Tag Archives: hot chocolate

Our Week in NYC

December 2, 2017 by

We’re almost at the end of our nine-day pop up in New York City, and…WOW. We are just so humbled.

Day in and day out, our tiny little corner café in Chelsea has been flooded with such warmth and enthusiasm, and we can barely keep the s’mores in stock! Chef Lisa and her team have doubled down in their little commissary kitchen, rolling out impossible numbers of cookies and tarts and brownies and more. We’ve made more hot chocolate this week than we thought we ever could, and we’ve been teaching chocolate making classes to the best and most welcoming crowds.

We have a few more classes and book events before we hit the road back to California on December 3rd, so come see us before then! The full list of events is here.

Thank you New York. We really do love you.

(And we hope we’ll be back!)

Follow us on Instagram for more pics.

Thank you Gennaro Pecchia for the photos!

EDUCATION STATION: Ground Chocolate

March 25, 2017 by

You’re curious, so we find answers. Our education team fields many questions from our guests in classes, so we’ve decided to launch a brand new series in which we tackle some of the questions we get most often. We call it The Education Station, and it’s where you’ll find the answers to just about everything from what cocoa beans are made of to why cocoa powder and ground chocolate are not the same. Speaking of…

What IS this?? Keep reading to find out.

It’s A Grind!

Sometimes people ask us how we make our hot chocolate so, well, chocolatey. Do we pour chocolate from our melangers (the machine that grinds, conches, and mixes cocoa beans and sugar to turn them into chocolate) straight into their cups?  

Sadly, if we poured chocolate from a melanger into your cup it would solidify pretty quickly and be too thick to drink. So how then, do you make a thick, rich hot chocolate?

The answer is that we make a rich base with ground chocolate. But what, might you ask, is ground chocolate? Is it like cocoa powder? Most hot chocolate recipes are based on cocoa powder, which is in its own way a kind of ground chocolate so that would be a good guess, but they are very, very different.

Since this often seems to be a confusing subject, I’ve taken the opportunity to demonstrate some of the differences between the two.

 

What is cocoa powder?

Many people assume that cocoa powder is simply ground up cocoa nibs. It’s a good guess, but the thing is, cocoa nibs liquify when you grind them. Cocoa nibs are made up of approximately 50% fat, or cocoa butter, and when the heat from the friction inherent in grinding the cocoa nibs meets that cocoa butter in the nibs, it melts. Thus, when you grind up cocoa nibs you end up with more of a crunchy peanut butter-like paste rather than a powder. (Don’t trust me, try it! Throw some nibs in a blender, food processor, or between a mortar and pestle.)

So if not ground nibs, then what is cocoa powder? I’ll give you a clue: cocoa powder comes from a part of the cocoa nib. Cocoa nibs are composed of two things (if we’re being relatively simplistic): cocoa solids and cocoa butter. Now, it’s worth saying here that there are no definition of “cocoa solid” that is universally agreed upon. Technically, there are non-fat cocoa solids (the brown, flavorful stuff in a cocoa nib) and fatty cocoa solids (usually called cocoa butter). For simplicity, we call the brown flavorful component the “cocoa solids,” and the fat “cocoa butter.” So, we’ll roll with that for now. 

Back to our programming: cocoa powder comes from the solids. But how do you separate the two? Well, it takes some heat and a lot of pressure to press most of the cocoa butter out of the cocoa nibs. To make cocoa powder, the remaining solid parts of the nibs are ground up. Since most of the cocoa butter was pressed out, cocoa solids won’t liquify when you grind them up, instead becoming a dry powder. In the video below, I’m pressing the cocoa butter out of our nibs using a seed oil extractor, and the butter that comes out is still brown because it’s not a perfect pressing. But, you get the idea.

An interesting note: Sometimes cocoa powder is chemically treated with an alkali solution to make it taste less acidic and more “chocolate-y.” These will be labeled “Dutch-processed” or “alkalized.” For more on Dutch-processed versus natural cocoa powder check out David Lebovitz’s informative blog on the subject.  

 

So, what is ground chocolate?  

In short, ground chocolate is just what it sounds like: chocolate ground into a powder. Most of the ground chocolate we make at Dandelion is made out of 70% dark chocolate (ingredients: 70% cocoa nibs and 30% sugar, by weight). So to recap, cocoa powder is basically cocoa solids (with a tiny bit of fat that couldn’t be pressed out), and ground chocolate is three things: sugar, and cocoa solids and cocoa butter (the two components of nibs). 

We recently got a few new machines to help us make ground chocolate from untempered blocks of chocolate. You have to be careful not to heat the blocks too much or grind them for too long because, of course, chocolate melts. To grind the blocks, we used to use an industrial food processor, but we’ve recently upgraded to a fancy shmancy granulator that is much quieter, faster, and more consistent. 

Those were cool photos, but I’m still a little confused about how cocoa powder and ground chocolate are different….

Okay – well let’s look at them in the real world. To make hot chocolate we need some heat, right?

What happens if we gently heat cocoa powder and ground chocolate on a double boiler?

Ground chocolate melts over heat

Cocoa powder….does not.

