How To Make French Hot Chocolate At Home

Hello, welcome back everyone! Today we're making a quick fix recipe. Someone asked me on Facebook to show everyone how to make a real french hot chocolate from scratch and this is exactly what we're going to do today. But to take it a bit further let's make a little bit of a gourmet hot chocolate and this is my recipe of the day. Today we're making a hot chocolate from scratch with vanilla and cinnamon bark. It's going to give a nice flavor. So the ingredients I'm using half a liter of full cream milk, organic dark chocolate with 70% cocoa content, some fresh cinnamon bark that's going to give that nice little flavor, a pinch of sugar, some vanilla essence and I've got some 100% cocoa powder to really give it some texture. To finish we're going to add a little bit of salt just to enhance that kind of sweet and savory balance. Now let's see how to make it. So let's get started and make a hot chocolate. Step number one, I'm starting with a medium to high heat, simple pan and you're going to start by heating up your milk. So I put my half a liter of milk in, very simple, and from here I'm going to add immediately all my flavoring ingredients. So I've got some cinnamon bark, just bought it in a shop, okay, and with this I'm going to add a little bit, quite more than a little bit actually, of vanilla extract but that's up to you to make it how you like. That's going to add some sweetness and some flavor. So from here, very simple, you're going to wait until your milk boils and then we're going to reduce the heat and let it simmer for a bit. Okay, so as I said now my milk has reached boiling point, you see it starts to foam, so from here you now put your heat on the minimum, very very low, give it a little stir and you're going to simmer that milk for around 10 minutes. The reason we're doing this is to give time for the cinnamon to diffuse its flavor into the milk and your milk is going to reduce a little bit, give it a bit more body, it's going to be less liquid. Done! 10 minutes have passed, this is my mix. The first thing you're going to do, like always, you taste your preparation. So a little bit, yes I can feel the cinnamon that's been cooked enough, I put my heat off. I'm going to discard my cinnamon barks, put them on the side, okay, so I can continue with my preparation and at this stage I'm going to add one tablespoon, a little bit more, of my cocoa powder. Don't put too much and I'm going to be stirring and that's going to start the base of our chocolate. I'm going to take my mix, I'm going to filter it through a sieve in another container of the camera, wash my pan and then put my pan back here so we can continue with our second step. I filter everything and look at this, this is much cleaner and much better. So from here I'm going to add just my pinch of sugar just to add a bit of sweetness but not too much and the secret ingredient which is actually the salt because that also enhances the sugary kind of taste. From here you add all your chocolate in, look at that, fresh chocolate pieces. This is how you make a real hot chocolate. So basically what I'm going to do here, as you can see chocolate melts very very fast so you don't have to wait very long but I'm not going to hold you on the camera so I'm going to stir it very gently until my mix is nice and sweet and nice and silky. Now the last hint, when you're here it's up to you to leave the heat on or off because if you leave the heat on the creaminess of the chocolate is going to increase and you're going to have a mix like a chocolate is going to be thicker and thicker. If you like it thin put the heat off and you can serve it right away. If you like it a bit thicker keep on cooking it until you get your perfect consistency but honestly speaking if I look at this that's pretty good and it's ready for serving. And now for the serving, I'm going to show you today a bit what we do in France for breakfast because we also have hot chocolate sometimes for breakfast. You get your butter, a bit of extra sugar and I've got some nice brioche here. From here take your pan and I'm going to pour this straight into my bowl. Look at that silkiness of a chocolate, it's a bit much but it's just for the demo. What we do from here, you can add a bit of sugar if you want, you mix your chocolate but best of all what we do is we take this little baby here and we dip it in the chocolate. Look at that, lovely! But I conclude the video for the quick fix recipe of the week, the French hot chocolate. I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next video, bye!