Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Cacao & Vanilla

Cacao a la mexicana - for four cups

Get
½ litre of milk
½ cup of dark, organic cacoa powder
2 tsp. of Rapadura (cane) sugar
½ teaspoons of cinnamon powder
1 pinch of salt
1 small vanilla bean
½ cups of whipped cream, optional

Do
Heat up the milk.
Add the the scraped out vanilla bean to the milk
Mix in a bowl all dry ingredients and add to the hot milk while quickly stirring it.
Allow to boil and than remove the chocolate from the stove. Now stir in (the cream and) the vanilla.

- Recipe in altered form via Vanilla Trade
- Thanks to the pre-Columb
ian Mayan cultivators who have " been managing their forests for millennia to cultivate cacao and to make chocolate, and we know they were also cultivating vanilla to use it as a chocolate spice.The Maya created these forest gardens by introducing different types of species of wild cacao and vanilla from the surrounding forests, which meant that species that had previously been geographically separated were then able to hybridize because they were in the same place. That's the scenario we present in our research paper for how Tahitian vanilla got started. It is an evolutionary product, but also a Maya artifact." Pesach Lubinsky, University of California, Tahitian Vanilla Originated In Maya Forest, via Science Daily 260808

Hot chocolate without sugar

1 comment:

Heather W said...

Thanks for writing tthis