Recipe - Mill Creek 70% Drinking Chocolate

One of my favorite ways to enjoy chocolate is by creating drinking chocolates from artisanal chocolate bars. Not only is a great way to experience the subtleties of the chocolate someone spent a great deal of effort creating, but it also gives you a much more enjoyable hot chocolate experience than the typical overly-sweet cocoa packets.

I hadn't heard of Mill Creek until recently, but I always buy new bars when I find them. I'm very glad I picked this one up. I thought this chocolate delivered on every level. Clean and elegant packaging, with a beautiful bar inside.

Mill Creek Cacao Roasters was founded in 2011 in Salt Lake City, UT, by Mark DelVecchio and Dana Brewster. This bar is made with Ecuadorian Arriba Nacional cacao, which, if you taste it (and you should!), has plenty of flavor nuances. It's also an heirloom cacao, recognized by the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Initiative of the Fine Chocolate Industry Association in New York. That's a long way of saying this cacao is widely recognized as having a very fine flavor that is worth preserving.

What a gorgeous bar!

Very simple ingredients that I think come through very nicely. The added cocoa butter, being a fat, helps make the drink a little smoother and creamier.

Also in the package is a little card from Dana and Mark telling you about Mill Creek and this specific cacao. It's a nice touch, especially if you're into that kind of thing. And with chocolate this good, you should be.

I chopped up the bar for easier melting. Be sure to sample it as you're chopping it up. It's a great way to preview what the drink will be. This bar is a bit sweeter than I thought it would be, since I'm used to 70% bars being on the bitter end of the flavor spectrum.

I used about 1½ cups of 2% milk. If you have whole milk, that's fine too, but try not to use half & half or heavy cream for this one. With a fine chocolate like this, the thicker the milk you use, the more the flavor of the chocolate will be muted. 2% will really let the flavor come through.

The drink is great! Chocolatey and rich, but not too dark. If I hadn't made this myself, I would have guessed it was made with a milk chocolate bar, not a 70% bar. You can also choose to serve yours with gourmet marshmallows or homemade whipped cream, but I decided not to garnish with anything. I wanted to really enjoy the chocolate Mill Creek created, and I certainly did. 

Review - Dagoba Drinking Chocolates

Dagoba chocolate is a product I've been seeing turn up more and more in my local grocery stores. I started seeing it first in the baking chocolates, and later saw their drinking chocolates pop up in the hot cocoa aisle. Being a "Star Wars" fan my entire life, how could I not be drawn to this chocolate!?

As always, we're going to enjoy a couple of their drinking chocolates for the review, but I did also grab their 100% unsweetened chocolate. It has a couple other ingredients in minuscule amounts (soy lecithin and milk), but it is still a very nice chocolate to work with.

I picked up both the Authentic and the Xocolatl drinking chocolates. The Authentic is simply their dark hot chocolate, while the Xocolatl is flavored to represent the ancient Mexican drinking chocolates with some added cinnamon and chili.

There's a small label on all their products showing a little frog. This is the Rainforest Alliance logo, and it's there because Dagoba is all about sustainability. Taking care of the environment, the cacao workers, and their cacao farms. I'm all for this! If cacao isn't sustained, that would mean no chocolate. That's not a world I want to live in!

The ingredients on both products are nice and simple. A great, straight forward mix. It just seems so unnecessary to add in all the extra preservatives and stuff that most store bought hot chocolates have in them, especially once you taste a chocolate like this. So much more real chocolate flavor! 

Their instructions actually made me laugh a little. What a pleasant way to describe the act of heating milk and scooping this chocolate into it! "When vapors rise, the milk will be at its most receptive to accept the chocolate into its embrace". Seriously, how awesome is that! 

The mix itself has nice chunks of real chocolate in it, which is great. Having the actual bits of whole chocolate in there is a definite improvement over mixes that only have cocoa powder. The fat (cocoa butter) from the chocolate really makes a difference in the smoothness.

By the way, did you know what Dagoba means? A dagoba is a shrine for sacred relics in the Far East, usually pertaining to Buddha. Kind of makes sense that George Lucas used it for the name of the planet where the wise Jedi Master Yoda was living in "The Empire Strikes Back".

The Authentic has a rich, almost smoky flavor. Nice dark notes, but not bitter - it still manages to be sweet. And as I always recommend, you can use just a little of the mix for a nice lighter breakfast hot chocolate, and then in the evening, use a lot for a rich after-dinner dessert drink.

