everyday drinking: chocolate for breaking the rules
dive on in the froth is perfect
Hello from the Substack Formerly Known As The Next Batch, which has flown the coop, and I am now writing about drinking chocolate: the joys of it, and why so many of us march about wearing those chocolate mustaches-o-glee. I’m also sending out a monthly printed cacao barista mini~journal, which you can find here and yes, there are options with/without chocolate, and also, for folks outside the U.S.
I recently spied Alice Medrich’s Seriously Bittersweet in my favorite thrift shop, which has a book section to rival a Barnes & Noble. I did let out a happy squeal, and immediately bought it. Also spotted: Megan Giller’s book on craft chocolate, which will always be a thrill to open and see my Map Chocolate Co. bars blinking back at me from amongst the big craft bros.
Once I had Seriously back home I sat down to an iced mocha (tis the season), opened it, and landed on this sentence. Oh my heart; I loved every bit. Here’s what Alice had to say about making the leap to open her renowned San Francisco shop, Cocolat.
Cocolat, my chocolate dessert shop, emerged entirely out of my imagination.
Nothing like it existed either in this country or in France, so there was no standard to measure it against. I was not presuming to copy a French pâtisserie, but rather to take what interested me and leave the rest. I wanted to evoke my own experience of eating chocolate in France . . . if I wasn’t presuming to copy a french pâtisserie, I certainly did not aspire to emulate American bakery desserts.
~~Alice Medrich, Seriously Bittersweet, The Ultimate Dessert Maker’s Guide to Chocolate
This whole passage is so wonderful ~~ we can each bring our own interests to our endeavors ~~ having never run a business or worked in the type of business we dream of creating is not a reason to not go for it ~~ what we learn comes from simply wading in and doing it ~~ make something elevated in flavor and style with homemade quality, but make it look and taste better than homemade ~~ the earliest years are intense and exhausting ~~ it all requires near-impossible tunnel vision (aka, dedication)~~ that I’m going to stop quoting it here and insist you find the book and read it for yourself.
Ok, maybe one last tidbit:
It all began with chocolate (best beginning ever).
So what about the chocolate for drinking chocolate?
TBH, I don’t give a licorice whip if you use chocolate chips from the bodega on the corner, or hack into that uber-elite bar you found in Paris. Those chalky baking bars you forgot about that are best-buy dated 2015, maybe not so much. I do have opinions on chocolate though, and I wouldn’t be a bean to bar maker worth my Havsno (most fabulous ever) sea salt if I didn’t.
I’m just not aiming for comparisonlandia. I’m not here to pull back the “craft chocolate is better than all the stuff we secretly love but hope our fellow chocolate aficionados don’t know we scarf down at the movie theater” curtain. Like Alice wrote (with my drinking chocolate tweaks),
I was am not presuming to copy a French pâtisserie shake the big no-no finger, but rather to take what interested makes me giddy with joy and leave the rest.
Chocolate with personality is what compels me to levitate from my desk as if pulled by some cacao spirit, find my way to the kitchen, choose whatever chocolate feels right in that moment, and make it into a drink.
For personality I reach for actual chocolate. Mostly made in small-ish batches. I will break this rule at some point, probably next January when I snap a photo of a 50% off dollar store chocolate santa melting in a pool of soy milk, but as a guiding thought, it’s the chocolate that creates the happiness we experience in drinking it, and the only way that happiness gets into the chocolate is through the intentions of the people who made it.
That’s why this ingredient list reads “sweet with a shadow of chocolate flavor and hints of industrial shlock.”
Torani PUREMADE Dark Chocolate Sauce for Coffee Lattes and Milkshakes (they put puremade in all caps, not me) contains:
pure cane sugar, water, invert cane sugar, breakfast cocoa (processed with alkali), cocoa (processed with alkali), less than 1% of chocolate liquor, citric acid, natural flavors, salt
Drinking chocolate is not just the experience of chocolate in liquid form, but one made with chocolate worthy of our craving. Sometimes this means a higher chocolate to liquid ratio, but! the beauty is in making it like we crave it.
Unless you did not grow up eating chocolate, then you know your preferences better than anyone else. From there we ask ourselves, do I crave warm and comforting. Do I need a wake up call. Is my mood spicy, off the wall, lunch-in-a-mug, nightcap, topped with something fluffly and creamy, dark & reflective? Or, a simple gotta have it / gimme now.
I do hope you will try drinking chocolate outside your comfort zone and I equally hope you’ll worry less about finding the (quote/un-quote) “best” chocolate and come to see drinking chocolate (if you’re not on the free-wheeling path quite yet) as an adventure to that end. Clearing the fence, so to speak, and venturing into cacao and the backroads of its long culinary history, trying the approaches and recipes other cultures enjoy, and stirring your own inspiration into it when the mood strikes.
When I chose the drinking chocolate I’m sending out with the first snail mail club delivery this week, I crafted what may not be your everyday drinking chocolate, unless maybe it is? Or will become. There’s only one way to find out: by diving in.