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Forget Hershey’s: Our chocolate sauce recipe is better, and takes 5 minutes to make

Seriously, stop buying chocolate sauce

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Chocolate cake and syrup
Hansuan_Fabregas/Pixabay / Pixabay

If you don’t have kids in your house, it may have been a while since you last enjoyed a generous drizzling of sweet, indulgent chocolate sauce. Or maybe not. In addition to the childhood favorites, chocolate sauce (or, syrup) can also be the star of many adult-themed beverages and…activities. But however you enjoy this decadent sauce, we’ll bet you didn’t realize how easy it is to make for yourself. No sticky brown jug from Hershey’s is required.

Chocolate sauce is the ketchup of the dessert world. Kids love it, adults love it (whether they admit it or not), and it makes anything better with just a little squeeze. Use it to amp up ice cream, magically create chocolate milk, turn it into a dip for your favorite fruits, or garnish cakes and brownies. We love to stir it into our iced coffees and chocolate-themed cocktails.

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The most spectacular thing about homemade chocolate sauce, though, is just how simple it is to make. It’s truly a wonder that the bottled stuff sells as well as it does when making your own tastes so much better, comes together in about five minutes, and is made of only simple ingredients that are actually pronounceable. Made of just sugar, water, and cocoa powder, this is one sauce you’ll never buy at the store again.

ice cream sundae with chocolate sauce
David Calavera / Unsplash

Homemade chocolate sauce recipe

Easy recipes like this let simple ingredients shine, so the quality of the ingredients is very important. Obviously, the star of this recipe is the cocoa powder, so it’s crucial to use high-quality cocoa. Of course, there is something deliciously nostalgic about Hershey’s, and you can certainly use that for the sake of your inner child. For a more sophisticated flavor, however, we like to go with something a bit more refined. Brands like Guittard and Ghirardelli are lovely and relatively easy to find in the baking aisle.

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This recipe is ridiculously simple to scale up or down, as each ingredient’s measurement is equal. Using a 1-cup measurement for each ingredient in this recipe will yield just under 2 cups of chocolate sauce. But you’re probably going to want a lot more than that.

Ingredients:

Method:

  1. Over medium-high heat, whisk water and sugar together until sugar is dissolved.
  2. Remove the pan from heat and whisk in cocoa powder, stirring constantly to remove all lumps.
  3. As the sauce sits, it will continue to thicken.
  4. Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to three months.

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Lindsay Parrill
Lindsay Parrill
Contributor
Lindsay is a graduate of California Culinary Academy, Le Cordon Bleu, San Francisco, from where she holds a degree in…
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