spiced chocolate soda

Made a chocolate soda today. We decided to make it as if we were doing a normal spiced hot chocolate (just with water instead of milk) and then remove all the fat and solids using a gelatin clarifying technique leaving us with a nice spiced chocolate water that could be carbonated.

I first learned about using gelatin to clarify broths from the ideas in food blog when I was trying to make a light clear bacon broth for a recipe with scallops and a bean puree a couple years ago. They had a great bacon broth recipe online, check it out here. The basic idea is the same as the old French technique of using egg white- the gelatin creates a 3D matrix that acts as a filter for all solids and fats. You add a bit of gelatin while the liquid is warm and then you freeze it and let it slowly melt in the fridge over a filter. This keeps the fat and gelatin solid and they trap all the other solids with them in the filter letting a crystal clear liquid drip down.

The chocolate water came out quite tasty! The method does need some tweaking though. 1st-recovery was low. I started with a liter of chocolate and only ended up with about 300 mL of chocolate water at the end. I think the gelatin ratio needs to be even lower because of the higher fat content of the chocolate vs. a meat broth. 2nd- not enough spice! The cinnamon, the clove and the hoja santa come through nicely but the chile spice is not really there. May need to use fresh chiles instead of dry or more of them or just lengthen the boiling time to extract more from the dry chile. Otherwise it's good- nice and clear and light but still very chocolatey! This is all probably too much work to scale up especially since we could just make a chocolate syrup and add carbonated water much easier, but it's fun to experiment!

The recipe:

226g (8oz) baking chocolate

1 dry gaujillo chile

2 dry ancho chile

1 tsp hoja santa

3 sticks cinnamon

1 tsp clove

1 L of water