QC Recipes: Champurrado Drinking Chocolate

QC Recipes: Champurrado Drinking Chocolate

Drinking chocolates can be enjoyed anytime of day but I prefer to begin the day on a high note! Paired with my homemade granola, this was my first experiment with making champurrado before my shop opened. It was a delightful rookie cup and catapulted me into exploring more drinking chocolate concepts!

Chocolate's origins are, in fact, rooted in drinking rather than eating. Mesoamerican cultures long cultivated, harvested, consumed, and traded cacao before colonizers stumbled their way to this hemisphere. With a name meaning Food of the gods, we can see how highly-esteemed theobroma cacao was situated in many of the civilizations from as early as 1900 BCE, with some evidence suggesting even earlier.

Cacao beans were even used as currency. Money literally grew on trees, y’all.

Eating chocolate, as we are more familiar with today, didn’t come onto the scene until the 1800s by comparison.

And as much as we love to eat chocolate, one should definitely have a proper cup of drinking chocolate to walk down the road of becoming a true cocoa connoisseur!

Let your Queer Chocolatier help!

Drinking Chocolate vs. Hot Cocoa

You might ask yourself, what's the difference between drinking chocolate and hot cocoa? Sounds the same, right?

The key difference is the form of chocolate used in the beverage.

Hot cocoa is made with, as you may have guessed, cocoa powder as its base and is mixed with sugar, water or milk, and flavorings. Drinking chocolate, on the other hand, is typically made by gently melting down finished chocolate and incorporating various liquids and other ingredients for flavor and texture.

A good but imperfect analogy would be to compare drip-brewed coffee with hot cocoa and espresso shots with drinking chocolate. The intensity and concentration of chocolate is more present in drinking chocolate as so with espresso shots in the coffee world.

Preparing drinking chocolate orders at Queer Chocolatier's Chocolate House

We served 4 to 5 different drinking chocolates on our menu, depending on the season, but my favorite is the champurrado. This drink is inspired by the Mesoamerican origins but made more palatable for today's consumers. Although, the modern-day Hoosier in me deeply yearns for that corn…

Ingredients:

For 1 serving of champurrado

• 1 ounce dark chocolate (no less than 60% cocoa, which is what we use at QC), chopped into small pieces

• 1 Tablespoon of finely-ground cornmeal

• ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

• ¼ teaspoon ground chipotle

• 4 ounces of boiling water

Steps:

1. Set a small cup to the side ready for you to pour your champurrado in immediately after it is prepared.

2. Place a kettle filled with water on the boil.

   1. If you have an electric kettle, use as instructed by manufacturer.

   2. If you have a non-electric kettle, pour water in and place in stovetop burner to bring to boil.

   3. If you don’t have a kettle, skip this step and move onto step 3.

3. In a small pot (tbh, I use butter warmers to prepare our drinking chocolates!), combine chocolate pieces, cornmeal, cinnamon, and chipotle and place on stovetop burner on medium-low heat. (If you do not have a kettle, add 4 ounces of water along with the other ingredients in small pot.)

4. Stir continuously with a heatproof spatula in order to keep chocolate from scorching and to further incorporate dry ingredients into melted chocolate.

5. Once chocolate is fully melted, pour boiling water in with the melted chocolate and use a whisk to vigorously combine. (If water was added at the beginning, once you see chocolate is melted, switch out the spatula for the whisk to begin mixing vigorously.)

6. As beverage heats up, the cornmeal will thicken considerably. Check for temperature and flavor by dipping a small spoon in the pot to bring out for a taste. Be careful, please, and don’t burn your tongue!

7. When beverage is at your desired hot temperature, turn off heat and pour immediately into your serving cup and enjoy!

A couple of notes:

• Drinking chocolate is absolutely something to make to your tastes! If you want it spicier, add more chipotle. If you don’t like or can’t eat cinnamon, omit it for a different spice you like. If you like a thinner or thicker beverage, adjust the water accordingly.

• For something a bit more robust, consider swapping hot coffee for the water!

Serving our drinking chocolates with a palate cleanser such as sparkling mineral water provides a fuller tasting experience. Photo credit: Veronica Engle

QC Recipes: Biscuits and Chocolate Gravy

QC Recipes: Biscuits and Chocolate Gravy

One of my very favorite things I used to make at the Chocolate House (before the pandemic…) was our Saturday brunch plate of biscuits and chocolate gravy!

