.
“The purpose of this hot chocolate recipe is to highlight the chocolate’s flavor, not to cover it up,” she says. “The secret lies in the chocolate—pick a bar you know you like, and it will probably make a great hot chocolate“
Afterwards, you can experiment with a bar of single-origin chocolate to highlight its distinct flavors, buy a bar with a higher percentage of cacao (between 75 and 85 percent) and omit the sugar in the recipe, and change the milk-to-chocolate ratio to get the right amount of creaminess.
Furthermore, the staff at Escazú, particularly Centeno’s business partner Tiana Young, enjoys adding items like peanut butter for fullness, cinnamon for depth of flavor, and a small pinch of cayenne powder for a spicy kick—or, better yet, all three together. Centeno says, “It’s as much instinct as science,”
Ingredients Of Hot Chocolate
Escazú’s Hot Drinking Chocolate
42 grams (¼ cup) of chocolate,
cut into pea-sized pieces or smaller
(Centeno and Young use Escazū’s 65% baking chocolate).
One-half tablespoon, or seven grams, of sugar
A little over ½ cup, or 4.5 ounces,
of whole milk or an alternative (oat milk’s flavor and texture appeal to both young people and the elderly).
Preparation
Put all the ingredients in a pot and whisk over medium heat until the milk is steaming but not boiling and each ingredient has melted and combined completely. Turn off the heat and whisk vigorously to create a little foam.
An espresso machine with a steam wand or a milk frother can be used in place of the burner to produce more creamy and foamy hot chocolate. To make richer, more chocolaty hot chocolate, you can use less milk or more chocolate. If you like it a little less sweet, you can either adjust the amount of sugar or omit it altogether.
Sip it from the cup of your choice.
Note: You can add a substantial amount of peanut butter
at the end to give the classic sipping chocolate a distinctive touch.
At the start, a pinch of chipotle pepper powder is added to all the components.
Add ¼ tsp of cinnamon before adding the rest of the ingredients.
Or mix and match all of the accessories described above.