Better Homemade: Chocolate Syrup

Chocolate milk is one of life's most wonderfully extravagant pleasures. 

If you are already convinced, and want to skip straight to the recipe, click here.

My mom never bought chocolate syrup. "It's full of nothing but junk!" she said. We did make hot cocoa on snow days, mixing cocoa and sugar and milk and vanilla in a saucepan on the stove. As we got older, she started buying the cocoa packets, and they were nice (and a lot faster, especially because we now had a microwave), but the flavor didn't compare.

My kids also prefer stovetop cocoa to anything out of a packet. On a really cold day, I'll add a tiny dash of cayenne...so pleasantly warming with the chocolate. Cinnamon is nice too!

Chocolate milk made a regular appearance in our lives when my kids started school five years ago. My son remarked early on that he generally preferred the "regular" milk, but the chocolate and strawberry-flavored milks had all the fun cartoon characters on the containers, which he thought wasn't right (and I agreed). He bought his lunch occasionally, and my daughter did the same when she started school, but she made an argument that a weekly chocolate milk was a good "sometimes treat." I thought this was a fair argument, and my son by this time had developed an appreciation for it, so we agreed they could do it once a week, whether they brought or bought their lunch.

Shortly after this, I went to school and bought my own school lunch with the kids, and I looked at the carton of chocolate milk. High fructose corn syrup was the second ingredient in a long list of unpronounceable items, and it had 26 grams of sugar! What?? That's almost as much as a bowl of chocolate ice cream!

"I can do better than this," I said, and the tinkering commenced.

First, most recipes called for a mix of granulated white and brown sugars. I quit storing brown sugar a few years ago, since I already stock both molasses and sugar, and it's easy to mix up brown sugar on the few occasions I need it. 

Interestingly, a teaspoon of molasses contains more sugar than a teaspoon of granulated sugar (4 g to about 4.6 g). However, the molasses has a little magnesium, iron, calcium, and potassium, and its rich, deep flavor really complements the cocoa. I mixed up brown sugar once for this, then decided to just substitute straight molasses for it, which is easier and tastier!

My recipe makes the most deliciously-rich, intensely-chocolaty hot cocoa, chocolate milk (and occasional an iced mocha) I've ever had. It uses only six common pantry ingredients, though I could make a good case for adding a dash of cinnamon!  

My "Deliciously Rich Chocolate Syrup" has about 4 grams of sugar per Tablespoon versus Hershey's Chocolate Syrup, which has 10 grams of sugar per Tablespoon. Cocoa is the fourth ingredient on the Hershey's label (the first is HFCS, then corn syrup, then water...finally some cocoa). Besides water, my recipe has more cocoa than anything else (and some of that water disappears when you reduce it, so we could argue it comes out as the top ingredient).

A printable recipe is below.

Sugar Cereal

Sugar cereal and Saturday morning cartoons

I joked recently on Facebook about how Southerners run to the store for milk and bread if snow is forecast, and a friend joked back "You buy groceries? I thought you guys were self-sustaining." 

It got me to thinking about how often living a simpler, more sustainable life can seem daunting in our media-saturated, consumer culture. For me, it's all about making very small changes. I'm not an all-or-nothing person. And, for the record, I have no desire to be self-sustaining, though "community-sustaining" is certainly a goal.

We talk as a family about our goals, and then find ourselves buying more organic, more local. Food is sacred. It literally creates us anew. Some Buddhist practices teach that how food is grown and prepared impacts not just the body, but the soul as well. Food prepared with a bad attitude causes a kind of metaphysical/spiritual damage, just like eating food full of hormones and pesticides can cause physical harm. 

So yes, the goal is to prepare healthy food with love...but it's also important to be honest and objective about where we are now. It's rather like filling a Facebook feed with a bevvy of gardening posts; it can mistakenly give people the impression that one is feeding a family of four from a flowerbed garden. (For the record, probably 10% of our food comes from our own garden + my dad's garden, though hopefully more as time goes on.)

Similarly, when shopping with my children recently, my 7-year-old son asked, "so mommy, is sugar cereal so bad we really should never eat it?" That gave me pause. In the pause, my son pointed out, "Well, we used to eat it once a year, on vacation, but we didn't do that this year. Is once a year okay?"

Pretty sure those honeycrisp apples in the background are not organic either.

"Yes, once a year is certainly fine," I said. "......so let's get the little boxes so we can try a lot of different things." This suggestion was well received, and then gave us the opportunity to read labels, to look at packaging claims (like "Good source of VITAMIN D"), to consider degrees of processing for different foods, and to discuss what choices mean for our bodies and the greater world to which we are connected. I love buying the little boxes, which you can cut open and use as a "bowl" of sorts. I always wanted to try even one of these as a kid, but it was completely verboten, and I coveted those little boxes.

In our world, as it exists today, we cannot avoid chemical pesticides and fertilizers. Even if I only consumed what I grow here myself (assuming I could grow enough), I would get some runoff from my uphill neighbor, or from the bird that eats it elsewhere and poops in my garden, or my wheat is cross-pollinated with GMO wheat, etc. There is no perfect, chemical-free, food-world....but this doesn't mean that my choices don't make a difference!!

Nowadays, I buy only organic strawberries and spinach. I buy organic bananas, unless they just look horrible (only usually about 10 cents/lb more than alternative). I buy organic apples about 80% of the time. (I have tried to begin with foods containing the most pesticides and petrochemicals, and/or the cheaper organic alternatives, and work from there.) And nowadays I buy sugar cereal once a year. We don't have to be all-or-nothing. The journey toward sustainability and moderation, for me, is made up of many, many small steps. 

Walk with me, hold my hand, and we won't run this race in vain!

I also have to share that my kids self-rationed these little boxes to last for several weeks, saving the last two for the Saturday morning after Thanksgiving. They didn't gorge, like I did on sugar cereal when I got to college. I found this to be very interesting, and pretty cool. For them, it's a "sometimes food," just for fun...a tiny bit of Yin that must exist in the Yang.