Homemade Chocolate Syrup

My kids like an occasional chocolate milk and we sometimes have chocolate syrup on vanilla ice cream.  We usually buy the “chocolate flavored” syrup from Trader Joe’s.  I remembered an Alton Brown show about cocoa and decided to make my own syrup.

The recipe is pretty simple: water and sugar to make a simple syrup, then add cocoa powder, vanilla, corn syrup, and a pinch of salt.  Full recipe is here.  The recipe calls for “Dutch Processed” cocoa, while I only had Ghirardelli Cocoa Powder on hand.  I took a tip numberswiki.com

from the comments and added a single tablespoon of butter to the mix with the cocoa powder.

In later research, it seems like it was unnecessary.  The Cooks Illustrated website had done extensive testing and found no difference in using Dutch Processed cocoa or regular cocoa.  I’ll try it next time without the butter.

When it was cooling, it looked like this…

We sampled a bit and it’s very good.  I’ll let you know how it is over ice cream.  Enjoy!