by Jared Heng
A new cocoa beverage recently hit supermarket shelves in Singapore, which was welcome news for chocolate lovers looking for a quality drink outside the usual café haunts at affordable prices.
Coming from British beverage giant Cafédirect, San Cristobal Rich Drinking Chocolate contains only two natural ingredients ‒ cocoa from San Cristobal in the Dominican Republic and pure cane sugar.
The cocoa accounts for a significant 40 per cent of the ingredients, and the rest is cane sugar.
Cafédirect claims that this beverage contains no transfat, preservatives and caking agent, and is gluten-free without artificial colours and flavours.
It also says that when mixed with hot milk, the drink offers a “luxurious, velvety, and exceptionally creamy” experience.
While not a chocolate lover myself, I was curious to try this drink, which might make for a nice, warm beverage especially on rainy days.
The preparation is simple. Just add the powdered drink into a mug and mix with a little milk to form a smooth paste. Then, add hot milk, stir well and enjoy the drink. Alternatively, you can add cold milk and microwave the mixture for about two minutes before stirring.
As I did not have hot milk or a microwave oven, I simply added a little hot water to the powdered drink to form the paste. Then I added three small sachets of creamer and topped up the rest of the cup with more hot water before stirring.
Although I did not use fresh milk, the strong cocoa taste and aroma was apparent. I wondered if the drink could even be consumed without any milk as the cocoa flavour was already very rich and tasty.
The drink also left a smooth chocolaty taste in my mouth and was a warm comfort when I tried it for the first time on a rainy day.
Besides rainy days, this drink can also be enjoyed on the sofa in front of a good film, on the porch, in the office or anywhere you have a craving for a cocoa drink.
Cafédirect’s San Cristobal Rich Drinking Chocolate is available in Singapore at Cold Storage, FairPrice Finest, Jasons Market Place and ThreeSixty. It is priced at S$8.85 (inclusive of GST) for a 250-gram tin.