What on earth is chocolate gravy, you ask? I’m glad you did.

My late grandma is from Tennessee and she used to make it for Saturday breakfast, as told to me by my aunt. I'd never had it before, but when we were building out the Chocolate House, I thought I would make a test batch at home and see if it was something to include in our offerings.

It immediately won over my wife, who serves as the true arbiter of taste in our household. Cheri can be picky but it is always in a way that serves as a line of what is high-quality and what’s not.

We both got excited about offering brunch to the queer community! Muncie, meet biscuits and chocolate gravy; biscuits and chocolate gravy, meet Muncie!

The very first plate of B&CG I ever made!

If You Like Biscuits and Any Gravy, You’ll Love Biscuits and Chocolate Gravy

Some folks who have never heard of chocolate gravy are universally skeptical at first. My wife included. The concern is whether the chocolate gravy is too sweet.

It isn’t. Trust.

It is situated somewhere between sweet and savory.

Serving it atop warm, tender biscuits helps anchor the gravy from drifting too far into the sweet category as well.

Here’s a bonus: I’ve created a way to make the whole plate vegan!

Part of our mission at Queer Chocolatier is to stand in solidarity with people of all sorts of diets, including vegans, and have the majority of our offerings suitable for their diet.

I’ll offer both versions, with dairy and without, in the recipe below!

The gravy itself is not hard to make but it can be easily ruined, so I tend to recommend not starting your gravy until at least you’ve put your biscuits in to bake or when they are out of the oven altogether. Also, the recipe for the gravy is what I use, but I include some of my preferred optional flavorings as well; feel free to experiment with flavors you enjoy! Gravy is more about expressing your own preferences, some like thinner gravy while others like it thick and never leaving the biscuit surface. Make it your way!

And, in case you wondered, yes these biscuits can be made in a toaster oven!

Ingredients:

For Biscuits (Yield: 6 biscuits)

• 2 cups All-purpose Flour

• ¾ teaspoon Salt

• 1¼ tablespoons Baking powder

• 1 stick, 8 tablespoons, very cold and cubed Butter (vegan version: butter alternative, such as Earth Balance or Country Crock's plant-based offerings, preferably the avocado over the olive oil)

• ½ cup Milk (vegan version: unsweetened soy milk), may need to add more, so keep handy.

Steps:

1. Preheat oven to 425° F.

2. Combine dry ingredients in large bowl and whisk to incorporate.

3. Cut butter into dry mixture. Use your hands to work butter into the mix as quickly as possible so as to not get the butter too warm, but get your final mix looking kind of sand and the butter pieces no bigger than pea-sized.

4. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour the milk into the well. Stir to incorporate, but only just. Do not overwork mixture, as biscuits will get tough and not rise well.

5. Turn out biscuits dough onto counter and shape into a disk that is an even 1” thick throughout. Use a 2” biscuit cutter to cut out biscuits and place them onto a parchment-lined baking sheet. Re-shape scraps and cut more biscuits. I always made myself an “ugly” biscuit I shape by hand with the final remaining scraps that I couldn’t use to cut with biscuit cutter!

6. Bake for 12-15 minutes, until tops are golden brown.

7. Remove from oven, serve warm with gravy.

Ingredients:

For Chocolate Gravy (Yield: 2 cups)

• 1 cup Sugar

• ¼ cup Cocoa powder

• 3 tablespoons All-purpose flour

• Pinch of Salt

• 2 cups Milk (vegan version: unsweetened soy milk)

• 4 tablespoons, cubed, Butter (vegan version: butter alternative, such as Earth Balance or Country Crock's plant-based offerings, preferably the avocado over the olive oil)

• Optional: serve with a pinch of ground cinnamon and ground chipotle, maybe add 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract to be real fancy!

Steps:

1. Combine dry ingredients in a medium pot, whisking until fully incorporated.

2. Place pot on stove top on medium-low to medium heat and slowly stream milk into mixture, whisking to remove lumps.

3. Cook, stirring frequently and paying special attention to the bottom and sides of pot where gravy can thicken (and burn!) until gravy is warm and thickened to desired consistency, realizing gravy will continue to thicken as it cools.

