I’ve discovered a new thing.  Homemade chocolate sauce.  Sure, I grew up dousing my ice cream in Hershey’s syrup, but recently when I was about ready to walk into one of the only shops in Sydney to stock Hershey’s syrup and buy a bottle of it, I stopped.  No, I wasn’t going to buy it.  I didn’t need to look at the ingredients list or the nutrition information to know what was in it; I just knew it wouldn’t be healthy.  Surely there was a homemade chocolate syrup or sauce out there that was healthier, and probably even tastier, than Hershey’s syrup, which is pretty much a staple item in most of America’s refrigerators.

So, I dug in my bag for my phone and searched Google for a homemade chocolate sauce.  One of the first recipes to come up was from David Lebovitz.  I clicked on it and discovered that there wasn’t any cream or butter in the ingredients list, and better yet, you could use agave nectar as part of the sweetener.  Okay, well, I didn’t have any agave nectar, but I had brown rice syrup that I wanted to use up.

The recipe is simple, quick and much richer than any chocolate sauces you could buy at your average grocery store.  The shelf life might not be as long, but at least you won’t be consuming any ingredients that you can’t pronounce, or ingredients that are numbers rather than words.

I used some of the darkest cocoa powder available – Valrhona – to make my version of David Lebovitz’s chocolate sauce, along with a couple of squares of Lindt, my preferred chocolate to cook and bake with.

My finished version wasn’t as thick as the original recipe said it would be, but it still coated a bowl of ice cream very well and dissolved easily in a glass of cold milk.

While I used brown rice syrup, next time I’d try one of the recommended sweeteners from David’s recipe (probably agave).  Honestly, I probably wouldn’t use Valrhona cocoa powder next time either, as the sauce was, indeed, very dark in taste.  Have you made homemade chocolate sauce before?  What is your favorite cocoa powder to use?

David’s chocolate sauce recipe is a must-have for everyone.  I highly recommend it!  And it makes a killer glass of chocolate milk!