Mexican chocolate: what it is and how to use it
Coarse, stone-ground, cinnamon-spiced and made for drinking or cooking — and its grain is a characteristic rather than a fault.
If you read nothing else
Mexican chocolate is a drinking and cooking product, deliberately coarse, and it is not a substitute for couverture in any technique that requires tempering.
What is in a tablet
Mexican drinking chocolate is typically ground cacao, sugar and cinnamon, pressed into a disc or tablet. It is stone-ground rather than conched, so the sugar crystals are large enough to feel — that grain is the product, not a defect, and conching it out gives you something else.
Some tablets include almond, and some include no cinnamon at all. Read the tablet rather than assuming a formula.
How it is used
Whisked into hot water or milk and frothed, traditionally with a molinillo, and the foam is the prized part — as it was in the pre-conquest drink. It is a drink first.
In cooking it appears in mole and related sauces, where cacao contributes bitterness, colour and body against a large quantity of chilli. The right product for that is usually unsweetened cacao rather than a sweetened tablet, and the quantity is small: a mole that tastes of chocolate has too much in it.
What it will not do
It will not temper, it will not coat, and it will not set as a ganache in the way couverture does. The sugar particle size and the absence of conching make it a different material.
If a recipe wants Mexican chocolate and you have none, the nearest substitute is dark chocolate plus a small quantity of ground cinnamon — but you will lose the texture, which is most of the point.
Covered in this guide
- Mexican drinking chocolateThe living practice, and why the texture is characteristic.
- Cacao in Mexican cuisineCacao as a savoury ingredient, and what mole actually is.
- Drinking chocolateThe category, and the range of products inside it.
- CinnamonThe spice that survived the European adaptation, and is still the default here.
Sources
- ChocolateHQ editorial synthesis — ChocolateHQ(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
- The True History of Chocolate — Thames & Hudson(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)