If it's Atole or Champurrado, I don't know, but, it was Chocolate.

An evening of home-made hot chocolate with Francesca.

Francesca is a new friend of mine that I met through Faith. They used to be roommates in college, and one Saturday I ran into them at La Maison des Tartes for coffee. We sorta hit it off right away, talking about having lived in NYC and having interest in food, specificly Mexican. She challenged me that day with the taunt, "Well I bet you haven't had hot chocolate where you roast your own beans?!?!"

Well, tonight the duel commensed, and it was really fun, if a bit exotical. Something that first occured to me about Francesca's style of preparing Mexican Hot Chocolate was that the steps seemed very many, and a little difficult to follow. Something about the number and almost randomness of how it went together had me a bit confused. And of course that's when my suggestions started flying. I mean I've never done any cooking of this sort, but based on other experiences, I had all these theories of what should happen next, and what the approach should be. Francesca was very generous and understanding.
So, now follows the pics in the order they were taken. These should give you a basic understanding of how to do this if you ever dare it at home alone.

Here you see the unroasted cocoa beans.

Francesca wasn't exacty sure what difference the roasting made, but knew that it was how she'd seen it done before; and that it aided in removing the chaff from the beans.

Over about medium heat, she roasted the beans until they darkened and popped. Stirring constantly.









So then all you have to do is crack the skins off all the beans.











Grinda, grinda, grinda!

I'm gonna breeze through a bunch of steps now that are a little more familiar. First, roast some anise seeds in a skillet until they're browned and starting to pop. Grind finely. Next, break up some cinnamon stick and grind to a fine powder.

I had asked Francesca about Mexican canela, but she said she just used the kind you get at the store here. I've used the canela from a little Mexican market shop and found it slightly lighter in flavor and flakier in texture, like if cinnamon stick could be shale. At any rate use pre-ground cinnamon if you like.

Add the cocoa powder and spices in a proportion that seems natural to you to a like proportion of milk and heat. You're gonna use quite a lot more ground cocoa than you might suspect. Stir every so often, but don't neccessarily let it come to a boil.

Next strain through a fine wire sieve. Make sure and press as much moisture as possible from the remaining paste. (Incidentally, this resulting paste can be used and an exfoliating skin moisturizer. Rub in well. Rinse. But before you do that, there are some more steps involved, so hold off on your beauty treatment until later.)




Next comes the Mexican blue corn flour/starch.







Put a few tablespoons in a blender with some water and whip up to a nice creamy consistency and add to the strained cocoa and milk mixture.

Continue to simmer until it thickens to a rich creamy texture. That accomplished, run the whole mess through your sieve again which still contains your strained cocoa paste--you're doing a second round of extraction. After you've passed your concoction through and pressed as much liquid out as possible. Add a little water to the paste and express again. Now stir in a small amount of sugar and taste. We added a very minimal amount of sugar. Just enough to sweeten slightly, but really as though you would use salt to brighten and bring out flavors.


Serve and enjoy!




As to my impressions of the flavor of this decidedly home made hot chocolate, I'd like to say that it was similar to the one that I had one morning for breakfast in Granada; though that one was more "refined." And, I don't mean that exactly in a good way. It was finer in texture, but much less nuanced in subtle chocolate flavor.

I tasted the beans before and after roasting. Also, one of Francesca's friends named Stuart brought over a fancy electronic bean roaster, and he brought his chaff to a very dark brown. All three versions differed significantly in flavor. The unroasted lacked flavor almost completely, though the texture was already similar to that of a roasted coffee bean. Francesca's pan roasted beans had a very light and subtle chocolate flavor. It was nutty and the texture compared to roasted coffee beans. I was surprised that it had almost none of the very dark bitter flavor of a dark chocolate. Lastly was Stuart's machine roasted. These beans were very dark in color and flavor. These tasted almost indecernably of a light roast coffee bean, and were decidedly missing the chocolate note one would expect. Neither Francesca nor I favored these beans on their own. Stuart, however, liked them, and we added them to the mix. I suspect that they did bring a touch of darkness that would have otherwise been missing.

On a final note, we discovered a couple kinds of "reject" beans. The first were ones that didn't seem to roast and were beigish in color. I had read about "quakers" with coffee beans (unmature beans that add a bitter acidic taste to coffee) and suspected them to be the cocoa bean version, so Francesca agreed and we avoided using them. The second type was a bean that sort of shattered in your hand as you tried to remove the chaff. Francesca said they were fine, but once they were shattered it became impossible to separate out the chaff, so I threw this type out as well.