“The ideal hot chocolate is made with the finest cocoa powder or solid chocolate or both. The resulting beverage should be neither too thin for serious satisfaction nor too thick to refresh; neither too bitter to produce the childlike enjoyment we seek, nor so sweet and simple as to insult the intellect.†Jeffery Steingarten
In its place of origin around modern Venezuela, chocolate was always a drink, often mixed with chilli and/or vanilla. Columbus almost discovered chocolate when he captured a trading canoe loaded with cocoa beans in 1502 near Guanaja (the name now given to Valrhona ’s finest), but he did not realise their value and it was left to Cortes, who, in 1528, bought a huge shipload of cocoa beans back to Spain and drinking chocolate became the rage.
Spain had chocolate more or less to itself for 50 years, until the fashion spread to France, Italy, Holland, Germany, England and outwards, but always it was a drink.
In 1828 Dutchman Conrad Johannes van Houten set about improving the drink by removing some of the fat from the bean to make a lighter drink. He did this by pressing the cocoa mass so that about 66% of the cocoa butter was extracted, the resulting paste could be ground into cocoa powder (and the pressed-out cocoa butter could be added to other cocoa mass and allowed the first chocolate moulds to be made).
Van Houten further refined his drinking chocolate by adding alkaline to it, a process that came to be known as “dutchingâ€. It makes the powder disperse more easily in water or milk and also darkens the powder and lowers its mild acidity, which, when it has not undergone this process, is known as “naturalâ€.
Chilli has come back to chocolate in a big way in recent times – there’s an Aztec hot chocolate with chilli on the menu at the House of Anvers, and the Afterword Café in Fullers Bookshop in Hobart has its winter special back – hot bitter chocolate flavoured with chilli, cardamom, pure vanilla extract and a little nutmeg and cinnamon.
Jeffrey Steingarten settled on a recipe from Pierre Hermé in Paris as the best for producing four cups of hot chocolate:
In a saucepan, stir together 500ml of whole milk, 50ml of bottled still water and 60g of caster sugar. Bring to boil over medium heat. Add 100g dark bittersweet chocolate that has been finely sliced with a serrated bread knife and 28g of cocoa powder loosely packed, and bring to the boil again, whisking until the chocolate and cocoa are dissolved and the mixture has thickened. Reduce heat to very low. Blend for 5 minutes with a wand mixer or whirl the hot chocolate in a blender for half a minute, until it is thick and foamy.
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