4. Add cubed butter at the end of cooking and stir to combine until all butter is melted and gravy has a shiny, glossy appearance.

5. Serve over fresh biscuits or just eat with a spoon from the pot, I ain’t about to judge.

6. Gravy can be stored in a jar in the refrigerator for about a week. When reheating, use a microwave (30 seconds at a time, stirring in between) or return gravy to a pot but add a bit of milk to thin out while bringing gravy to desired temperature.

Instagram photos from customers who have unapologetically indulged in Queer Chocolatier Biscuits & Chocolate Gravy

Photo credit: Benjamin Strack (IG @photogben)

Photo credit: Ryan Remington (IG @ryanisadope)

Photo credit: Amy Shaw (IG @alphanumeric.71697

Photo credit: Patrick O'Neal (IG @patrick_mcdarling_oneal)

QC Recipes: Cold Brew Cocoa

QC Recipes: Cold Brew Cocoa

As things are shifting here at Queer Chocolatier, I’ve decided that it might also make for a great opportunity to begin sharing some recipes with readers!

I will hope to have a recipe posted about once a week or so, depending on how the season is going at the shop and whether Dorian will let me sit down to write…

You understand my plight

My first recipe is incredibly easy and really quite surprisingly pleasant as I literally just tried it for the first time for myself this morning!

Hey, when something is that good, why keep it to myself when I could share it with my family???

COLD brew Cocoa

If you’ve ever had or heard of cold brew coffee, then you gotta try cold brew cocoa!

Some people tend to discuss cold brew coffee as a preferred way to drink coffee without the stomach-wrenching acidity or bitterness that can accompany a typical hot brewed coffee. It has a smoother taste and you don’t have to worry about your coffee getting cold when it already starts out that way!

Cold brew cocoa may require more convincing since the vast majority of the time we consume cocoa is hot or, when not hot, in a frappuccino of some concoction.

But trust your Queer Chocolatier!

I gotchu! Cold brew cocoa is delicious!

Cold brew cocoa: Dark, smooth, but flavorful in a delightfully unexpected way!

To make yourself a serving at home, you likely have all the things you need already.

Ingredients and Materials:

• Glass (8-12 oz will do nicely) to brew plus a glass to filter into and drink from

• Spoon

• Cold water (preferably filtered or bottled)

• Cocoa powder (any will do, but pick your favorite, and keep an eye out for when QC makes housemade cocoa powder!)

• Coffee filter (ideally a pour-over coffee set-up of some sort)

That’s it. You may be thinking “But wait! Cocoa powder isn’t sweetened! It is really bitter! I REMEMBER AS A CHILD MY GRANDMOTHER TRICKING ME INTO A BITE OF COCOA POWDER AND I CARRY THOSE SCARS ON MY HEART TO THIS VERY DAY!!”

Ahem, you might be thinking that, but just give this a try first and if you do find that you need to sweeten it up, you can do so just before serving.

Steps:

• Take your glass and pour your cold water in, leaving a bit of headroom for when you stir.

• Scoop 1-2 spoonfuls of cocoa powder into your cold water and stir. Be aware that not all of the cocoa powder will dissolve, that’s okay! Just give it a diligent stirring and stop when it is mostly incorporated.

• Place your glass in the refrigerator overnight.

• In the next morning, set up a a coffee filter in either a single serving pour over set-up or fit a coffee filter over a clean glass by rolling the edges of the filter over the top of your glass and secure with your non-pouring hand.

• Take your cold brew cocoa out of the fridge and, without stirring again, pour carefully into your coffee filter. The cocoa solids will be strained away and the water will pour through easily. Discard filter after water is fully filtered.

• Drink immediately or return to fridge to drink later (but maybe no longer than a day, just go ahead and drink it, you already went through all that trouble). Add any creamer or flavorings similar to how you might fix yourself a cold brew coffee, but be sure to taste it first because you might just like to drink this beverage stra… well… unadulterated.

You can also make ice cubes of cold-brew cocoa and serve a batch of cold brew cocoa over these ice cubes! Or mix & match between cold brew cocoa cubes with cold brew coffee, or vice versa!!

THE POSSIBREWERTIES ARE ENDLESS!!!!

Give this fun beverage a try and let me know your thoughts in a comment below!