Recently, while preparing to teach a private cooking class at Cooktique in Tenafly, New Jersey (www.cooktique.com), I was considering a number of possible desserts.  For a menu built around grilled marinated flank steak with coffee chipotle glaze, my thoughts turned naturally to chocolate.  Actually, my thoughts always turn naturally to chocolate, but especially when planning a menu with beefsteak. 

The menu needed to be approachable for participants at all levels of culinary experience, so it was simple to put aside thoughts of cakes and other sweets that require real baking in favor of an easy sauce for ice cream that is also easy to love.  In fact, I have never heard any American say no to the idea of a hot fudge sundae.

The recipe below was created only about two years ago for my chocolate week at the Culinary Center of New York (www.culinarycenterny.com).  In looking over my sauce recipes – raspberry coulis, caramel sauce, white chocolate sauce, crème anglaise, etc. – I had noticed the lack of a really old-fashioned fudgy sauce for ice cream that could be as gooey or as creamy as desired.  In fact, I hoped to reproduce the hot fudge from my childhood, the one they served at the Guilford Dairy Bar in Burlington, North Carolina.

While we can never go home again (and nor would I want to, thank you very much), it is often an exciting challenge to try to create a dish that will not only be delicious but also warm the cockles of the heart in a Proustian way.  For this hot fudge, I reasoned that it would be simplicity itself to create a sauce even better than the one from a simpler place and time.  With good Belgian chocolate around (my preference), anything chocolate is always better than anything could have been in the South in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  So I knew the sauce would be really good, I just needed to figure out how to duplicate the wonderful texture.

Something in my experience made me think of sweetened condensed milk, that mainstay of the dessert kitchen in the South and also much of the Americas.  Canned milk products caught on quickly in many climates where fresh dairy products were hard to find and hard to hold.  And they still give just the right texture and flavor to traditional favorites.  The combination of semisweet chocolate and unsweetened chocolate below is just right for my taste.  You might vary the proportions, or use 9 ounces bittersweet plus 1 ounce unsweetened, or 10 ounces extra-bittersweet (about 70% cocoa mass). 

So next Monday night when we reach the end of our class and help ourselves to ice cream, toasted nuts, strawberries macerated in Grand Marnier (our bow to adulthood), vanilla-scented whipped cream, and a dark and luscious chocolate sauce, at least one of us will be transported to a time and place when hot summer days were impossibly long and hot fudge sundaes tasted impossibly good.

 

Hot Fudge Sauce

about 2 ½ cups

 

8 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped

2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped

2 ounces butter

½ cup sweetened condensed milk

½ cup hot coffee, approximately

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

 

            Place chocolates and butter into a stainless steel bowl over a pan of hot water.  Stir until smooth.  Stir in remaining ingredients until smooth.  Thin with more hot coffee if desired.  Use warm.

 

 

 

 

Tagschocolate, hot fudge, hot fudge sauce, sweetened condensed milk