Healthy Make Ahead Hot Chocolate Mix - Shelf Stable Pantry Staple - Healthy Hot Chocolate Recipe

today i want to share with you how to make a healthy make-ahead hot chocolate mix and this is a shelf-stable pantry staple [Music] hi sweet friends i'm mary and welcome to mary's nest where i teach traditional cooking skills for making nutrient-dense foods like bone broth ferments sourdough and more so if you enjoy learning about those things consider subscribing to my channel and don't forget to click on the little notification bell below that'll let you know every time i upload a new video well this is very easy to make and what we're going to do is make a total of 20 servings which we'll put in this quart size jar i'm also going to show you how to package individual servings in little jars like this with some baby marshmallows that make darling little gifts well the first ingredient that you're going to need is some powdered milk this can be an instant non-fat dry milk it can be a whole powdered milk whatever you have on hand will work for this recipe now if you use instant non-fat dry milk this has a very good shelf life because when you buy your powdered milk check what the expiration date is on it and if it's very fresh chances are the expiration date will be about two years out from when you buy it and the same will hold true for your cocoa powder your unsweetened cocoa powder so this could have a shelf life of about two years and yes you can store this in your pantry now if the dry milk powder you're using is made from whole milk the shelf life will be shorter it could range anywhere from six months to a year the whole milk powder because it's made from whole milk still contains the fat and so you have to always keep that in mind because fat whenever it's even when it's dehydrated when it's in any type of product will always shorten the shelf life but what you can do is when you buy your whole milk powder just look at what the best buy date is and that will give you some indication as to how long uh that or what the shelf life will be of your make ahead hot chocolate mix when you pull all your ingredients together now what you're going to want to do is just get yourself a nice bowl and get your powdered milk right in there and you're going to need two cups of powdered milk but don't worry about writing this down i'll be sure to put a link in the description underneath this video so just open up the description and you'll see the word recipe and next to it will be a link that'll take you over to my website where you can read the recipe online or you can print it out so we've got the two cups of dried milk powder and then you're going to want one cup of cocoa powder and this is just going to be a plain unsweetened cocoa powder in just one cup now i like to add all my ingredients into the dry milk powder through a strainer because sometimes some of them can have little clumps and this way we're assured of getting a nice a smooth mix the next ingredient you're going to need is just an eighth of a teaspoon of salt and again i'm just going to run that right through my strainer now i'll leave the discussion for the sugar last but the next ingredient is optional the what i've gotten here is some arrowroot powder and it's just two teaspoons of arrowroot powder you can also use two teaspoons of cornstarch if you want but if corn products don't agree with you arrowroot makes a great substitution and if you don't have either of those a little bit of white rice ground up in a grinder or if you have it already made into a flower a white rice flour works very well in in this preparation as well and the reason that we're adding this and again as i said it's optional is because a lot of the store-bought hot cocoa mixes that you might find on the shelf at your grocery store will also often include some sort of anti-caking agent so that all of this stays well mixed and there's no clumping and so on and so forth so cornstarch arrowroot powder uh rice what did i say white rice powder or white rice flour uh will definitely serve that process as well if you want to leave this out completely and maybe you're in the process of doing a lot of things with your your prepper pantry and you're storing food away and you have those little silica gel packages that are food safe or they're covered in a food safe wrapping you could stick one of those in your jar that'll help as well but i'm just going to go ahead and add in some arrowroot powder alrighty now let's talk about the sugar a lot's going to depend where you are on your journey from moving from a processed foods kitchen to a traditional foods kitchen if you're still using white sugar that's fine now what works best in a mixture like this is if whatever sugar you're using has been ground into more of a powdered sugar so if you have white powdered sugar and you want to use white sugar that's what you'll be adding to this and it's going to be two cups now if you just have white sugar and you want to use that and you have a little grinder like this or a blender whatever you have should be able to grind that white sugar into a powdered sugar and the same goes for if you're using a whole sugar