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The combination of milk chocolate with coffee is very good. The classic strategy is to take a bite of chocolate, chew it for five seconds, and then sip some coffee.

This strategy can be inconvenient at times, so I thought of dissolving the chocolate directly into hot coffee. However, this did not work very well due to the chocolate's fat content. How can I effectively mix chocolate into coffee? (Sometimes there are some tricks for these situations; for example, when you make hot chocolate, the trick to effective mixing is to make a slurry first.)

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  • 2
    Have you tried mixing in some instant hot chocolate? Or do you really want to incorporate actual chocolate?
    – zetaprime
    Aug 25, 2020 at 5:42
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    @2cents I do sometimes. Would you mind sharing the recipe?
    – Ovi
    Aug 25, 2020 at 15:22
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    Where I live this is called a 'Mocha' you can order it at most cafes
    – DarcyThomas
    Aug 26, 2020 at 0:42
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    @Ovi According to the wikipedia article, there isn't. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caff%C3%A8_mocha "Caffè mocha, in its most basic formulation, can also be referred to as hot chocolate with (e.g., a shot of) espresso added."
    – nick012000
    Aug 26, 2020 at 2:10
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    @nick012000 I can only speak from personal experience: I have had mocha before, and drinking it was quite different from the experience and flavor achieved by chewing chocolate and then sipping coffee.
    – Ovi
    Aug 26, 2020 at 2:32

9 Answers 9

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One classic solution is to make a ganache to make the chocolate liquid. Ganache is an emulsion that suspends the cocoa butter in water which helps it mix with the coffee. While this sounds fancy, you can make it in a few minutes.

The recipe I use is from The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee by James Freeman

  • Put 3 oz (85 g) coarsely chopped dark chocolate in a small bowl
  • Pour 1/4 cup (60 ml) boiling water over the chocolate and stir until smooth
  • You can pour your coffee directly over the ganache or store the ganache in the fridge for up to one week. Reheat in the microwave (gently) before using.

The original recipe uses espresso and tops the coffee with hot foamed milk. I have also always used espresso and foamed milk, but I believe coffee should also produce good results. If you don't use the foamed milk, I suggest using a less dark chocolate to balance the bitterness.

Ganache can also be made with heavy cream instead of water. I have not tried using a cream-based ganache in this drink.

One note is that this recipe works best for hot drinks. Cold drinks can seize the chocolate into lumps.

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    A double-cream-based ganache of 85% solids chocolate mixed into coffee? Oh my word - my wife is going to kill me if I start making that at home, but I'll die a very, very happy man. Thank you :-)
    – Spratty
    Aug 26, 2020 at 11:30
  • Imagine a $2 cup of hot coffee from the gas station. Take that, and drop in a few squares of chocolate broken off your ordinary Ritter chocolate bar. We have just precisely described the process in the first two points here. This entire QA is incredibly confusing. Everyone takes squares of chocolate (dark, milk, white, whatever) and drops it in hot coffee, and mixes it in. This QA is somewhat bizarre!
    – Fattie
    Aug 26, 2020 at 17:39
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    @Fattie I don't know I tried that, but the chocolate doesn't dissolve well. Most of the chocolate just ends up molten at the bottom of the cup. There are some chocolate particles suspended in the coffee, but not enough to give the drink a strong chocolate flavor. Do you have a different experience?
    – Ovi
    Aug 26, 2020 at 17:53
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    I think you will have to make a ganache with cream (which is what I expected from the word).
    – Mark Wildon
    Aug 26, 2020 at 18:24
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    You not seeing a physical difference doesn't mean there isn't one, especially when you simplify it to the barest of similarities. Adding ingredients gradually and folding into a liquid can have very different results to dumping it all in at once and beating fast, though both of those could be equally described as "mix ingredients in a bowl".
    – Nij
    Aug 27, 2020 at 0:32
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If convenience is your priority, then making an emulsion might not be the best solution. I would recommend making a chocolate syrup to mix into your coffee. A recipe based on water or milk with cocoa powder rather than chocolate will produce the best result mixed into coffee. Using a good quality cocoa powder will produce a very tasty result. Most coffee shops use a chocolate syrup to produce their mocha coffees because they incorporate so much easier than pure chocolate.

