Way back in the day, when I was just out of high school, I helped some friends out by running their little coffee shack for a weekend. This was the first place I had ever tried an espresso drink, that I remember. It was tiny, but they cared about doing it right. Who knew that their way of making mochas was very popular in Alaska, where I lived at the time, but virtually unheard of everywhere else.
As with every other coffee drink, the primary component is great coffee beans. If you start with great coffee, and add great ingredients, then you’ll end up with a delicious cup of coffee. I’ve mentioned that in a previous post.
The next key ingredient for a great mocha is chocolate milk. The beauty of using chocolate milk is that when dairy farms make chocolate milk, they have a way to suspend the chocolate in the milk so that it doesn’t settle out as easily. The higher quality of milk, the better the chocolate milk is. The better the chocolate milk, the better the mocha.
Most places will put all their syrups into the bottom of the cup, then add the espresso and try and get the syrups to melt and blend into the drink. The problem is that this method won’t get the syrup to melt enough to fully suspend in the drink. Chocolate sauce is even worse than the syrups, as it is thicker and heavier than the thinner sugar-based flavorings. This means that the chocolate sauce will settle out into the bottom of the cup even more than the simple syrups.
We, at Galaxy Girl Coffee, did a survey of the different chocolate milks available in our area. By far, the winning chocolate milk was Hildebrand Farms Dairy. For those of you not in Kansas, it is a local dairy that is about 45 minutes from our shop. We have been struggling to get our milk directly from them after our move, but have finally found success, and we are thrilled. It means we get to serve the best mochas.
Small hint. Our hot chocolate is also made with their chocolate milk, and it is very popular.
So, for all of those people that can have dairy milk, try making your mochas with chocolate milk. It will change the way you look at mochas.