Do you know who came up with how to make hot chocolate at home? Mexican nuns! To brighten up the harsh everyday life, full of night vigils and prayers, they thought of planting cocoa powder with milk and adding cane sugar there. The resulting drink perfectly invigorated, nourished, warmed. In addition, he brought joy to the monotonous life of hermits. Soon, the drink recipe went beyond the monastery cloisters and enriched with new nuances. Now there are many ways to make hot chocolate. Here are the best of them.
Before making hot chocolate at home, you should have basic products with you. Milk should be low-fat and fresh. Never use powder or long-term storage. If you decide not to use cocoa powder, but bar chocolate, the latter should be of the highest quality. That is, without impurities of palm oil and other chemicals, as well as without fillers. The proportion of cocoa should be at least 70% in it. For lack of cane sugar it is allowed to use ordinary, beetroot sugar.
Now about the cooking process. The classic recipe for making hot chocolate at home requires grinding the tiles to ground coffee. This can be done using a blender or grater.
If you use cocoa powder, you can skip this stage of preparation. Pour water into a large pot and set it on fire. In a boiling liquid we place an iron bowl in which we pour a glass of milk. In cooking, this technique is called a “water bath”. The bowl should not touch the bottom of the pan. And milk needs only to be heated strongly, not bringing to a boil.
Then another bowl should be immersed in the same boiling water - with crushed chocolate or cocoa powder. Before this, they should be slightly diluted with several tablespoons of milk. Keep in a water bath until the pieces become liquid. Remove from heat and knead for several minutes, making circular movements all the time in one direction. Add the remaining milk, add two tablespoons (for cocoa powder) of sugar. Thorough mixing is the basic rule of how to make hot chocolate at home. Put the mass back into the water bath. Three minutes is enough.
Then add your favorite flavors: cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, zest. Stir again and leave the drink to infuse for 10 minutes. If desired, you can add different decorations to the cups: whipped cream, star anise, or marshmallows. Such hot chocolate, the photo of which you see, is not ashamed to submit to the banquet table for dessert.
And in the end - a classic recipe. Instead of milk we use water. We heat it and pour the crushed 100-gram bar of chocolate. Stir until smooth and drive in the egg yolk. When the mass begins to thicken, we dilute it with a small amount of sour cream. At the end, add a few drops of liquor. And you can cook in Mexican. We make coffee with milk and a pinch of cinnamon, melt the chocolate in it. We mix until smooth, pour sugar. In another container, beat the egg until foam, gradually add to the warm mixture so that the protein does not curl. This is how Viennese hot chocolate is cooked at home.