Recipe

Warm Up with the Richest, Creamiest Cup of Hot Chocolate

Two North Carolina chocolate makers share their go-to recipe for drinking chocolate—plus how they upgrade the classic with cayenne pepper, peanut butter, cinnamon, or all three

Hot chocolate pours into a mug

Photo: Giedrius Kartanovic


Your drinking chocolate, says Danielle Centeno, is only as good as the chocolate you use to make it. She would know—she’s been operating Escazú, a craft chocolate shop in Raleigh, North Carolina, since 2008, sourcing beans from all over Latin America but primarily from her native country of Venezuela. 

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Though Escazú specializes in chocolate bars and confections—the bestsellers are a sea salt bar and a milk chocolate bar accented with goat milk powder—the shop also serves hot beverages, including a drinking chocolate. “It smells like brownies,” Centeno says of the decadent drink. “It’s thick, but not quite as thick as ganache.” 

The most important part of the recipe is the chocolate itself. “Use chocolate from your favorite small, bean-to-bar chocolate maker,” Centeno says. Opt for a bar made of just cacao and sugar and maybe a third ingredient, cocoa butter (the fat of the cacao bean). “This hot chocolate recipe is meant to showcase the flavor of the chocolate, not mask it,” she says. “The magic is in the chocolate—choose a bar that you know you enjoy and it will most likely make a delicious cup of hot chocolate.” 

From there, you can get creative; buy a bar with a higher cacao percentage, between 75 and 85 percent, and omit the sugar from the recipe; try a single-origin chocolate to really let its distinctive flavors shine; play with the milk-to-chocolate ratio to find your preferred creaminess level. And the staff at Escazú, including Centeno’s business partner, Tiana Young, like to throw in some extras, including a pinch of cayenne powder for spicy kick, peanut butter to make it more filling, cinnamon for depth of flavor—or, even better, all three together. As Centeno says, “it’s as much instinct as science.” 

A sprinkle of chipotle pepper powder on a mug of hot chocolate
A sprinkle of chipotle pepper powder.
photo: Giedrius Kartanovic
A sprinkle of cayenne pepper powder.

Ingredients

  • Escazú’s Hot Drinking Chocolate

    • ¼ cup, or 42 grams, of chocolate, chopped in pea-size pieces or smaller (Centeno and Young use Escazū’s 65% baking chocolate )

    • ½ tbsp., or 7 grams, of sugar

    • Just over ½ cup, or 4.5 oz., of whole milk or alternative (Centeno and Young prefer oat milk for flavor and texture)


Preparation

  1. Combine all the ingredients in a saucepan and heat on medium while whisking until completely melted, combined, and hot (your milk should be steaming, but not boiling). Turn the heat off and whisk vigorously to create a little bit of foam.

  2. If you have a milk frother or an espresso machine with a steam wand, you can use that instead of the stovetop for extra foamy and creamy hot chocolate. If you’d like a thicker, more chocolatey hot chocolate, you can use less milk or more chocolate. And if you’d like it a little less sweet, you can omit the sugar or adjust accordingly. 

  3. Serve in your favorite mug and enjoy.

  4. Note: For a twist on the classic drinking chocolate you can add:

  5. 1 heaping tsp. of peanut butter whisked in at the end

  6. A pinch of chipotle pepper powder, added at the beginning with all of the ingredients

  7. ¼ tsp. of cinnamon, added at the beginning with all of the ingredients

     

  8. Or, put all of the above add-ons all together


Lindsey Liles joined Garden & Gun in 2020 after completing a master’s in literature in Scotland and a Fulbright grant in Brazil. The Arkansas native is G&G’s digital reporter, covering all aspects of the South, and she especially enjoys putting her biology background to use by writing about wildlife and conservation. She lives on Johns Island, South Carolina, with her husband, Giedrius, and their cat, Oyster.


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