Sugar Savvy

Chuck Siegel of San Francisco’s three-year old Charles Chocolates is a busy man. He’s running a new boutique (opened just in time for Valentine’s Day), he’s experimenting with flavor infusions from Teance Fine Teas and locally-made wines, and he’s supplying first-class treats to Qantas Airways. He’s also one of the nicest guys on […]

Everyone runs out of time. There are those moments when you have to have something on the table, and all you have is a mess in the kitchen. That’s exactly what happened to me last week when I looked at my calendar and realized that the latest installment of my hot chocolate column was due. […]

I can only think of one thing that would be better than my own method for preparing Scharffen Berger hot chocolate–John Scharffenberger’s personal recipe. Here’s an excerpt from the new book The Essence of Chocolate by John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg.
John’s Classic Drinking Chocolate
2-1/2 cups whole milk
4 ounces 99% unsweetened chocolate, coarsely chopped
1/3 cup granulated […]

Sam Madell is a chocolate purist. At her Australian chocolate company Tava, she produces a 100%-cacao bar using beans she and her partner Langdon Stevenson purchase directly from growers and collectives on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu. Over a lengthy email conversation, Sam and I discovered that we have something in common: we’re both, […]

An alluring spokeswoman for the Max Brenner chocolate company in Australia recently implored me to join her for an orchid hot chocolate, swearing by the floral beverage’s aphrodisiac properties.  Since orchids are the source of countless fascinations and fixations (and even phobias, I’m told), this seemed like a stirring topic for Sugar Savvy’s hot chocolate column.  […]

If the wintering of the northern hemisphere isn’t enough to put me in a bad mood, the frigid clouds that have blown in over what’s supposed to be spring here in southern Australia will do the job. Luckily, an out-of-town guest has kept me in good spirits, and my mood was especially lifted when we […]

While I’ve never been a proponent of online dating, a recent experience showed me that the internet can indeed bring kindred spirits together. Through star-crossed postings, I discovered Seneca Klassen’s chocolate blog, and he discovered mine. Since I was writing an article on chocolatiers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he was hard at […]

Chili (or chile) is now part of the common hot chocolate arsenal. On the eve of Friday the Thirteenth, why not toast the dark side with a glass of this libation?
Demonic Hot Chocolate
Chop or grate one ounce each of dark chocolate and milk chocolate into small pieces (remember to use a high-quality couverture–make sure […]

Hot chocolate is unusually easy to make: it requires only a basic recipe and the understanding of a few simple principles.
You need two ingredients to make a true cup of hot chocolate: chocolate and milk. (The Maya and the Aztecs used water instead of milk, and you can still find chocolate con agua […]

“When we modern Westerners think of chocolate, we think of it in its solid, sweetened form…. Yet during nine tenths of its long history, chocolate was drunk, not eaten.”
-Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate
Hot chocolate deserves a lot of attention. For thousands of years, it has been […]