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Hot Fudge Chocolate Sauce
1 cup sugar
1 square chocolate
½ cup water
1 tablespoon butter
½ teaspoon vanilla
Mix together the sugar, water and grated chocolate. Boil for five minutes. Cool slightly and add the butter and vanilla.
A four-ingredient sugar syrup sauce that depends almost entirely on how long you let it boil. A few conversions and one point of technique are all it needs.
- A square of chocolateOne ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, the standard scored square of the period and still sold that way. Bittersweet or semisweet will work but the sauce will be markedly sweeter, since the cup of sugar assumes no sugar in the chocolate.
- GratingGrating was to help hard block chocolate dissolve in the water. Chopping fine does the same job, and modern chocolate melts readily enough that either is fine.
- The five minutes is the whole recipeBoiling sugar and water for five minutes concentrates the syrup, and that concentration is what makes the sauce thicken and go chewy on cold ice cream. How far it gets depends on the pan and the heat; the recipe names no stage and gives no temperature. Boil less and you get thin chocolate syrup; boil much longer and it may set hard.
- Stir at the start, then leave itDissolve the sugar fully before it comes to a boil, then stop stirring. Agitating a boiling sugar syrup encourages crystallisation and a grainy sauce.
- Cool slightlyAdd the butter and vanilla off the heat once the bubbling stops, a minute or two. Vanilla's aroma is volatile and some of it will be driven off if added to boiling syrup.
- YieldRoughly a cup, depending on how much water boils off. It reheats gently over low heat or in short bursts in a microwave; add a teaspoon of water if it has stiffened.
Hot fudge belongs to the American soda-fountain era rather than to home baking, and its appearance in a Butterick household book of the early twentieth century shows how quickly drugstore counter confections migrated into domestic kitchens. The sauce is built on sugar, water and unsweetened chocolate, boiled only to the thread stage, with butter beaten in at the end for gloss and body. Ice cream itself was becoming a home dish in this period as hand-crank freezers and commercially delivered ice grew cheaper. The invention of the hot fudge sundae is often claimed by several early Los Angeles and Midwestern fountains, but the attributions are traditional rather than documented.