Champurrado Oaxaqueño con Masa de Maíz

This is Oaxacan champurrado. Not the thin, sweet hot chocolate you find in cafes that call themselves Mexican. Champurrado is an atole, a corn-based drink thickened with fresh masa de maiz, and in Oaxaca the chocolate that gives it its soul is chocolate de metate, ground on stone with cacao, canela, sugar, and sometimes almonds until it becomes a rough, grainy tablet that dissolves into something no factory chocolate can replicate.

The base is water, not milk. I know that will bother some people. It bothered me the first time a senora in the Mercado 20 de Noviembre in Oaxaca city handed me a jicara of champurrado and I watched her make it with nothing but water, masa, piloncillo, chocolate, and a stick of canela. I asked about milk. She looked at me like I had asked if she put ketchup on it. The water lets the chocolate and the corn speak. Milk muffles them. If you want hot chocolate with milk, make hot chocolate with milk. But don't call it champurrado.

The masa is what separates champurrado from every other chocolate drink on earth. You dissolve fresh corn masa in water and it thickens as it cooks, giving the drink a body that sits on the tongue, dense, grainy in the best way, substantial. Cornstarch will not do this. Flour will not do this. Masa harina from a bag will get you closer than either of those, but fresh masa from a tortilleria is where this drink lives. My mother made champurrado every December morning during the posadas season. She used masa from the tortilleria two blocks from our house in Colonia Roma, chocolate de Oaxaca that my tia sent by bus, and a molinillo she inherited from her own mother. She would stand at the stove frothing the pot until the foam rose, and the kitchen smelled like cacao and wet corn and canela. That smell is December in Mexico. Saber cocinar es saber vivir.