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  • This is a very interesting solution. I am not sure about the convenience aspect though. Commercial syrups are formulated for shelf stability. The kind of syrup you suggest is likely to be normally perishable - so max 5 days in the fridge. Depending on the OP's mocha drinking habits, they may end up making a new dose of syrup for each cup, which is not more convenient than making an emulstion for each cup.
    – rumtscho ♦
    Aug 25, 2020 at 16:14
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    @rumtscho I freeze mine in ice cube trays since I don't drink mochas very often :) A shot of espresso + hot milk is more than enough to melt it immediately.
    – user141592
    Aug 25, 2020 at 16:33
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    I hadn't thought of that, it really sounds like a very nice solution!
    – rumtscho ♦
    Aug 25, 2020 at 17:43
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    @Johanna you should add that trick to your answer, it sounds very helpful
    – Kat
    Aug 25, 2020 at 21:42
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    If the cocoa powder actually mixes well with the water or milk, then that will be because the cocoa powder has an emulsifier in it and the resulting syrup will be a more convenient emulsion, but still an emulsion. Without an emulsifier, my experience is that cocoa powered just never really mixes with any water-based liquids.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Aug 25, 2020 at 22:27
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If you are not watching calories, and want a treat, use good quality chocolate ice cream. Add a shot or two of espresso, stir, add milk to taste. The result is a very rich chilled mocha drink.

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As you already observed fat and water separate from each other. In this regards your coffee-choclate-mixture is similar to a salat dressing made from vinegar and oil, you can mix it but after some time the both parts will separate from each other again.

To create a stable fat-water-mixture you will have to add an emulsifier like soy lecithine. As an alternative you could try to blend in an egg yolk which is the traditional source for lecithine in ice cream making, in this case you have to take care that the temperature is kept below 65°C to ensure the yolk does not cook. Because this also means it is not pasteurized you should only use very fresh eggs for this purpose and take care the yolk does not get into contact with the outside shell.

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  • Egg yolk and lecithine are not required for chocolate emulsions. You can make one with cream or water and chocolate as the only ingredients.
    – 2cents
    Aug 25, 2020 at 16:31
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    @2cents Egg yolk and lecithin are good alternatives for anyone avoiding dairy.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Aug 25, 2020 at 22:29
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    This is a tangential comment, but: are eggs used in icecream due to lecithin as an emulsifier? Icecream uses, well, cream in the base, which is already a pretty stable emulsion of fat in water, to the point (reduced) cream will itself stabilize say the ganache mentioned in another answer. I thought adding egg to ice cream bases serves to further thicken the dairy and thus inhibit ice crystal by mainly binding loose water in the dairy to proteins in the egg yolk; not by primarily helping integrate fats with the water phase. (I don’t imagine egg-less ice cream base “breaks” into water and fat.)
    – millimoose
    Aug 26, 2020 at 0:31
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    Although I am aware store bought heavy cream may have stabilizers like carageenan added to it to prevent that. Nonetheless even with cream that I’ve found had fat rise to the top of the carton this was nothing briefly whisking it wouldn’t fix and the churning process wouldn’t prevent from reoccuring until the ice cream is ready to go into the freezer. Heavy cream really doesn’t fight being homogenous.
    – millimoose
    Aug 26, 2020 at 0:36
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    @millimoose I can´t provide an exhaustive explanation here, but AFAIK some emulisfiers are commonly used in the most mixtures aiming a bit higher (traditionally: yolk, modern: others). Thickening the mixture means to shift the ratio of water-to-solids, creating a harder result with the same percentage of water frozen. Recommended readings: icecreamscience.com/why-are-emulsifiers-used-in-ice-cream icecreamscience.com/ice-crystals-in-ice-cream Also try googling for: angelo corvitto i segreti del gelato
    – J. Mueller
    Aug 26, 2020 at 8:56
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I am not understanding the amount of time and extremes for answers. I get in kicks where I melt chocolate into my coffee for a day or two a week to mix it up (I am a pot a day minimum person).

  1. Chop up part of bar.
  2. Put it in microwave at 20% power in your coffee cup.
  3. 15 seconds.
  4. Check it out.
  5. It should be slightly melted - let the coffee do the rest. For some type of chocolates I have had to put a wet paper towel on top and add time in the microwave.
  6. Pour coffee.
  7. Stir.

As mentioned every chocolate will have specifics. If you do about the same amount, with same chocolate, this should add no more than 30-40 seconds to your day and without adding ingredients you are getting the chocolate flavor, not a sugary taste (which I do not like as I drink my coffee black or just a bit of chocolate). The chocolate powders or emulsions or hot cocoa powder may taste good or better to some but this is different from your description and is a sweeter cup.

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  • The key is the micro power and keeping it in the same cup. It isn't that much chocolate, so if you melted it down, then poured it you may lose half the chocolate in the mixing "bowl".
    – blankip
    Aug 25, 2020 at 18:00
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    It seems like this might risk seizing the chocolate?
    – nick012000
    Aug 26, 2020 at 2:06
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    @nick012000 Chocolate only “seizes” within a particular range of water-to-chocolate ratios. Once you add enough liquid, the clumps will disperse again. This is the trick behind Heston Blumenthal’s chocolate-water mousse: youtu.be/F6oMIo3GTQ8
    – millimoose
    Aug 26, 2020 at 11:49
  • Note that you can use pure cocoa or cacao powder if you don't want it to be sweet. Or a high % dark chocolate bar.
    – JBentley
    Aug 27, 2020 at 8:43
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    @nick012000 One way to avoid seizing the chocolate would be to temper it (not as in tempered chocolate, as in bringing two ingredients to the same temperature) by stirring the chocolate and adding a small amount of coffee at first, then adding the rest when the two incorporate
    – Kevin
    Aug 27, 2020 at 16:12
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If you have a small smoothie blender, try zerping the coffee + chocolate while it’s hot just before drinking. It might stay emulsified for long enough.

