Make Restaurant-Quality Hot Chocolate With One Added Ingredient

When it comes to hot chocolate, nothing hits quite like the nostalgia of grandma topping off your cocoa with a heavy handful of mini marshmallows when you were six. But as an adult, you may prefer the kind of deeply rich chocolate experience that restaurant-quality hot chocolate brings — the kind you find in quaint little French cafés or bustling Italian coffee bars. Maybe you've been lucky enough to experience the joys of sampling cinnamon-laden Mexican hot chocolate, the peppery heat of chili-laced Mayan chocolate, or even explored the pure anarchy of Columbia's melty cheese-filled version. The point is, when it comes to that grown and sexy mug of hot chocolate you're looking for, there's a lot of room to play. But the truth is, no matter how you prefer your hot cocoa experience, you can give it that restaurant-quality boost with the addition of one simple ingredient: brown sugar.

In Tasting Table recipe developer Ksenia Prints' ultimate hot chocolate recipe, she recommends 4 teaspoons of brown sugar for every 1 ½ cups of milk. While it might not seem like much (upgrading your sugar from the basic white granulated variety to its caramel-toned brethren), light or dark brown sugar can help you level up your hot chocolate game in one move. In the rich history of drinking hot chocolate, nothing marries those dark cocoa-y tones as nicely as brown sugar.

How could such a small tweak have such a big impact on your hot cocoa? Brown sugar has a more complex flavor profile than its more refined, white counterpart. While white sugar does the most efficient job of amping up overall sweetness and providing a neutral flavor, brown sugar offers full-bodied toffee and caramel notes — a result of its natural molasses content, dovetailing nicely with chocolate's darker, bitter tones. Because brown sugar is naturally less sweet, it allows the more subtle notes of whatever cocoa, cacao, or variety of chocolate you're using to blossom on the tastebuds, resulting in a deeper, less sweet, and more nuanced cup of cocoa. The darker your sugar, the deeper and richer those flavor profiles will be, in direct correlation to the increased molasses content and reduced sweetness, layering, and even magnifying complementary flavor notes.

Best of all, brown sugar can also uplift and spotlight any additions you make to your hot chocolate from spices like cardamom, cinnamon, and cayenne, to libational lifts from the likes of whiskey, rum, brandy, Grand Marnier and other liqueurs, to the addition of teas like Earl grey and Chai. Whatever signature twist you have in store for your hot chocolate — it only gets better with brown sugar.