what i've got here is sukinat and this is just dried cane dried sugar cane juice and the name sukinat is just where they take the first letters of a few words and put them together sugar cane natural sukinat and so this is what i like to use and sukinat works beautifully whenever you're working with chocolate because chocolate can really help disguise the fact that you're using a whole oh sorry a whole sugar now are there other options you can use certainly if you want to be a little gourmet you could use a maple sugar but you want to make sure that you do like that little bit of added flavor you could also use coconut sugar you could also use date sugar so there's a lot of options you have to increase the healthiness so to speak of this hot chocolate mix but i find just your regular basic sukinat and this is becoming more and more common it's a lot easier to find at the grocery store so i highly recommend using this now what we're going to do this is you know as you see this is just in its form where it came right out of the bag when i bought it at the grocery store and it's very you know it's it's very grainy it's got a lot of graininess to it so what we're going to do is we're going to just you know whirl it in this little grinder i find this works very well but if you have a blender that'll do it too you'll just want to take you know periodically stop it and just you know mix it up a little bit with a spatula you know down the sides just to make sure you get everything evenly ground i think if you have one of those fancy high speed blenders it uh it should go very quickly and you probably wouldn't even need to um scrape the sides down and probably do it in 30 seconds and the same if you have one of those like little bullet type blenders that'll probably work really well too but what i'm going to go ahead is i'm going to go ahead and just start grinding these grinding this up in here until i get it into a powdered sugar form now i ground the soukinet all up in my little grinder and as you'll see it just looks like sort of a lightish beige colored powdered sugar it's perfect for adding now directly into our hot chocolate mix a lot of it's flying up here now we're just going to mix all this up and you know what i found as i said with the sukinat you know it does have a little richer flavor than if you were just using plain white sugar but i find it makes the hot chocolate very nice it gives it a little bit of a richer flavor and it it complements the chocolate so well that i don't find that it it has a strong flavor but certainly you could use your white sugar you could also try half and half or you could just try maybe incorporating a quarter cup of the sukanat and do the rest with white sugar so that little by little you can start to incorporate more whole sweeteners into your cooking and again you know i just want to mention about the arrowroot powder that i used if you don't have any of those things that i mentioned the cornstarch or the arrowroot powder or a little bit of rice flour or even a little silica gel pack don't worry about it it's especially helpful when you live in a very humid climate if if moisture is really not an issue where you are or in your kitchen this should be fine and if there is any little bit of caking it's easy to just mix it up very quickly with a fork so if those are things that you don't have on hand don't worry about it this will be fine you'll just mix it make sure that you mix it real well that's what's most important at this point you don't want to see like when i turn this up from the bottom i'm seeing like a little bit of white here uh which is some probably residual arrowroot powder so i want to make sure that i really mix this thoroughly i'm actually going to switch to a whisk so i can really get everything well mixed together you know and as i had mentioned it's interesting about arrowroot flower it's very well tolerated by a lot of people so if there's various other recipes you have that call for cornstarch and you don't want to use cornstarch you know it's often used for thickening soups or thickening gravies or sauces various other recipes sometimes you know even you might even see it in cake and cookie mixes you can often substitute arrowroot flour which is great you know as i said if any if corn products just don't agree with you or cause inflammation in your body so that's something to keep in mind so i'm just going to continue to give this a nice whisk to make sure i don't see any more light colored spots and then we'll get ready to dry this up and i'll show you what i like to do with the baby marshmallows in here to how and i'll show you how to put a little piece of parchment paper in there to keep them separate from the hot cocoa mix now i'm going to put this entire mix into a quart sized jar i'm going to use a funnel just to make things easier for me and this is going to hold 20 servings and i'll show you how we're going to reconstitute this and turn it into a nice cup of hot chocolate but you this makes a wonderful gift and as i said this is 20 servings that you'll have in this jar and after we get this filled i'll just take out a little bit and i'll show you