the swiss miss has left the building
(Anti-dairy people, you can just go ahead and stop reading now.)
So. In the spirit of culinary pleasure, plummeting mercury, and obsessive-compulsive documentary disorder (OCDD), I’ve decided to (re)dedicate myself to the sampling of hot chocolates this fall and winter. A quick rummage through my pantry yields a startling array of cannisters and packets — all just sitting there waiting for people to drop in at 1am and drink them with me — and I figure the best way to help get through these is to share my findings with you.
We start with what may be the early winner in the season: Vosges La Parisienne hot cocoa. I know what you’re thinking: man, Liz is really taking one for the team here! That’s right — I’m sampling the $25 “couture” cocoa so you don’t have to. Actually, you do have to. It’s really good.
I made La Parisienne last week for the first time and followed the vaguely involved directions (actually, there are three different sets of directions, depending on how you like to get your hot choc on) — and despite being, you know, tired, it was totally worth it to carry them out.
Hometown Chicago girl Katarina Markoff would like me to prepare this hot chocolate with milk, cream, orange rind and Ceylon cinnamon sticks. I did it with a mix of 1% organic milk, half-and-half, and the zest of a mineola — and while I’m not rightly sure that the “Choix Extra” store-brand cinnamon sticks I buy aren’t just made in Tobago or Vietnam, they got the job done.
La Parisienne (especially with orange flavouring) has that really nice gentle-yet-sludgy quality I look for in a cocoa’s richness. Since spending a lot of time in the would-be-exotic cocoa aisles under the “Aztec” banner in the last few years, I have to say that the Vosges blend has a subtlety I’ve come to miss. Whether I’m still doing it as intended — the first batch I made saw a truly spectacular splattering of cocoa across a 5-foot radius in my kitchen when I attempted to follow the “thicken it til it foams to double its size with an immersion blender!” suggestion — is a bit up for grabs. But if you are, like I was, putting off buying this cocoa for month after month because you couldn’t justify the price tag (thank you, DRD for the Zingerman’s gift certificate!) — well, you kind of still can’t justify the price tag. But you might be able to justify inviting yourself over for a cup, or perhaps forming a hot-chocolate-drinking-collective and launching an eco-charter to Indonesia. Let me know how it goes.