Cocoa powder has between 11% and 22% fat (because it’s nearly impossible to press all the cocoa butter out) and ground chocolate has more like 35% fat, so they behave differently when heated. Heat cocoa powder, and virtually nothing will happen. It balls up a little, but can easily be whisked back to its starting texture. On the other hand, the ground chocolate, a fattier substance with some sugar in it, will melt fast. To return it to its starting state, we’d have to cool it and toss it in a food processor. 

 

Okay, but we still haven’t made hot chocolate…

Another way of illustrating the difference between these too is by looking at what happens when we make hot chocolate with them by adding warmed milk to each. Behold:

When 3 oz of steamed almond milk were added to 2 tablespoons cocoa powder or 2 tablespoons ground chocolate, the cocoa powder rose to the top of the container. Meanwhile, the ground chocolate started to melt.

When stirred, the milk and powders mixed into each other in a similar manner, but the hot chocolate made from ground chocolate was slightly thicker. The hot chocolate made from pure cocoa powder was more bitter since it had no added sugar and a strong chocolate flavor, but it was less creamy and rich and noticeably thinner. The hot chocolate made from the ground chocolate was thicker and clung to the whisk a little more.

Here at the factory, without a 50-tonne hydraulic cocoa butter press, we don’t have or make cocoa powder, and so we’re only left with what we do make: chocolate. This is a fundamental difference between our pastry kitchen and most pastry kitchens, where cocoa powder is a baking staple. Our Executive Pastry Chef, Lisa Vega, and her team are constantly improvising ways to work with chocolate instead of cocoa powder to make cakes, cookies, custards, and more. Single origin ground chocolate brings a few more challenges to the table—the fat level varies from origin to origin—and you can’t just swap ground chocolate in for cocoa powder because, as you’ve seen, they are quite different.

But lucky for me, I get to savor the rich chocolatey hot chocolate from our pastry team every day. Later this year, you’ll get a full look inside our kitchen and all of its secrets as part of the book we’ve been writing for the last two years, coming out in late fall. But for now, we’ll include a recipe for our hot chocolate below. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go order myself another cup. And stay tuned for our next installment of Education Station, where we’ll explore some more chocolate mysteries. Next stop: Is White Chocolate, Chocolate?

“Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground [chocolate].” – Theodore Roosevelt

Our house hot chocolate is one of the simplest, most delicious ways to enjoy chocolate as a drink. We recommend it with marshmallows or nibby whipped cream, both of which you’ll find in our book—a guide to making chocolate at home, sourcing beans, and making pastries with single origin chocolate—coming out later this year!

Our House Hot Chocolate

2½ cups / 567 grams / 20 ounces nonfat milk

1 tablespoon packed / 10 grams light brown sugar

1½ cups / 227 grams / 8 ounces 70% chocolate, chopped

 

  1. Combine 1 cup (225 grams / 8 ounces) of milk and the brown sugar in a large heatproof bowl set over a pot of simmering water.
  1. Add the chocolate to the hot milk and whisk to combine, keeping the bowl over the pot to continue . Whisk the mixture for an additional 3 minutes, until shiny and emulsified. This mix——may seem quite thick at this point.
  1. Whisk in the rest of the milk, adding it in a slow stream, and heat for another 4 to 5 minutes, whisking occasionally, until hot.
  1. Remove the bowl from the pot of water, pour the hot chocolate into mugs, and serve immediately.

 

The Lost Hot Chocolate

April 30, 2015 by

Kaylen Baker—one of our café baristas—takes a look at hot chocolate through the eyes of one of history’s original gastronomes, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. 

It’s hard to forget your first hot chocolate. I sipped mine inside Angelina’s, off the rue de Rivoli in Paris, where Marcel Proust allegedly dined. I’m talking about the thick stuff, not the scalding, sandy-textured, cocoa-water of the collective American youth (though that’s just as hard to forget; the smell of chlorine and campfire comes to my mind). I still remember steam coming from my cup, the bowl of whipped cream, and a blanketing sensation as molten chocolate rolled across my tongue and hit my taste receptors, flooding my brain with sweet signals. The moment felt holy.

Since then, I’ve spent five years hunting down and devouring this beverage in all its variations: sipping chocolate, chocolat chaud à l’ancienne, European drinking chocolate, even “l’africain” (a perplexing nod to colonial imperialism). Its modes are endless: slurped from bowls, chewed with cinnamon-sugar churros, flavored with strawberries, deconstructed with a meltable chocolate spoon. Dripping, thick-skinned, coagulated, and cooling, hot chocolate takes so many forms. But there’s one version that continues to evade me, and my search—like Proust’s—is futile, because I’m looking for a hot chocolate from a lost time. Let me explain.

brillat

One of the few portraits of Brillat-Savarin, here he sits with pen and paper at a table laden with fruit.

In 1825 a Frenchman named Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin published a book about food. Or rather, a book about survival and the human spirit, using food as both the key and the keyhole (we’ll assume that the door opens a forbidden pantry) to a happy life. He called it The Physiology of Taste, or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, and he called himself the Professor (he was not). If you haven’t heard of Brillat-Savarin, you’ve at least heard his famous phrase, “Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.”

