SMOOTH CHOCOLATOR
If any man has drunk a little too deeply from the cup of physical pleasure;
if he has spent too much time at his desk that should have been spent asleep;
if his fine spirits have become temporarily dulled;
if he finds the air too damp, the minutes too slow,
and the atmosphere too heavy to withstand;
if he is obsessed by a fixed idea which bars him from any freedom of thought:
if he is any of these poor creatures, we say,
let him be given a good pint of amber-flavored chocolate . . .
and marvels will be performed. ~Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826)
So, I’m chatting with my writer friend online — blogging buddies we’ve become – and we start talking about chocolate pudding. Raw, as in no cooked ingredients. Well, I’d never heard of that before, not given to the raw food movement, as it were. Most of the preparations I found online used avocado as a base. Now, as you may have surmised from previous posts, I like them so much that I doubt you could ever get me to do that to an avocado. Another one used coconut pulp. My friend said that she used nuts as a base.
I tried it; first with cashews, and then with peanuts. They have to be ground pretty finely, or your pudding will come out chunky which, I think, is not desirable in a pudding. If you use a food processor, you want it ground just fine enough before it gets to the nut butter stage. My friend has a Vitamix, an industrial-strength blender which she says pulverizes better than anything.  I ran the ground flax seed through the coffee grinder a few whirls, just to pulverize it further.  If you use kosher salt, you might want to run that through the grinder, too. I used fine sea salt.
If you want chocolate pudding in a hurry, without all the goop in the mixes, give this a try. You can use all water instead of coconut milk for a darker chocolate, and add a tablespoon of ground coffee beans for added flavor.  And if you pump up the amount of liquid, you have a chocolate sauce for ice cream, strawberries or pound cake.
Who knows? Maybe I’ll try making it with avocado, just for giggles.
