Why Your Homemade Hot Chocolate Never Tastes As Good As A Cafe's

Hot chocolate is the ultimate comfort drink, especially on a cold winter's day in a cozy café. It's tempting to try to recreate the magic at home, but there's nothing quite as good as a steaming hot cup of chocolate crafted by a trained professional. Cafés obviously want their products to be memorable to keep customers coming back, so they perfect their techniques and carefully select their ingredients — in this case, chocolate, milk, sweetener, and various flavorings. The quality of those ingredients goes a long way, starting with the chocolate itself. High quality chocolate contains cocoa butter rather than vegetable oil, and the higher the cocoa content, the richer the chocolatey taste. 

If you want to attain that café-quality at home, look for premium chocolate, whether it's a bar, chips, or cocoa powder, that's made from at least 70% cocoa. You want a chocolate that melts easily on the tongue and has that heavenly chocolate scent. If you're planning on using a bar, ensure there's a nice, crisp snap when you break off a piece. To achieve a café-quality beverage without real chocolate there are some pretty decent store-bought hot chocolate mixes out there, but they won't do your drink any justice if you're using water instead of milk. 

At home, you have that option and many people choose it because it's easier and water creates a healthier beverage overall. While milk has plenty of vitamins and minerals, it also has calories, fat, and a glycemic index of 31. But in a café, the priority is taste, so you are more likely to get your hot chocolate made with milk. For instance, at Starbucks, their hot chocolate comes with 11 different milk options. Water, meanwhile, isn't inclued.

Aside from milk being better for making hot chocolate at home, the technique itself is a craft too (similar to making latte art for beginner home baristas — which isn't as hard as you think!). Likewise, practice makes perfect. Baristas spend their days creating perfect steaming hot beverages, so if yours comes out a little flat at first, don't be discouraged. Professionals also have their recipes down solid, along with the process itself. They have professional-grade equipment to do things like create the perfect foam to adorn the top of your hot chocolate. You can invest in high-grade equipment too, or you could simply perfect your own technique over time.

Further, you should also put some work into perfecting your own flavorings, something which helps elevate hot chocolate beyond the average homemade cup of cocoa. There are plenty of genius hacks to elevate your hot chocolate to restaurant-level quality, including getting creative with spices, making your own Chantilly cream, and using a whisk rather than a spoon to make sure that your chocolate and your milk are seamlessly incorporated into a rich, silky, cup of perfection.