This was 100% an experiment to see if I can incompetently pull something off. I didn't look up anything other than how to roast cocoa nibs, and came up with something that's actually kinda good.
Ingredients:
about a dozen cocoa nibs
2tb heavy cream
1c milk
1 tbsp sugar
First thing you'll need to do is get cocoa nibs. A friend of mine brings in large quantities of 'superfoods' from foreign countries and sells them to hippie/granola-whore stores, and gave me a small bag of them to try out. If you're looking for them, uh, check a hippie/granola-whore store.
Set your toaster oven (or real oven) to 300F, put the nibs on a sheet/piece of foil/whatever and put them in there for about 15 minutes. When they crack, they're done. The house smells fucking awesome when you do this, I should add.
While they're still hot, smash them and grind them with a mortar/pestle. I ground them to a ground coffee sort of consistency. You want to do this before they cool down, because cocoa nibs contain cocoa butter (unsweetened white chocolate, basically) which will harden as it cools down, making the job harder.
Raw nibs are in the foreground, ground nibs (aka 'cocoa mass') from the mortar/pestle are in the background.
At this point, I thought what should I do... this mashed cocoa stuff smells awesome, I can't really eat it directly, but I can probably extract some flavor from it. Flavors are oils, to extract them I could use alcohol (making creme de cacao), oil/fat (something to ponder for the future, for baking) or borrowing an ice cream making trick, using cream to extract the flavor. So into a small pot went the ground nibs and a couple tablespoons of cream.
After simmering for several minutes, things started to look, and smell, pretty damn awesome.
Now that the chocolately goodness is extracted into the cream, I added 1/4c milk to dilute the cream. This makes everything liquid, making straining it possible.
The cocoa clumped up when I added the cold milk, probably due to the cocoa butter solidifying. So I heated it for another while to get everything melted again.
Next step, strain it. I used a fine mesh metal strainer, cloth would get rid of more cocoa dust and make for a better texture in the final product, but refinements can come some other time if the outcome doesn't suck.
I added more milk to top up the glass. First taste? hey, pretty good, it just needs sweet. In went some organic tree-hugging hippie free trade coconut palm sugar that's been hiding in my cupboard for a while and needed to get used up, to bring the sweetness more in line with normal chocolate milk.
Bam. Homemade chocolate milk!
Outcome = success. It's actually kinda good, it's got a sharp intense flavor - this could be the result of my using way more cocoa nibs than I needed to, or it could be because I made this with plain cocoa versus dutch cocoa.
Ingredients:
about a dozen cocoa nibs
2tb heavy cream
1c milk
1 tbsp sugar
First thing you'll need to do is get cocoa nibs. A friend of mine brings in large quantities of 'superfoods' from foreign countries and sells them to hippie/granola-whore stores, and gave me a small bag of them to try out. If you're looking for them, uh, check a hippie/granola-whore store.
Set your toaster oven (or real oven) to 300F, put the nibs on a sheet/piece of foil/whatever and put them in there for about 15 minutes. When they crack, they're done. The house smells fucking awesome when you do this, I should add.
While they're still hot, smash them and grind them with a mortar/pestle. I ground them to a ground coffee sort of consistency. You want to do this before they cool down, because cocoa nibs contain cocoa butter (unsweetened white chocolate, basically) which will harden as it cools down, making the job harder.
Raw nibs are in the foreground, ground nibs (aka 'cocoa mass') from the mortar/pestle are in the background.
At this point, I thought what should I do... this mashed cocoa stuff smells awesome, I can't really eat it directly, but I can probably extract some flavor from it. Flavors are oils, to extract them I could use alcohol (making creme de cacao), oil/fat (something to ponder for the future, for baking) or borrowing an ice cream making trick, using cream to extract the flavor. So into a small pot went the ground nibs and a couple tablespoons of cream.
After simmering for several minutes, things started to look, and smell, pretty damn awesome.
Now that the chocolately goodness is extracted into the cream, I added 1/4c milk to dilute the cream. This makes everything liquid, making straining it possible.
The cocoa clumped up when I added the cold milk, probably due to the cocoa butter solidifying. So I heated it for another while to get everything melted again.
Next step, strain it. I used a fine mesh metal strainer, cloth would get rid of more cocoa dust and make for a better texture in the final product, but refinements can come some other time if the outcome doesn't suck.
I added more milk to top up the glass. First taste? hey, pretty good, it just needs sweet. In went some organic tree-hugging hippie free trade coconut palm sugar that's been hiding in my cupboard for a while and needed to get used up, to bring the sweetness more in line with normal chocolate milk.
Bam. Homemade chocolate milk!
Outcome = success. It's actually kinda good, it's got a sharp intense flavor - this could be the result of my using way more cocoa nibs than I needed to, or it could be because I made this with plain cocoa versus dutch cocoa.