what i like to do with the little jars but you could have this jar filled uh to the to the rim with hot cocoa mix and then you could tie a nice ribbon on this and you could also get another jar next to it you could have just regular little baby marshmallows or you could even dehydrate them which is what i like to do and when i put them in the little jars but either way this is just a wonderful mix to have on hand it's homemade and you don't have to worry about having any extra added chemicals from ones that you might buy at the store and now what you do is as you're filling this you just give this a little shake it helps compress it and so that you can fit all of it in here well i think i got all that in there that is really filled to the rim and now i've just got my canning lid what came with this jar but you can use any lid that you have i'm just going to put this canning lid ring on and there we go 20 servings of a make ahead hot chocolate mix now if you want you can also use these plastic storage lids that they also make for jars or you can use any jar that you have i just happen to have a lot of canning drawers but use whatever you have and now i'll show you how we're going to reconstitute this to make a nice cup of hot cocoa now to make a cup of hot chocolate or hot cocoa whichever you call it you're just going to need a quarter of a cup of your make ahead hot chocolate mix now i'm just using a spoon to spoon this in here since my jar is so full but as you decrease the amount in here it's a lot easier to just go in with a scoop and get out your quarter of a cup alrighty well that's about a quarter of a cup of our mix and i'm going to go ahead and just put this right into my cup now in a minute we're going to add eight ounces of hot liquid to that we'll talk about that in a minute what our options are in terms of the liquid but i want to show you how i fill this drawer to make little individual portions and i just think this is so cute but again we're just going to take our quarter cup of mix i'm just going to spoon this into here and once i get this up to just about a quarter of a cup that looks good i'm going to go ahead and put it right into my jar then what i like to do is to add in dehydrated marshmallows because if they're dehydrated and then you go ahead and put your mix in and then pour either your hot water or your hot milk in there the dehydrated marshmallows won't melt right away they'll sort of float to the top and start to rehydrate and become like fresh marshmallows and it just makes the perfect hot cocoa or hot chocolate now what i've got over here are some dehydrated marshmallows they're just the little baby marshmallows this is very easy to do if you have a dehydrator just lay them out on one of your mesh sheets and set your dehydrator at 150 degrees and fahrenheit and they'll probably be dehydrated in about four hours or so and they come nice and hard hear that and then you can just go ahead and plop those right down on top of your hot cocoa mix or your hot chocolate mix in this jar and then whoever you give this to when they're ready to turn this in to a cup of hot chocolate they'll just go ahead and dump the whole thing into their cup with the dehydrated marshmallows add their hot liquid and they're all set if you want to use regular marshmallows that are so often have not been dehydrated you can certainly do that too and you could just put them right in with the hot cocoa mix and the only difference is when you add the hot liquid they'll float to the top but they may begin to melt very quickly as opposed to uh when they're dehydrated that they take a little time to rehydrate and sort of stay as marshmallows for a little bit longer but another thing that you can do yet if you want to give these as little gifts you can actually cut out a little piece of parchment paper and we're going to go go ahead and put the parchment paper on top and then we'll put the regular marshmallows on top of that so if the person wants it's very easy for them just to sprinkle out the marshmallows and set them aside and then lift the piece of parchment paper and then put it into their into their mug add their hot water and then they have their marshmallows separate to put on the top and what i like to do is as i said just take any parchment paper that you have and i'll usually take the jar and i'll just trace the bottom because if you say your jar was empty and you turned it up and traced around the top often that the the circle of parchment paper will be too large but if you just trace around the bottom of the jar it's a little easier when you cut it out to get it to fit into the jar and once you've got your circle all traced out like that you can just go ahead and cut your circle and what i like to do is cut just slightly inside of my pen mark so my parchment paper has no pen mark on it then i'll just go ahead and take this little disk and just put it right into my jar right on top of my hot chocolate mix now once you get your little piece of parchment paper your little round tucked into your jar on top of your hot cocoa mix your hot chocolate mix then you can go ahead and take your fresh marshmallows and just