A Luxurious Cup of Chocolate for a Cozy Day

There's hot chocolate, and then there's hot chocolate. This is the latter: a thick, rich, velvety cup of chocolate that feels and tastes like the very essence of decadence. It takes more time and effort than your average cup of stir-milk-into-powder cocoa, but it's well worth it. On a day when the fog is creeping up the cliffs to envelop the house--I can now barely see the vegetable garden only 100-150 feet below the house, and through the skylight I can see only the tiniest hints of blue sky--there is nothing better than curling up with a good book and a cup of drinking chocolate. 

A few notes on the ingredients: it calls for whole milk, but frankly, I think you can use skim (if you so desire) and not lose much of the velvety richness. We used skim this morning, and I had no complaints. Don't feel that you need to spring for bottled water, either--good tap water will be perfectly sufficient. As for the chocolate, if you're going to run the hot chocolate through a blender or use an immersion blender on it, I don't think it's worth the trouble to shave the chocolate with a serrated knife. Chop it up finely, and it won't have any trouble being adequately melted and blended. If you plan to hand-whisk it, though, I might suggest making sure the chocolate is chopped very finely.

A final note: if you haven't yet read Jeffrey Steingarten's side-splittingly funny It Must Have Been Something I Ate, I wholeheartedly recommend that you pick up a copy. It's written in self-contained vignettes, good for the busy reader or foodie, and is guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

Chocolat Chaud

From: It Must Have Been Something I Ate (Jeffrey Steingarten); adapted from Pierre Hermé

Yield: Four 6-ounce cups of hot chocolate.

Ingredients

1. 2-1/4 cups whole milk
2. 1/4 cup bottled still water
3. 1/4 cup (generous) superfine granulated sugar
4. 1 100-gm bar (3-1/2 ounces) dark bittersweet chocolate, Scharffen Berger, Valrhona, or Lindt (see note, below), finely sliced with a serrated bread knife
5. 1/4 cup (1 ounce or 28 gm) cocoa powder, loosely packed, preferably Valrhona

Directions

1. In a 2-quart saucepan, stir together the milk, water, and sugar. Bring to a boil over medium heat.
2. Add the chopped chocolate and the cocoa and bring to a boil again, whisking until the chocolate and cocoa are dissolved and the mixture has thickened. Reduce the heat to very low.
3. Blend for 5 minutes with an immersion mixer or whirl the hot chocolate in a standard blender for half a minute, until thick and foamy.

Notes

1. Steingarten recommends using a dark chocolate containing close to 70 percent cocoa, though Lindt bittersweet also works just fine.
2. The Mayans and the Aztecs considered the froth the best part. Today, five minutes with an immersion mixer or a blender accomplishes what a half hour of beating did long ago.