Cacao And Collagen Recipe: A Simple Morning Mug

Warm 250 ml of milk until it steams, take it off the heat, whisk in a heaped teaspoon of unflavoured collagen powder until the grains are gone, then drop in four dark chocolate buttons and keep whisking for half a minute. Collagen first, chocolate second, and never at a boil. That order is the whole recipe.

Most versions of this spend four hundred words on why you might want the drink and forty on how to make it. The forty are the part that decides whether you get a smooth mug or a gritty one, so this page is mostly those.

What collagen powder is

Collagen hydrolysate is described by Harris, Potgieter, Ishfaq and Shahzad, in a 2021 review in Materials, as a hydrolysed form of denatured collagen: the protein broken into shorter peptide chains, either by acid hydrolysis using acids such as acetic, citric or lactic acid, or by enzymatic hydrolysis using proteases such as alcalase, pepsin, trypsin or papain. Combined acid-and-enzyme methods are common too.

The raw materials in that literature are animal by-products. The review covers bovine tendon, bone and lung; porcine skin and leg bones; marine sources including salmon and tilapia skin, fish scales and cod swim bladders; and chicken cartilage and skin. Reported molecular weights run from roughly 500 Da at the small end to around 100 kDa at the large, with many studies working on fractions below 1 kDa.

Two things follow for the kitchen. It is an animal product, so a mug made this way is not vegan. And it is not one standardised ingredient: the source animal, the hydrolysis route and the peptide size all differ between tubs. That review is a survey of production methods and biomedical research, a long way from a drink, and it is cited here only for what the powder is and how it is made.

The cacao and collagen recipe, in quantities

One mug, about three minutes.

• 250 ml whole milk, or oat milk if you want the same body without dairy
• 1 heaped teaspoon of unflavoured collagen powder, roughly 10 g
• 4 dark chocolate buttons, which is the daily dose printed on a Chaski tube, or about 20 g of a dark bar chopped small
• A pinch of fine salt
• Optional: a strip of orange zest, or a quarter teaspoon of vanilla

Method, in order:

1. Heat the milk in a small pan until the surface moves and it steams. Stop before it simmers.
2. Take the pan off the heat. Add the collagen to the milk, not the milk to the collagen, and whisk for about twenty seconds until nothing grainy is left on the back of a spoon.
3. Add the chocolate. Well-tempered chocolate melts at around 30 degrees Celsius, on a figure cited in Lonchampt and Hartel's 2004 review of cocoa butter crystallisation, so milk at drinking temperature does the work with no extra heat. Whisk for thirty to forty seconds.
4. Add the salt and the zest, whisk hard enough to raise a little foam, and pour.

If you are swapping in a bar rather than buttons, chop it first. Anything sold in England as "chocolate" carries at least 35 per cent total dry cocoa solids under the Cocoa and Chocolate Products (England) Regulations 2003, and a 70 to 80 per cent bar carries a good deal more, so a chunk takes longer to go than a thin button does.

Why it goes gritty, and how to stop it

Four habits cover nearly all of it. Powder into liquid, always: tipping hot milk onto a mound of collagen wets the outside and leaves the middle dry, which is the lump you find later with a spoon. Collagen before chocolate, because a thin liquid whisks clear more easily than a thickening one. Whisk rather than stir, since a balloon whisk or a frother breaks clusters apart where a spoon only moves them around. And keep it under a simmer, or you get a skin to whisk through and a mug nobody can drink for five minutes.

Taste and texture, honestly

Unflavoured collagen powders are not interchangeable, and the sensible move is to taste a pinch of yours dry before you commit a mug to it. Some are close to neutral, some are not, and the difference is easier to notice in a 77 per cent dark drink than in a sweet one.

The drink itself comes out thicker than a plain cocoa, closer to a thin drinking chocolate than to a milky one. A 77 per cent base is bitter-led, with coconut sugar rather than cane sugar behind it. The pinch of salt and the orange zest are the two cheapest adjustments to that, and both work better added at the end than at the start. For the wider set of ways people build a mug at home, there is a separate note on hot chocolate alternatives for winter, and on starting materials, one on raw cacao and cocoa powder.

What is in a Chaski tube

A 600 g tube of 77 per cent dark buttons: single-origin Peruvian and Ecuadorian cacao ground at low temperature, coconut sugar, Lion's Mane as a fruiting body extract and Cordyceps sinensis mycelium. The Ginkgo Biloba component is being replaced by 200 mg of Tremella fuciformis, a 10:1 fruiting body extract, per daily dose, and tubes are in that transition. No emulsifiers, no seed oils, no palm oil, no added cane sugar. Every batch is tested for lead, cadmium and pesticides. The daily dose on the pack is four buttons, and the button shape changed in mid-2026 with the recipe unchanged by the reshape. Full details are on the Chaski Cacao product page.

Make it once with the quantities above and no substitutions, so you know what the baseline tastes like. Then change exactly one thing next time: the milk, the salt, or the collagen brand. The rest of the writing is in the Chaski guides library.

Sources

1. Harris M, Potgieter J, Ishfaq K and Shahzad M, Materials, 2021
2. Lonchampt P and Hartel R W, European Journal of Lipid Science and Technology, 2004
3. The Cocoa and Chocolate Products (England) Regulations 2003, legislation.gov.uk