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Dessert

Hot Chocolate Sauce

A sweet sauce made from sugar, water, boiling water, and chocolate, served hot over ice cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and chocolate are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Hot Chocolate Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the sugar with water in a frying pan, stirring until dark brown.

  2. Add boiling water and simmer for 10 minutes.

  3. Stir in the chocolate until melted.

Serve

  1. Serve hot over vanilla ice cream.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Caramelizes when melted to give the sauce its deep, slightly bitter sweetness.
Baker's chocolate
Provides the chocolate flavour and body, melting smoothly into the hot liquid.
Boiling water
Dissolves the caramel into a pourable liquid and thins the sauce as it simmers.

The step that matters

Melting the sugar until dark brown. Sugar darkens quickly once it passes its melting point, so it can go from amber to burnt within seconds. Burnt sugar tastes bitter and ruins the sauce, so watch it closely and stir constantly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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