All you have to do is combine cacao and milk

I do think a hot chocolate is the best drink on the planet. It has everything that I could need in a drink and also even in a mini meal or snack, and I will spill the secrets as to why soon. I like cacao (specifically dark chocolate) so much that I occasionally fantasize about going on a year-long cacao pilgrimage. Maybe one day.

But fundamentally … a hot chocolate consists of cacao and milk. I like mine with dark chocolate, sea salt, and some type of raw/dark sugar (could even be maple syrup for a woody sweetness).

But again … fundamentally … we are talking just the two ingredients here, that is, milk and cacao. It’s fascinating to note that not everyone can get nourished from milk, let alone tolerate it. But if you can … then you might even find that dairy at large … in all forms, from a variety of mammals … integrates with your body seamlessly. A baby mammal survives on milk alone. And if your body can make light work of dairy, then in many ways you’re off to to the races.

This is because dairy nourishes and hydrates at the same time. It’s what I call an integrated system. Complete protein. Calcium. Phosphorus. Fat-soluble vitamins. Potassium. A touch of sodium and magnesium. Fats that sit slow, sugars that release calm.

And … dairy creates a kind of stability in the gut. A base on which plants can dance. For example …

In Seoul I had this chestnut cheesecake with cacao nibs, almond, whipped cream, and some sweet crumbles. These sharp/bouncy plant-based ingredients, I felt, found their fullest expression when they had something steady to land on.

This is what integration, to me, means at the level of the gut. Not adding or subtracting, but letting one thing fold into another. We’re talking layers of layers within layers.

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Now to the hot chocolate. Real hot chocolate. Milk, whole or not, raw or not. Dark chocolate broken in. Sugar (if you want), and a pinch of sea salt.

What’s happening in this cup is … quite frankly … a small marvel. Hot chocolate with cocoa of Chiang Mai origin. 75% dark. The cocoa trees are planted in Mediterranean red soil; goes through a 7-day fermentation process at an altitude of 500 meters above sea level.

This is the cleanest fruit flavour I’ve tasted in cacao, with a hint of citrus. It’s got longan notes … longan is similar to lychee.

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The milk grounds and the protein is just sort of dissolves into you. The dark chocolate lifts … theobromine is a long, gentle stimulant. There is also bitterness and richness. The sea salt magnifies.

Lift and ground. Sweet and bitter. Warming and soothing. Stimulating and settling. These so-called opposites just fold into one another. Nothing in the cup is fighting anything else in the cup. You finish it and you are more yourself, not less. Hot chocolate is one drink you can think on, write on, move on, and rest on. it gets rave reviews from me. It doesn’t commit you to a direction … it gives you the whole arena!

The cacao trees and the cows do not necessarily know each other. But milk fat happens to be the perfect carrier for cacao’s flavanols. Cacao’s bitterness happens to be the perfect counterweight to milk’s sweetness. This is why I trust foods like this. Not because a label says they are complete. There is no vitamin C in the cup. The calcium will blunt some of the non-heme iron. Fine. I’m not asking the cup to be a diet but to do two things at once without contradiction. Nourishes but it doesn’t weigh. Lifts without hollowing. Satisfies you … but doesn’t put you in a coma.

It does all of this because the cow and the cacao tree and the salt and the heat were all made by the same world. The body that has learned to hold them recognizes this immediately. The drink arrives integrated, the body integrates effortlessly, and you stand up lighter than you sat down, while also being more fed. Sounds crazy but it’s true.

Most foods, in the modern world, are simply unintegrated. They arrive, let’s say, “one-sided”. Therefore the body has to manufacture the counterweight, and that manufacturing is what we call fatigue. I could go for days about such meals/foods … because our modern world is plagued with them, sometimes covertly, and perhaps I will in the future.

In the mean time … slowly acclimatize your palate to the complex fruity-bitter quality of cacao so that one day you may see it beyond a sweet treat and as the integrated, grounding-yet-lifting seed that it really is.