A country lawyer, amateur violinist, and suppertime storyteller, Brillat-Savarin lived long enough to witness 71 years of drastic change in France: the birth of fine-dining, the invention of the guillotine, bread riots, bloody riots, the death of the monarchy, rolling heads, and the rise of haute cuisine. Amidst all this, Brillat-Savarin jotted down alimentary observations. He made talking about lunch trendy long before we started to Instagram our plates.

But what does he have to do with hot chocolate? Well, by this time, the drink had already leaked across the continent, carried over the mountains by monks and a princess, one Anne of Austria. It caught like the bubonic plague, but this time people praised God. In fact, in 1753 Swedish botanist Karl von Linné dubbed the tree cacao theobroma*—“food of the gods.”

According to Brillat, the Italians drank it bitter, while New World señoras drank it during mass, under the chagrined eye of their bishop. King Louis XVI drank chocolate made by the pharmacist M. Debauve of rue des Saintes-Pères, 25. (His shop still stands. I ate a truffle as I left, it was pralinée.)

Brillat-Savarin drank chocolate for breakfast, claiming it had two main functions: to aid in happy bowel movements, and regulate feminine beauty. This prescription may sound absurd to us, with our indoor plumbing, fiber supplements, and vast array of grocery-aisle lipsticks. Yet in Brillat’s day, when gout and gallstones could take your life if the Jacobins didn’t, the speed of your bowels indicated not only your physical health but a spiritual one. Digestion, said Brillat, “makes us habitually sad or gay, taciturn or talkative, morose or melancholy, without our even questioning it, and especially without our being able to deny it.”

Pomba Still Life

Brillat’s breakfast tray may have looked something like Jean Gustave Pomba’s “Still Life with Hot Chocolate Pot”

In order to maintain a healthy weight and fight off disease, he recommended breakfasting with “a little meat pie, a cutlet, or a skewered kidney” (yum), then washing it down with “a bowl of Soconusco chocolate.” His version of hot chocolate began by dissolving chocolate, sugar and cinnamon in hot water, then boiling the mixture for 15 minutes, “so that the solution takes on a certain thickness,” and finally leaving it in a porcelain coffee pot overnight to develop a velvet texture. For special ailments he advised add-ins: salep for the gaunt, almond milk for the irritable, orange flower water for the nervous, and amber for the unhappy.

“Because of my scientific enthusiasm and the sheer force of my eloquence,” Brillat-Savarin wrote, “I have persuaded a number of ladies to try this, and although they were convinced it would kill them; they have always found themselves in fine shape indeed, and have not forgotten to give the Professor his rightful due.”

Which brings me to—ah, yes. The ladies. Nothing made Brillat-Savarin happier than sitting across the dinner table from a beautiful woman, engaging in “coquetry.” Though he never married, Brillat fell in love once, but the girl, Louise, wasted away from a poisonous diet. After drinking down a glass of vinegar each morning, she turned skeletal, and died at 18. Thus haunted, Brillat took on the role of beauty consultant, administering hot chocolate to the wives of friends and neighbors.

A woman (Aline Masson) drinking a cup of chocolate, by Raimundo Madrazo

This 19th century Spanish woman engages in what Brillat called “coquetry” in Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta’s painting.

If we are what we eat, then these were people of exotic hopes, relying on sensual and sensory remedies as an answer to their bodily crises. They were health-crazed monks, monarchs and mademoiselles, peering into murky mugs for balance and beauty. They knew life was short, and drank dessert first.

Today, we still take chocolate hot. I serve about 75 European drinking chocolates on a busy day in our café, and I wonder what Brillat-Savarin would think, were he to walk in and order one. We’ve simplified ours by eliminating cinnamon and vanilla to let the flavor of the Camino Verde bean shine through, and use milk instead of water. I imagine the silky-soft, dense consistency of our European remains true to Brillat’s recipe, but this is based purely on gut instinct, and my own affinity for the man.

You see, Brillat-Savarin didn’t include any measurements. He only referenced a “cup,” which could have been an exact volume in 19th century France, or simply a drinking utensil. Furthermore, by omitting quantities for sugar, cinnamon or vanilla, his recipe remains vague and unreliable. I’ve attempted to make his drink at home several times, all with different results. So I shrug, and slug, and will continue to wonder. What I do know is Brillat had a penchant for pure, quality flavors, and from that alone I feel sure he’d deem our European très bon. In fact, judging by the size of his paunch, I expect he’d order a double.

Though Brillat-Savarin would have wandered into Dandelion at breakfast time, we San Franciscans drink chocolate all day long, and often at night, more for pleasure than for potion (though the two remain inextricably linked). We’re a people of practicality, of play, and we expect we’ll live forever. For now, at the end of each day when we fall into theobromine-infused sleep, we dream of firsts sips, lost times, and wake remembering a mishmash of sweet, holy things.

*We now know that theobromine, the bitter alkaloid C7H8N4O found in chocolate, produces certain effects on our nervous system: a rush to the head, sweaty palms, a fluttering, excessive trips to the bathroom—hold on, does this sound a bit like falling in love?