fill the top with some of or you know put on on top of the parchment paper just as many as you want that you can fit in the jar and then you can go ahead and you can use your canning lid and ring or just one of your storage lids whatever whatever way you want to prepare it for a nice presentation and then you've got your hot cocoa mix there and the marshmallows on top and then when the person goes to make their hot cocoa it's very easy to just take these marshmallows if they want like i said you can put it all in it's just that the undehydrated or fresh marshmallows will melt up a lot quicker but this way see they can just put them out and that parchment paper protects your little mix so it's a beautiful combination of being able to get exactly the perfect cup of hot chocolate because now they can go ahead remove the parchment paper put their hot cocoa mix in here give it a stir let it mix up real well with the hot liquid and then go ahead and put top everything with their marshmallows but i'm going to go ahead since i've got these dehydrated marshmallows i'm going to go ahead and put this right into the jar without any of the parchment paper because as i said when you add your liquid these will rehydrate and they will melt quickly then i'll go ahead and put this lid on or my canning lid either or and then we'll prepare it with a little ribbon and gift tag now if you're a canner and you've got some canning labels you could just put a little canning label right on the front that says hot cocoa mix or something like that or you could put some fabric and tie it with ribbon but what i like to do is really just tie it with ribbon since they're such small jars and certainly you could uh do like a double a double serving if you wanted in a larger jar or something like that or just give someone the whole jar for all 20 servings and some uh you know maybe a pint-sized jar filled with dehydrated marshmallows or fresh marshmallows whatever you wanted that would be very cute in a little basket but because this is such a small jar what i'll i'll show you what i like to do now i like to just take a little bit of red ribbon here you really could use any color but say you're doing this at christmas time red is nice and then i just like to get a little gift tag this one's a little large but it was what i had so that's what i'm going to use and then i'll just thread my ribbon through my gift tag and we'll tie it around the jar and then you just have your little homemade gift now i know mine is not pinterest perfect i'm very old-fashioned and i use simple ribbons and whatnot but you could be a very fancy with a nice little silk ribbon and a cute little maybe cut out type uh tag but i just think these look so cute you can even fill a basket with them and you know people can just take one at a time as they want to enjoy a cup of hot cocoa and you can write your little message like i did here on your tag and there you have this just i think it's just such a cute little gift well now let's make our hot cocoa now we've got a quarter cup of our hot chocolate mix right here in our mug and we're going to add just about eight ounces of boiling water now if you want to up the nutrition even more you could add hot milk or you could even put your hot milk on the stove and put your quarter cup of hot chocolate mix into the milk on the stove and prepare it the old-fashioned way but usually because you're making this with powdered milk you've got some nice nutrition in here then you want to mix this up with your spoon or a little whisk if you have it like this i find the little whisk works great and you just want to make sure that you get everything that all of your mix dissolves beautifully in your hot water then that usually takes just about 60 seconds and then you can go ahead and top it with marshmallows and we'll take a taste well i've got my marshmallows in here and they're starting to melt i just love hot cocoa with marshmallows in it love me when he gets very hot so i'm just going to use this spoon to take a taste but let's see how it is that's delicious and i'm telling you you're not going to notice that you use sukanat instead of white white sugar and how nice because you have all those nutrients that are still in the soukinet as opposed to those that have been stripped out of white sugar you've got to try this now if you want to try more make ahead mixes like pancake mix biscuit mix brownie mix cookie mix all sorts of things be sure to click on this video over here and i'll see you over there in my texas hill country kitchen love and god bless [Music]

Channel: Mary's Nest

Views: 120,877

Keywords: Healthy Make Ahead Hot Chocolate Mix - Shelf Stable Pantry Staple, Healthy Make Ahead Hot Chocolate Mix, Healthy Hot Chocolate Recipe, healthy hot chocolate, Make Ahead Hot Chocolate Mix, Hot Chocolate Mix, Hot Chocolate, pantry staples, pantry staple recipes, hot chocolate recipe, hot cocoa recipe with cocoa powder, how to make hot chocolate, homemade hot chocolate, homemade hot chocolate recipe, easy hot chocolate recipe, marysnest, marys nest, best hot chocolate

Id: cNRZYdHo4sk

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 03 2020