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    This might be more of a suspension than an emulsion, but a suspension is a viable way to combine chocolate and coffee, if one is willing to do the work to create the suspension or use an appliance to do the work.
    – Todd Wilcox
    Aug 25, 2020 at 22:31
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    @ToddWilcox Nah, this is hardly different the ganache method. Chocolate is broadly speaking cocoa solids; cocoa butter (fat); sugar; and in the case of milk chocolate, milk/cream or their powdered versions. I’m making an educated guess here based on the numbers I can find on Google, but melting chocolate - and freshly brewed coffee will likely fully melt chocolate, since those melt at around body temperature - will unravel the cocoa crystals trapping the other constituent parts in a homogenous bar.
    – millimoose
    Aug 25, 2020 at 23:57
  • @ToddWilcox The solids are either soluble in water or not, so they’ll dissolve in the hot coffee. The sugar will certainly dissolve, as will probably anything in the dairy part - milk is homogenized during production, i.e, already emulsified by breaking up the dairy fat droplets. What’s left is a decent amount of cocoa butter - an 85% chocolate bar I have around is 46% fats. Blending it will emulsify if by breaking the fat apart into tiny particles that should hopefully be small enough to not bounce into one another too much and contained through surface tension to not merge again.
    – millimoose
    Aug 26, 2020 at 0:03
  • @ToddWilcox It’s literally the same process as when emulsifying mayonnaise by whisking madly… or using an immersion blender, a great hack to save effort. Emulsifying agents like lecithin merely aid emulsification and stability by coating the fat particles with a layer preventing them from recoalescing.
    – millimoose
    Aug 26, 2020 at 0:07
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    @ToddWilcox Long story short: emulsification is always the act of breaking up the fat phase of a liquid into microscopic droplets, and optionally using additives that help them stay apart afterwards. The OP cites the fat in chocolate as the culprit, presumably as a pool of cocoa butter floating on the top of the coffee; so he needs to make said cocoa butter into the opposite of a coalesced fat layer.
    – millimoose
    Aug 26, 2020 at 0:14
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Not sure where you are from, but in germany we have "Pocket Coffee" from Ferrero, they just fill a chocolate piece with coffee. This way you still have the chocolate melting part before you get to the coffee.

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Hervé This, the French physical chemist focusing on molecular gastronomy discovered how to create a mousse from chocolate and water/liquid.

"I invented chocolate Chantilly — how to make a chocolate mousse without eggs, just foaming the chocolate. I was very proud, I got prizes for that. Later I discovered you can make the same with butter, foie gras, or even olive oil, so the invention is nothing [big in itself]."

Chocolate chantilly

  • 200ml water
  • 225g bitter chocolate (with a high percentage of cocoa butter)

Melt the chocolate in the water over medium heat. Stir until smooth. This forms a mixture where the cocoa butter can be mixed like cream. Pour the chocolate into a bowl cooled by an outer bowl of ice and water. Whisk until whipped.

You can flavor the water with anything so coffee, or a liquor.

I have followed this recipe before, it turns out quite strong if you use a bitter chocolate (for my taste).

Note: Three things can go wrong. Here's how to fix them. If your chocolate doesn't contain enough fat, melt the mixture again, add some chocolate, and then whisk it again. If the mousse is not light enough, melt the mixture again, add some water, and whisk it once more. If you whisk it too much, so that it becomes grainy, this means that the foam has turned into an emulsion. In that case simply melt the mixture and whisk it again, adding nothing.

https://food52.com/recipes/16044-herve-this-chocolate-mousse https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.689/box/1

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I do this every day, though I don't use chocolate bars. I have tried every brand of spicy hot cocoa mix on the market that I could find and my favorite for both flavor - and how well it dissolves in my coffee - is Equal Exchange Organic Spicy Hot Cocoa. I absolutely love the stuff. A lot of other brands did not dissolve as well. Equal Exchange also has regular and dark versions without the spice.

However, if you prefer to use solid chocolate it is possible with the right mixing method. There is an amazing device out of the UK called the "Hot Chocolate Shaker", made by The Chocolate Society. I purchased it from the original kickstarter - a bit skeptical but hopeful. I was not disappointed. At first it seams rather simple - a cup with a lid for shaking hot cocoa. The magic is in the lid - it starts collapsed and pops out as you shake the hot cocoa. Smoothest hot cocoa ever - whether you use mix or chocolate drops. For coffee, just pour the coffee in, add some chocolate drops, and shake.

Enjoy!

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