How To Make Hot Chocolate In A Coffee Urn – Tutorial With [Video]

If you bought an urn and want to make a lot more than coffee in it then this article is for you as I talk about how to make hot chocolate in a coffee urn. 

I’ll show you how to do it the easy way, trouble free and what to watch out for! Let’s get right on with making hot chocolate in batches.

How To Make Hot Chocolate In A Coffee Urn – The Instructions

With a coffee urn you can make a lot more than just coffee in it as it is a multi-purpose device. You can make hot milk, hot chocolate, tea and other hot water or milk based drinks within reason.

How much you can make will depend on the size of the urn. Each urn comes in various sizes measured in cups with each cup size being commonly defined as a 6 ounce (180 ml) quantity.

Common sizes are: 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 80, 100 and 200 cup sizes.

Keep that cup size in mind when working out the size of your party or event as if you are serving standard 8 ounce cups, you will find yourself running out quicker and will need to manage appropriately and factor that in.

Note a 30 cup urn at 8 ounces will fill 21-22 cups.

Read: 30 cup coffee urn instructions

Making Hot Chocolate In An Urn Step-By-Step Instructions

The means here is not to provide you with a recipe for making chocolate. I’m sure you can find world-class ones on specialist chocolate blogs. Let’s get right to it!

First find a fairly large saucepan and add cocoa, sugar and chocolate chips to the saucepan. With your pot at a medium heat slowly and at a low boil while gently simmering, stir the pot gently and constantly.

Now add the mixture into your urn. Add milk and keep stirring to mix well and combine with the chocolate mix. Keep stirring until your hot chocolate is ready to drink.

Add in cinnamon for extra taste, entirely optional.

Never put in or use marshmallows, no matter how small and how few. This will destroy your urn and do not use the steel rod, remove it from the center. This only serves for making coffee (or tea) and most certainly not hot chocolate.

With the rod in place you will only end up with a messy chocolate fountain in the middle that serves no purpose and makes a mess! Do not use the rod at all.

Immediately as you are finished serving up the hot chocolate, fill your urn with cold water and start cleaning your machine. If you wait, you will be in for one heck of a job scrubbing it. Don’t make your life difficult!

Boil water in it until it is clean. Filling it with water and letting it steep and clean for a few hours. Scrub the hole where the long steel rod goes in the middle.

When you are cleaning, do not forget to clean the spigot and rinse it with boiling water and clean with a pipe cleaner as any dried hardened chocolate will be difficult to remove. This should be your first thing to clean.

Can You Put Milk In A Coffee Urn?

Yes, with a decent sized coffee urn you will have the ability to make approximately 5 gallons (22.7 liters) of hot milk in around half an hour. A coffee urn can be use for making a number of hot drinks and not exclusively for making hot tea and hot coffee. You can make hot milk, and of course hot chocolate.

It might be a good idea for your function to hire extra urn for giving your party guests options.

How To Heat Milk In A Coffee Urn

Perhaps making hot milk as well as coffee and hot chocolate is what you want to make. An advantage at large events that you are making coffee, heating milk in your urn gives you plenty of coffee options for making Latte’s and other milk based coffee drinks.

This sounds like a simple task but do it wrong, and you will end up with hot burnt milk that curdles and is rather smelly!

Fill your coffee urn with the amount of milk that you need. Make sure that you fill it with fresh, refrigerated cold milk while it is switched off.

If your urn has the ability for you to control the heat, use a medium heat setting. If you do not have this facility, be sure to use a thermometer to keep a close eye on the temperature of your milk.

Continuously stir your milk with a big wooden spoon. You must keep stirring, otherwise you will get burnt milk.

Once your milk reaches 160F, you are ready to serve it. If you have a lot of children, you would be better to serve the milk at a cooler temperature of 130F to 140F.

Once the ideal temperature has been reached, put your urn on a warm setting to maintain the heat.

Read: How does a coffee urn work 

Can You Use An Urn To Keep Hot Chocolate Warm?

Yes,

use the instructions above to make the hot chocolate and, as you would keep your milk warm or coffee for that matter, keep the plugged in and on a warm setting to maintain the temperature.
Simply keep an eye on the urn and top up with milk, mini chocolate bits and sugar as needed. You can make with quality cocoa powder if you want, entirely optional.

Can You Make Hot Chocolate In A Coffee Machine?

Yes,

you must be careful of which coffee machine you are using to make hot chocolate with and how you wish to make it.

With an urn and percolator, you can follow the technique above. With other machines, you will need to adjust your technique and method.

Can You Make Hot Chocolate In An Espresso Machine?

Yes,

I have done so many times, countless times. I have seen some websites giving advice of filling the portafilter with good quality cocoa powder.

Please do not do this.

This will make a mess of both your portafilter and the part that it is in contact with where water falls from. Besides a cocoa mixture, the majority of them are water-soluble. To put them in your portafilter is literally pointless and does not make the end drink any better in terms of quality.

I experimented trying it out and ended up with clumps of guey powder very horrible looking and gunge. The end chocolate, due to your machine working with water, will not have that milky taste and texture. It will end up watery.

You have a milk wand, use it to heat your milk and serve cocoa with milk. This is the best way to make hot chocolate with an espresso machine.

Can You Make Hot Chocolate In A Coffee Maker With Milk?

Yes,

If you want to make hot chocolate in your coffee maker with mike you will need to put some chocolate power in a cup and add 2 ounces (60 ml) of hot water from the coffee machine and mix well. The next step is to steam the milk in your milk pitcher then slowly add it to the molten chocolate powder in a separate cup and stir well.

The result is a delicious milk chocolate drink. Rinse and clean all parts of your machine. Do not leave any milk or powder in your coffee maker.

Frequently Asked Questions About How To Make Hot Chocolate In A Coffee Urn

Frappé-Ing It All Up – How To Make Hot Chocolate In A Coffee Urn

Now you know how to make hot chocolate in a coffee urn, you can go right ahead and make delicious batches of chocolate, hot milk and coffee. Do not forget to remove the metal rod in the middle and to clean with hot water immediately after you have finished serving hot chocolate.

Did you make hot chocolate in a coffee urn?

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Derek Marshall

Coffee is love, it's more than love — it's a passion of mine. I've had the luck to have travelled and enjoyed the most exotic of coffee's and unique flavors, brewing methods and techniques of making the perfect coffee from Thai hill tribe coffee to Indonesian volcanic coffee, Malaysian coffee that comes in a tea bag and the array of flavors in Vietnam, from Vanilla to Orange to Coconut to Avocado to even salt coffee and the famous egg coffee. The best part of my coffee adventures is getting to mix with the locals over a nice brew and learning how they make it! I'm cited and referenced on Google Scholar for the topic of coffee.