4. The Hot Cocoa That’s Too Much Work: Giada De Laurentiis’ Triple Chocolate Hot Cocoa
Overall rating: 3/10
Get the recipe: Giada De Laurentiis’ Triple Chocolate Cocoa
When I read the ingredient list for this one, I had high hopes. This recipe incorporates chocolate hazelnut spread in addition to dark chocolate, and is the only one to include a pinch of salt. A little bit of salt with your sweet is terrific! This is also the only recipe to lead with non-dairy milk. The curveball for me was the cocoa nibs, which don’t melt and seemed like a possibly problematic texture-add. This recipe uses the blender in addition to the stovetop, putting it squarely in a higher-lift category than every other recipe I tested. Still, I was hopeful it would yield a good cocoa with some added depth of flavor.
Before heating the milk on the stovetop you add dark chocolate chips, chocolate hazelnut spread, cocoa nibs, and salt to a blender. Once the milk is warm, you carefully pour it over the ingredients in the blender and allow them to sit for 30 seconds. Then everything is blended until smooth. Unfortunately, despite blending for over 3 minutes (well over the 30 seconds the recipe called for), I could not get the mixture totally smooth. The cocoa nibs remained stubbornly “nibby” and resulted in a gritty cocoa.
While blending heated milk and a few other ingredients is not necessarily a lot of work, it was noticeably more (and created more dishes to clean) than every other recipe I tested. Grittiness aside, the flavor of the cocoa was a tad on the bitter side and while the use of almond milk is great for non-dairy folks, the cocoa itself had a distinctly thinner texture than other cocoas I tested.