Cacao And Maca Recipe: How To Combine Them In A Mug

Start at a level teaspoon of maca, not a tablespoon, and wet it into a little cold milk before anything is hot. Maca is a dried, ground root, so it disperses rather than dissolves, and it carries a strong taste of its own into a mug that is already bitter-led. Quantities and the order of operations are below.

Almost every version of this recipe online opens with a heaped tablespoon and no mention of what the powder tastes like. That is how people decide in one mouthful that they do not like maca.

What maca is

Maca is Lepidium meyenii. Minich, Ross, Frame, Fahoum, Warner and Meissner, reviewing it in Nutrients in 2024, describe the edible parts as the hypocotyl and the taproot, with the hypocotyl the part normally harvested for food and powders. Its native range is the Peruvian Andes at roughly 3,500 to 5,000 metres. It is also grown in Yunnan in China at about 2,800 to 3,500 metres and in Tibet above 3,000 metres, and the review notes that Chinese maca differs in appearance and composition, raises concerns about pesticide and herbicide use and adulteration, and links growing altitude below 3,500 metres to lower macamide content.

There is no single maca. The review describes up to thirteen to seventeen colour phenotypes, grouped mainly as black, red, yellow, purple, grey and white, with the pigments sitting mostly in the skin. Black, red and yellow are the most studied. Only about half of the thirty clinical trials the review covers identified which colour was used.

Raw or gelatinised, and what changes

Traditional open-field drying takes about two to three months and exposes the root to freeze-thaw cycles and intense ultraviolet light. The review reports this is considered superior to oven drying, while noting it alters the glucosinolate, fatty acid and amide profiles.

Gelatinisation is something else: an extrusion process applying short-term high pressure, heat and moisture after the root has been dried and ground. The review notes the resulting powder is more hygroscopic and less stable, and that raw maca may contain roughly 20 per cent more glucosinolates than gelatinised. Glucosinolates are pungent-tasting, so that difference is one you meet at the rim of the mug.

The practical consequence of hygroscopic is a lid. A powder that pulls in moisture clumps, and a clumped powder will not disperse however hard you whisk. There is a fuller note on raw and gelatinised maca powder.

The cacao and maca recipe, in quantities

One mug, about four minutes.

• 250 ml whole milk or oat milk, plus two tablespoons held back
• 1 level teaspoon of maca powder, roughly 3 g, to start
• 4 dark chocolate buttons, 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 pinch of ground cinnamon

For scale: the review records traditional dietary use in Peru of more than 20 g of dried hypocotyl a day, and clinical studies using from about 300 mg to over 3,000 mg daily, while criticising how vaguely those doses get reported. A teaspoon in a mug is a cooking measure, not a derived one.

Method, in order:

1. Put the maca in the mug with the two tablespoons of cold milk and work it into a slack paste with a teaspoon. Ten seconds, and it saves the grit.
2. Heat the rest of the milk until the surface moves and it steams. Stop short of a simmer.
3. Take the pan off the heat and whisk the paste in.
4. 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 the milk is already hot enough. Whisk thirty to forty seconds.
5. Add the salt and the cinnamon, pour, and stir again before the last mouthful, because ground root settles.

Taste, and why a tablespoon is a mistake

The review describes Peruvian maca as more pungent in aroma and taste than Chinese maca, notes that glucosinolates are pungent-tasting and that alkaloids are bitter-tasting. A 77 per cent base is bitter-led before anything is added to it, with coconut sugar rather than cane sugar behind it. Put a tablespoon of a pungent, bitter root into that and the two do not cancel out.

Go up in quarter teaspoons across a week instead. Cinnamon and salt both help, and so does a slightly sweeter milk, which is the simplest adjustment of the three. How cacao and maca compare as ingredients is covered separately.

What to check on the tub

Three things, all on the label or the seller's site. Does it say which colour of maca it is? Does it name a growing region, given what the review says about altitude below 3,500 metres and macamide content? Are contaminant results published? That last is not idle: the review cites a study finding cadmium and lead above permissible limits in yellow and purple maca.

Worth knowing about the source: several of the review's authors are affiliated with companies that sell maca products, which the paper discloses. A useful survey of botany, processing and the state of the trials. Not a neutral one.

What is in a Chaski tube

Maca is not an ingredient in Chaski. It is something people add in the mug, which is why this page treats the two separately. A tube holds 600 g of 77 per cent dark buttons made from single-origin Peruvian and Ecuadorian cacao ground at low temperature, with 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, and the full list is on the Chaski Cacao product page.

Make it once at a level teaspoon with nothing optional in it, so the baseline is clean. Then change one variable a week. The rest of the writing lives in the Chaski guides library.

Sources

1. Minich D M, Ross K, Frame J, Fahoum M, Warner W and Meissner H O, Nutrients, 2024
2. Lonchampt P and Hartel R W, European Journal of Lipid Science and Technology, 2004