The Xocolatl is spicy, but not uncomfortably so. It's a very nice heat. The cinnamon is not as forward in this mix as in some other Mexican chocolates, but it's there, and it's a great addition. It'd be great to see Dagoba add a little more cinnamon to this mix and really make it pop!

Both of these chocolates are wonderful and worth picking up. Dagoba drinking chocolates are a perfect replacement for those packets of powdered milk disguised as hot cocoa you're keeping in your cupboard or office. Hopefully there's a gourmet grocery store near you that carries them, but if not, you can always grab them at Dagoba's website. They have a couple other flavors there, as well, like Chai, which sounds great!

Recipe - Shamrock Peppermint Hot Chocolate

St. Patrick's Day! What do you know about St. Patrick? Did you know he lived in the 5th century and was brought to Ireland as a slave when he was 16 years old? Did you know that it's believed a silver container was crafted to hold St. Patrick's severed arm? Neither did I! History is insane!

When I was growing up, St. Patrick's Day pretty much meant McDonald's would start serving their Shamrock Shake. I haven't had one in years, but since that minty, creamy flavor is a great memory for me around this time of year, I thought I'd try to recreate it in a hot chocolate.

 The ingredients are pretty simple:

¾ cup heavy whipping cream
¾ cup 2% milk
5 tbsp white chocolate, chopped
1 heaping tsp powdered sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp peppermint extract
2 drops green food coloring

I'm using Ghirardelli premium white baking chocolate. Besides the cocoa butter and sugar, it has nonfat dry milk and milk fat in it, which makes it not the best white chocolate available. But it works fine for this recipe.

The peppermint extract I picked up at a local grocer, and the vanilla extract is some I found from Madecasse. Madecasse is an amazing chocolate maker in Madagascar. Top notch products!








The blend of 2% milk and heavy cream gives it a wonderful creaminess, and the powdered sugar adds a little extra sweetness. If you get a really good white chocolate, you could try leaving out the sugar and half the vanilla.

Warm the milk and cream on the stovetop. Once it's pretty hot, add the sugar first and whisk it around a bit, let it start dissolving. As the milk gets close to boiling, add in the chopped white chocolate. Once that's incorporated smoothly, add the vanilla and peppermint extracts, and finish with the food coloring.

It's St Patrick's Day. It's important that it be green. Add 3 drops if you're feeling crazy!

I'm serving mine topped with some homemade vanilla whipped cream, green sugar sprinkles, and a clover. Minty, smooth, and rich!

Class - Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Making, Day Two

When we arrived for Day Two of chocolate making class, the refining machine was still churning away at incorporating the sugar and making our chocolate as smooth as possible. (If you missed reading about Day One, you can catch up here.) 

That refining is called conching. The goal of conching is to refine the particles in the cacao mass small enough that the tongue cannot detect them, which means the chocolate will feel nice and smooth in texture.

But let me back up for a minute. At the end of Day One, after our chocolate was in the refiner with the other ingredients, we had time left. So Chef Francois grabbed some chocolate that he had made the day before and we tried our hand at tempering it.

Tempering. That's an odd word if you're like me and have no idea about anything relating to the science of cooking and confection making. They temper steel, I think. Well, they temper chocolate, too. When chocolate begins to cool and become solid, what's happening is that the cocoa butter is turning from a fatty liquid into a crystal. Tempering is, basically, making sure that only very small crystal are formed, giving the chocolate a glossy finish, a nice snap when you break it, and lets it re-melt around body temperature.

Tempering chocolate consists of heating and cooling it to some very specific temperatures, and those temperatures and the order in which they are achieved ensure that only very small crystals are formed. Once that is done, the chocolate cools very nicely, it's shiny, it snaps well, and melts just as you would expect it to. You can temper chocolate very carefully on a stove, but the industry has, of course, created some high tech machines to run through the correct procedures automatically. 

We'd be using the machine to temper ours, but first, Chef Francois wanted us to try tempering some chocolate on the big marble table there in the kitchen.

We poured a little of the chocolate out on the cool table and began spreading it and scraping it back into itself, trying to bring the temperature down evenly throughout. Once it started thickening, we'd put it back in the bowl, and the chocolate that was beginning to crystallize would hopefully cause the whole batch to solidify with the small crystal structure.

