The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science

maybe some vanilla and/or bourbon, add milk, and whisk
while heating), you can’t deny the convenience of simply
stirring a few tablespoons of powder into a cup of hot milk.
So I decided to come up with a homemade recipe that would
match the convenience of a powder and beat it in terms of
flavor and price.
To start, I tried simply grinding chocolate to a powder in
the food processor (freezing it first makes this easy). While
that made decent cups, by the time I’d added enough
chocolate to the milk to get the flavor I wanted, the richness
of the cocoa butter started to dominate, making drinking a
full mug difficult.
I opted instead for a combination of 100%-cacao
(unsweetened) chocolate, sugar, and Dutch-process cocoa.
With these tweaks, my chocolate was tasting pretty good,
but a few problems remained: It caked in the storage
container overnight, making it hard to dissolve the next day.
It broke when added to the milk, dispersing a fine layer of
fat bubbles over the surface of the drink. And the result
simply wasn’t rich, thick, and creamy enough.
Many commercial mixes contain soy lecithin or dried
milk proteins, both of which are intended to increase
creaminess and help keep the milk fat, cocoa butter, and
liquid nicely smooth and emulsified. I tried adding soy
lecithin to my mix and it worked, but I decided against it
(it’s available in health food stores, but hardly a
commonplace ingredient). Milk powder also helped with
texture, but it left the chocolate with a distinct cooked-milk
flavor—not right.
In the end, the simplest solution was to add some