Chocolate milk please, hold the corn syrup!

As I continue to endeavor to eat less food that is processed or full of questionable and unpronounceable ingredients, I have been experimenting with making some interesting things from scratch.

I really love chocolate milk and find it to be an especially good post exercise recovery drink, but alas, Hersey’s syrup is basically chocolate flavored high fructose corn syrup. Horizon has delicious chocolate milk, but it is too expensive to make a fridge staple.

In the wintertime, I often make hot chocolate from scratch the Swedish way which is basically cocoa powder and sugar whisked into milk and heated. Unfortunately, when you try to do this cold you get a grainy texture. Next I thought of heating it to dissolve the sugar and then chilling it to make chocolate milk. It wasn’t too bad, but still lacked the richness that I love.

My next plan was to make simple syrup (equal parts water and sugar heated until the sugar dissolves). I realized that simple syrup is basically homemade corn syrup, but made from sugar. We all know that too much sugar is not a good thing, but I think it is far superior to the alternative (i.e. the devil of foods, high fructose corn syrup).

While the simple syrup was still warm I began whisking cocoa powder in about a tablespoon at a time. I continued until the mixture was very dark in color, rich tasting, and thick. Once cooled and mixed with milk it is delicious!!!!!

I would love to experiment more with this using raw sugar. I also considered using Agave syrup, which is derived from the Agave plant and some claim is better for the body than white sugar because it has a more complex molecule. The only problem with Agave is that it is still pretty expensive.