For some of us, it worked. For some of us, not so much.

We used this chocolate to make some raspberry ganache-filled bon bons. Since this wasn't the chocolate we made ourselves, I wasn't too excited about it, but it was still fun.

Ok, less talk, more pictures of chocolate making! Back to Day Two!

We drained the refining machine once the conching was done. You can see the thin stream of chocolate pouring into the bin underneath in this picture.

Oh man! That is brand new, sweetened, delicious, molten chocolate! The urge to just put my hands or face into this bin was almost overwhelming!

Still going! We filled this bin just about to the top. I still get chills just looking at the pictures!

One last step before putting it into the tempering machine - sifting. This machine had a fine mesh screen on top, and when switched on, it vibrated like crazy. The liquid chocolate would slowly work its way through the mesh, run down the pan, and drip into the bowl.

I can seriously look at pictures of liquid chocolate all day long. 

You know that chocolate river in the original "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory"? I loved that! I dreamed of seeing that in person! And this, while not quite a river, is 20 lbs of liquid chocolate!

Click on this picture to see the big version. For reals.

Here you can see why we're sifting it. See that grainy stuff? That's the germ of the cacao bean. It's a hard little stem inside the bean, and it's so hard it doesn't really break down through all the grinding and refining we've done. Being almost impossible to grind down, the easiest solution is to sift it out.

Done, everything sifted.

This is the high tech tempering machine I was talking about earlier. You just pour all your chocolate into it, and it runs through an automatic cycle of temperatures so that the chocolate will crystallize perfectly.

Once it's been in here through the whole cycle, it's ready to go! Ready to be turned into candies, molded into bars, or for bathing in-- I mean, molding into... uh... nevermind.

This is how we tested the tempering. We'd run a spoon under the stream, then set it aside for a few minutes to see how it cooled.

The first thing we made were little chocolate candies called mendiants. Mendiant means "beggar" in French, and the original toppings were meant to represent the robe colors of four different monasteries.

They start with just a dab of chocolate. Once the pan was covered, we banged it on the table a few times to smooth them out. Then we started putting on one each of our toppings.

We made two of these sheets. Tons of them! Part of the class is leaving with a pretty huge box of chocolates, and these were a big part of that.

And of course, we'd tasted our chocolate many times by now. Delicious! It was very fruity, almost tangy, with hints of citrus. Insane that all this flavor came just from the bean! And, having tasted every stage along the way, I could very much recognize the flavor of the roasted bean in this finished chocolate.

We made some other things with our chocolate, too!

We made hundreds of these little tasting squares.

We made up a batch of buttery smooth caramel and used these little cacao pod-shaped molds, making caramel filled chocolates. Chef Francois added a touch of sea salt to the top of each when we took them out of the molds.

This caramel was insanely good! I made sure to write down the recipe.

And that was it! We were done! We'd turned 30 lbs of cacao beans into 20 lbs of amazing chocolate, then made candies and tasting squares with it. There's almost no better way to spend two days!

We also made some chocolate mousse the first day, which is what you see in the middle in the picture above. We used different chocolates they had there in the kitchen to make them.

Our finished raspberry bon bons.

The completed caramels, topped with sea salt.

Our tasting squares, just the pure chocolate.

And our mendiants. With the fruits and nuts, and knowing how pure the chocolate was, these almost felt healthy to eat!

Also, during the first day, we all talked about why we were there taking the class, our love of chocolates, and the great variety of artisan chocolate makers that are out there now.

On Day Two, a couple of us brought in some artisan chocolates, and at the end of the day, we had a little chocolate tasting party! Holy cow, this was just astounding! Trying all these amazingly different flavors, and having our own chocolate there to taste with them. The variety was just unbelievable.

Recently, a lot of high end chocolate makers have been giving out chocolate and wine pairing advice, or even chocolate and cheese pairings. You should try them! Or, like we did, just get a bunch of artisan chocolates from around the country (or world), invite some friends over, and taste all of them, compare them, see how different they are. You'll be amazed.

And that was chocolate making class! I left with a big box with over a pound of the chocolate we had made, and if you know me or have been following this blog, you very well know I plan on making a hot chocolate with some of it.

If you're in the Los Angeles area and are interested in taking this class, keep your eye on  Qzina's website. At the time of this posting, they haven't yet announced another class, but I'm sure they will.