A Picture's Worth...

Well, it's not exactly a food blog, but they do add new content on occasionally: Aharn Thai does, however, have something that makes it very valuable: videos. I'm the type of cook who would rather see something done once in person by an expert than read a supremely detailed recipe guide.

Granted, videos of people cooking all manner of things are pretty easy to find these days on Youtube and the like, videos of cooking in its unmanicured, unmeasured, natural human habitat are less so.

My only advice would be to make sure that the quality of your meat, especially pork, as it's used extensively in Thai cooking, is up to par: that means either organic or, at the least, something not treated with hormones/antibiotics, known as "naturally raised." Why? Ming Tsai says so (at least his recipes do). Just read this horrifying account of the American hog industry if you're still iffy.

Ingredient Minimalism

Hot cocoa is usually easy to make: just tear open the packet and add to milk. If you're real fancy, you'll actually have a canister of Hershey's chocolate powder and spoon it into some milk along with a little heap of sugar.

It shouldn't be surprising that with all the hype about the antioxidant merits of dark chocolate, particularly those with high percentage concentrations of cacao (what exists before it becomes dried and fermented cocoa), hot cocoa isn't what it used to be. As such, I have a nice recipe I indulge in, and it doesn't even require added sugar.

Something like Hershey's Special Dark cocoa is probably pretty good, although I very much like my "Dutch processed" Hershey's dark chocolate powder (which is apprently increasingly hard to find, according to this discussion, and the fact that they don't display the clearly marked canister I have on their product webpage any longer).

Unlike a chocolate candy bar, a table spoon of this stuff has nearly no fat; the dark variety also has more iron and fiber than regular coca powder, and much more so than processed milk chocolate. And you still get that rich chocolate essence.


In any case, it should look something like what you see here: dark. It doesn't contain any milk powder, so you get the boldest flavor. All it needs is a bit of sweetening.

My Minimal Ingredient Cocoa

• Rice milk
• "dutch processed" dark cocoa
• powdered milk

You could just as easily use actual milk, but the rice milk has a bit of sugar on its own so nothing else in necessary. The milk powder just serves to soften the flavor a bit further, but I don't always use it.


When it's properly heated, it will get a bit of froth on the top, like this. Don't over heat it much past this point, especially if you've added milk. Just stir, cool, and serve.