Is chocolate a health food? Let's be honest. When we have an attack of chocolate cravings, do we really care? The thought that dark chocolate might be good for us or contain antioxidants doesn't compel us to eat more of it, it just makes us feel better when we're scouring the pantry with the desperation of an addict, hoping that we didn't bake the last of the chocolate chips into cookies.
I wish I could claim that making my drinking chocolate healthy was the main reason for adding such copious amounts of dark chocolate to every serving and including only simple ingredients in every bag, but the fact is that I've been searching for the best hot chocolate my whole life and this is the end result. The search has been long and delicious, beginning in my childhood when my family lived in Switzerland for a time, and I had the pleasure of discovering firsthand that not all chocolate is created equal. I went home a 12-year-old chocolate snob and thereafter always made my own cups of hot chocolate from scratch, experimenting with different ingredients and coming close but never hitting upon the perfect cup. Blessedly, years later, I came across drinking chocolate on my travels. Darker, thicker, and altogether different from hot cocoa, I had finally found my holy grail, my nectar of the gods, my you-complete-me chocolate drink. But while European cafes offered it on the street, American store shelves did not. At least not of the variety that would end my lifelong search. So, with the goal of creating an elixir that could be brewed at home, but transported one's mind to a faraway sidewalk café, I set to work, developing my own recipes. And, with the help of numerous willing taste testers, and after many iterations, I'm finally satisfied with the result. I think the twelve-year-old chocolate snob would approve. So, back to the original question of whether dark chocolate is a health food, I don't think I can answer for anyone else. While others debate whether dark chocolate is good for them, I'll just be sitting in my chair, sipping my cup of Deep Dark Drinking Chocolate, utterly convinced that it is good for me. |