Chocolate drinks

Every chocolate drink on this page is made either from CHOCOLATE or from COCOA POWDER, and the two are not strengths of one thing. Chocolate carries cocoa butter into the cup: fat is body, fat carries aroma to the receptors, and fat is why a drinking chocolate coats the mouth. Cocoa powder has had most of that butter pressed out — that is what pressing is for — leaving concentrated solids that give colour, bitterness and roast aroma, and no body at all.

So a cocoa drink cannot be made rich by adding more cocoa. Past about eleven grams per hundred millilitres it goes dusty rather than richer, because you are adding dry solids to a drink that has no fat to carry them. And a chocolate drink cannot be made light by using less chocolate without also losing most of its flavour, because the flavour and the fat arrive together.

Neither is the better one. Most of the world drinks cocoa, and a good cocoa drink is cleaner and less cloying than a rich chocolate one. But knowing which you are making is the difference between a drink that works and a drink that disappoints for reasons nobody can name.

Cocoa does not dissolve. It never has and it never will: what is in cocoa powder is fragments of plant cell wall, protein, starch and residual fat, and none of it goes into solution the way sugar does.

What a chocolate drink is, therefore, is a SUSPENSION — solid particles held up in a liquid, temporarily, against gravity. Every technique in this section is a way of managing that. The paste you make before adding the milk is about getting liquid onto every particle before a wet skin seals dry powder inside a lump. The whisking is about dispersing cocoa butter into fine droplets so the drink has body. The cornflour in a Spanish chocolate raises viscosity so the solids settle more slowly. The carrageenan in a carton of chocolate milk builds a network too weak to feel and too strong for a cocoa particle to fall through.

Four techniques, four traditions, one problem underneath all of them.