MEXICAN CHOCOLATE

Chocolate, but make it interesting. 

Ingredients: Dark chocolate with hand ground dried guajillo and ancho peppers, canela, and nutmeg 

While European chocolate is conched to reduce acidity and tempered, cacao nibs for Mexican chocolate are ground in a stone mill, combined with sugar and spices, and ground into a paste. 

As with most things, when Europeans got their hands on chocolate they made it pretty meh. The Olmecs were likely the first people to ferment, roast, and grind cacao beans — possibly as early as 1900 BCE where the Mexican states of Veracruz and Tabasco are located in the country’s tropical lowlands. 

After the Olmecs, the Maya of modern Guatemala and Yucatan began incorporating cacao into religious practices, and it was seen as a sacred food and central social life. Early Maya recipes used honey to ferment cacao, which they would flavor with herbs, corn, seeds, and spices. Aztecs traded the Maya for cacao beans, using them as a form of currency. 

Chocolate made its way to Spain in the 1500s via colonizers where it was sweetened and spiced with cinnamon. The 1615 marriage of Anne of Austria, the daughter of Spanish King Phillip III, to King Louis XIII brought chocolate to France. From there, European powers established colonial plantations in equatorial regions around the world to grow cacao and sugar, using slave labor to create a constant supply. 

In 1828, Dutch chemist Coenraad Johannes van Houten invented the cocoa press which enabled chocolate to be mass produced, allowing a further cut in production costs. This is where we start getting milk chocolate and basic Lindt truffles and garbage like that. 

Anyways. I made this ice cream in an effort to resemble champurrado — a traditional Mexican chocolate drink thickened with masa harina and flavored with cinnamon, anise, vanilla. While I don’t have my hands on an original Mesoamerican recipe and pretty sure my boyfriend would not appreciate me turning our apartment into a fermentation station, I hope you like the hand-ground blend that I made using dried anchos and guajillos, canela, and nutmeg in my mortar + pestle.