The World's Best Hot Fudge Sauce: or, That was a lot easier than I thought

We're beginning our stack of I'll-try-this-someday recipes with chocolate! I hope it's not the best recipe, because that would mean it's all downhill from here. But this one was pretty dang good, which means everything else has a lot to follow.

The World's Best Hot Fudge Sauce ½ cup heavy cream 3 tbsp butter, cut into small pieces ⅓ cup granulated sugar ⅓ cup dark brown sugar Pinch of salt ½ cup cocoa powder*      Stovetop method: Place the cream and butter in a heavy-bottomed 1-quart saucepan. Set over medium heat and stir until the butter melts and the cream comes to a low boil. Add both sugars and cook, stirring constantly, until the sugar dissolves. Taste and check for any granules. Whisk in the cocoa powder and salt, beating hard to break up any cocoa lumps. (If any stubborn lumps remain, use a rubber spatula to press them against the sides of the bowl.) Serve at once.      Microwave method: Place the cream and butter in a medium-size bowl. Microwave it 10 seconds at a time, stirring well after each time, until the butter melts. Stir in the sugars. Microwave it for 10 seconds at a time, stirring well after each time, until the sugar is completely dissolved. Taste and check for undissolved granules. Whisk in the cocoa powder and salt, beating hard to break up any cocoa lumps. (If any stubborn lumps remain, use a rubber spatula to press them against the sides of the bowl.) Serve at once. This sauce keeps in the refrigerator for up to two weeks. To reheat, microwave for 15 seconds at a time, cutting the sauce up and stirring it after every cooking interval. Or, place the whole container in boiling water until the sauce softens. Then cut the sauce up and place in a double boiler over simmering water (or in a small heavy-bottomed saucepan over very low heat). If it's too thick when you reheat it, stir in hot water, a small spoonful at a time, until the sauce thins a little bit. *The recipe says the cocoa must be Dutch-process. Unless you special-order cocoa powder from some super-organic purveyor, it's almost certainly been Dutched--- you don't need to worry about checking. If you want to be sure, check that the ingredients label either says "dutch-process," "processed with alkali," or something like that. Source: Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, Maida Heatter, 1974

 

I've been eyeing this one ever since I first purchased my own copy of Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts. I read the recipes for fun, and sometimes imagined how delicious this one would surely be if I ever dared attempt it.  The idea of a hot fudge sauce that you have to cut up to reheat was too dizzying a prospect for me to handle.

I don't know why feared the hot fudge sauce for so long. Maybe the incredibly gushy note on top of the recipe made me feel I wasn't worthy to try. After all, what if mine failed to be "very thick, coal black, and shiny as wet tar"? Or maybe I saw the full page of instructions (with extensive footnotes) and thought it was far too complicated an undertaking for my mortal self. Or maybe the long years without a dishwasher made me permanently leery of a failure that would leave me with a grimy pile in the sink waiting for me to start scrubbing.

But we had most of a carton of cream left over from a batch of the cookies from Maxine Menster's gravestone (which you should make if you like cookies at all). One evening I said, "You know, we already have cream in the refrigerator, ice cream in the freezer, and we have all the other ingredients anyway. We should try this."

No one else understood why I was talking about making hot fudge sauce in the same breathless, nervous tones as if I was asking if we wanted to mount another Saint Patcaken. But the others in the house are not the ones who've been flipping through Maida Heatter's cookbook like a novel one can't revisit enough times. Nor are they the ones who for years were too intimidated by the sheer length of Maida Heatter's instructions to actually read them.

Upon actually reading the instructions, I realized that this recipe simply tells you to everything in a pot and stir it for a bit. There are no other fiddly, skill-trying steps in making the world's best hot fudge sauce. 

I then realized while microwaves were a rare and expensive novelty in 1974 when Maida Heatter published her Book of Great Chocolate Desserts, they're now so cheap that anyone can get one. Heck, they turn up at thrift shops with lower price tags than the clothes. 

With that in mind, we decided to let the stove rest and make this recipe the modern way. As previously discussed, milk (and cream) love to scorch and burn onto the bottom of a pot unless you have top-notch rubber spatula technique. In the microwave, nothing burns onto the bottom of the pot. (Also, I figured that if microwaving didn't work, I could dump everything into a saucepan and simmer my way to success.)

In less than a minute, the cream came to a low boil and the butter had melted. When we added the sugar, it looked like the beginning of a very good batch of brownies. 

I have to emphasize how astonished I am at how easy this recipe has been. I don't know why I thought hot fudge sauce was a complex, tedious, maddeningly fussy undertaking, but I did. Instead, I only had to put things in a bowl and stir them a bit. I'm pretty sure that if I did this on the stove it would be almost as easy. It felt almost exhilarating to breeze my way through a recipe that I thought was impossible without years of study. 

Less than 5 minutes after I decided to make hot fudge sauce, I was adding the cocoa powder to it. In case you're wondering why you need a bowl with so much headspace over the mixture, have a look at how high the cocoa powder got kicked up upon contact with a whisk. You can also see the sauce starting to look "very thick, coal black, and shiny as wet tar" as promised in the recipe.

The sauce was amazing. It turned into firm fudge on contact with ice cream and tasted absolutely wonderful. I asked the others if I should make this again when we run out. One person looked up from dripping hot fudge sauce from the whisk right onto his fingers and said "Yes." 

This feels like the moment when I realized that I could go out and buy bacon whenever I wanted to. Or when I realized that no one was stopping me from buying Irish cream for my used-to-be-infamous Irish cream cake whenever I wanted to make one.  I had no idea the recipe was this easy the whole time.

As soon as the hot fudge sauce was ready, I regretted my choice to halve the recipe. It looked "very thick, coal black, and shiny as wet tar," just like Maida Heatter said it would.

I'm glad I modernized the recipe and didn't bother with the saucepan. While the ricotta was easier in the microwave, the hot fudge sauce was both easier and faster. It took me a foolishly long time to work up the courage to make this, but I suggest you make it a lot sooner.