My Morning Cocoa Coffee Concoction

I’m often asked to share the recipe for my healthy morning cocoa coffee concoction, so here it is. The health benefits of raw cocoa and the lessons in the story behind the recipe is what makes the concoction worth drinking, not the taste of the thing, but there is comfort in the tasting. For your convenience, recipe is posted first, story follows.

My favorite mug holds about eleven ounces and I use a tea spoon versus a measuring teaspoon. My recipe is as informal, resolute, and flexible as I am, so please make your own version.

Ingredients

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1 pinch of unrefined sea salt.

Brands I use and like

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Le Sauniere de Camargue Fleur de Sel; but I grind it a bit finer than how it is sold.

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¼ tea spoon of instant coffee or 1 tablespoon of cold-brewed coffee.

Mount Hagen Organíc-Café freeze dried instant coffee. This stuff is so good, it passes the taste test of coffee snobs, even if they won't admit it. Cold-brewed coffee is lower in acidity and it is easy to make your own with the many recipes on the 'Net. I prefer the cold-brewed!

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½-1 tea spoon of virgin coconut oil.

Any brand should work. This is a healthy dairy fat substitution; fat is an emulsifier and emulsifiers are needed to help distribute the cocoa, otherwise the powder tends to drop to the bottom as it does not dissolve like coffee does.

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1 very rounded tea spoon of unsweetened cocoa powder.

Regular baking cocoa powder will suffice, but in time the palate will get sophisticated if you brand hop. I love Guittard’s Cocoa Rouge cocoa powder, unsweetened. If acidity is an issue for you, be sure to get Dutch processed or alkalized cocoa. Usually, the darker the cocoa, the more alkalized it is.

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1/4 tea spoon of raw, unfiltered honey.

The creamed YS brand suited me well and is mess-free, but I’m currently enjoying Stubborn Girl Farm’s first honey harvest, which means I am also struggling to become efficient with the honey-dipper that I recently learned is meant to stay in the honey jar.

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Fill cup with boiling hot water, and stir well. Keep that spoon around as you’ll need to stir throughout, but not as much as you would if you didn’t add any emulsifier. It's up to you to add cream, fake or otherwise. I finally let it go as none of the options were suitable to my personal biochemistry - even rice milk aggravated my candida.

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My convoluted story

Coffee just isn’t good for me, not the least because of what the caffeine can and will do to my nervous system. I quit coffee about 19 years ago when I discovered that I had become allergic and addicted. It took me 30 days to get past the withdrawal. That 30 days was so memorable, it has kept me from ever getting addicted again. But coffee is wonderfully smelling and has some serious beneficial affects on both the brain and pancreas, two organs of mine that suffer, so I wanted to find a way to put coffee back into my life in a safe way. I started by learning that the darker the roast, the less the caffeine, so I dipped my toe in the espresso world, first. But, you can’t languish over the espresso cuplet.

I’m not supposed to have sugar or dairy, either, but chocolate! Chocolate is so very wonderful. World’s best antidepressant, really, short of a new love. As I compromised on coffee with the occasional espresso, I found a compromise with chocolate by buying dark, organic and limiting myself to one ounce, once a week. On Sundays, I would have my four little squares of chocolate with a cup of tea and the NY Times. I soon realized that Sundays were the only day of the week in which I was genuinely happy. I narrowed the cause down to the chocolate, which I then narrowed down to the cocoa in the chocolate. How to get the great benefits of cocoa without the disastrous effects of sugar and dairy? Duh. Just eat the cocoa. This is what prompted the morning drink, but in reality, cocoa powder can be tossed onto and into nearly anything. There’s a reason the Mexicans put it in their chicken sauce. If it can go there, it can go anywhere, so just play with it.

And, I wanted to drink something other than boring water in the morning. Don’t get me wrong: That morning glass of water is vital to breaking the fast in the best way, so it’s still on the menu, but I missed being like the rest of the world that ritualized morning with a cuppa joe.

I also had a strong, bittersweet memory of my biological father and I during the few short years I had him with me: He rose very early in the morning for factory work, made his cup of coffee with cream and sugar, and left it on the table as he turned his back pretending not to notice tiny me sneaking in and drinking as much of his coffee as I could get away with before he turned around and caught me; he never got angry, but only smiled and put me on his lap after making more coffee for himself. We two had a special and rare love, so love is another ingredient in my concoction.

I’ve also suffered in recent years from brain fog which seems to be a side effect as well as a cause of some chronic health issues, like arthritis. For a little while, I stopped my morning cocoa coffee drink, falsely thinking that it might be doing more harm than good. My brain fog got worse. Much worse. I did a little online research and discovered that I am not the only person who has discovered that the ingredients I put together in my drink also happen to be very helpful in keeping the brain healthier. I went back on the stuff.

Two months after experimenting with earlier versions of this recipe, I noticed that my chronic depression was no longer there. I also noticed that I no longer craved chocolate. I surmise that my brain needed the neuro-transmitter-balancing chemicals that the cocoa bean contains, and once satisfied, so was the chocolate craving satisfied. I’ve encouraged others to experiment with this, with similar results.

Coffee in small dosage to stimulate without damage, cocoa in liberal dosage because it is wicked healthy and doesn’t seem to do any harm in excess, unrefined sea salts for mineral balance which helps cellular communication, virgin coconut oil for many health reasons but mostly so I don’t have to keep stirring so often, and pancreas-safe raw honey not to make it sweet, but for balance. 

Find your concoction.


Note: The dollop of rice milk has been removed; it appears to feed the yeast that causes thrush and candida infections.