Well, I’ll have you know there is always a stovetop kettle on my stove top, ever at the ready. (Even now, I can say with absolute certainty though I be thousands of miles from home!)
And if you come in my house, within a few minutes of your arrival you WILL be offered a cup (cuppa? I think not, eh?) of tea. It will be brewed in a pot, served on a tray along with some cookies. ( You heard me, COOKIES,) If I like you, perhaps even a cup and saucer.
Having thrown off the oppressive yoke of colonialism, here in the free world we live without fear of roaming vans of enforcers. Y’know, like all them British wankers.
As a Yank I’ll defer to the Brits et al about the OP’s main question. But I gots ta know: how the heck do kettles and hot chocolate go together?
Hot chocolate comes from milk that’s heated to almost scalded in a saucepan, followed by adding the powdered or (better) shredded chocolate. Kettles have no place in this process.
Amazingly enough and despite the people who make powdered cocoa indicating in the very instructions that you can make it with milk, a lot of Britons use water.
The Scottish-Welsh team was stumped when they came to Bilbao for meetings and the local cafeterias (including the one in the company’s HQ) offered hot cocoa in the form of:
a jar of steam-heated milk,
a sachet of powdered cocoa,
an empty cup and saucer,
and the right to request to get the already-dissolved cocoa-in-milk topped up with room-temperature milk.
At least one of them caused a sensation the next time she had visitors, by making the cocoa with milk.
Most English people that I know, including myself, make drinking chocolate using mostly boiling water, topped up with some cold milk. It’s a lot faster than heating milk on the stove because, well, we all have electric kettles. It’s also a lot less rich, so you can drink more of it without feeling like it’s too much. Mostly the instructions do say ‘add hot milk’, except the ‘instant’ varieties, but everyone ignores them.
If you go to a cafe though, you’d expect it made with hot milk, though when I did cafe work (in both a major UK chain and a small independent cafe) it was pretty common for people to request it made with water or part water instead. I’d be surprised to have it laid out DIY style in a cafe, but I’d also be very surprised and feel a bit cheated if I’d bought one and it was made with hot water. That’d be like ordering a coffee and they get the jar of instant granules out; I might make it at home that way because it’s cheap and easy, but I ain’t paying someone else to do that.
Personally, I do make hot chocolate at home with milk on occasion, but that’s more of a treat for really rotten days, whereas I drink a couple of mugs made with mostly water and just a bit of milk most days.
I use a French press coffee pot, so I always have the kettle sitting on a burner. Not mention having used it for many things in the course of a lifetime. What i really would like is that thing called insta-hot thru a faucet in the sink. Mr.Wrekker vetoed that as maybe a problem waiting to happen. He likes to kill my dreams, sometimes.
Oh, the horror! I remember arriving at the railway station on my commute to work, only to find that the drinks machine (dispenses hot water) wasn’t working. Fortunately the ever-resourceful staff had procured a kettle and my pre-train cuppa was safe. Thinking about that day still makes me shudder, the consequences could have been quite catastrophic.
I installed my first one back in about 2000. Three residences later I still have one. It’s literally the first trip to HD after we move in. The one I installed in 2000 did fail after 4 years; some metal parts rusted through. The later ones lack any rustable parts and last indefinitely. Operating cost is negligible.
You might have to pull more power into an outlet under the sink. But you can probably just hang it off the same outlet the dishwasher uses. Hint: it can’t use the switched outlet the disposer uses.
The difference is the deluxe model has a second lever that dispenses unheated water. I have both sides fed through a filter then I connected the unheated side to an undersink chiller akin to this one: https://www.amazon.com/Franke-CT-200-Little-Filtration-Chiller/dp/B00W5B2262/. So I have instant almost-boiling hot water and instant almost-freezing cold water.
The cold side is mostly redundant to the dispenser in the fridge door, and is IMO a mostly-silly extravagance. OTOH, it flows about 3x the speed of the fridge door and I’m an impatient critter. The hot side on the other hand is one of those things like a microwave oven or an ice maker in the freezer, that once you have it you wonder how you got along without it.
Making tea is easy: grab a mug & fill with almost boiling water (we call it “boily water”). *Then *go get your tea, infuser, lemon, honey, milk, whatever. Once you have all your stuff, dump that water out of the now warmed cup, add all your ingredients then refill with more boily water. It’s been about 90 seconds since you thought “I want tea” and now it’s fully made and steeping.
I also use it to pre-heat my coffee cups and to quickly heat bowls for serving soup or whatever. It’s amazing how much longer hot things stay hot when you don’t waste half the heat in your coffee or soup simply warming the container. And that’s in a warm climate. When I lived in snow country the difference was astounding.
Trust me when I say this is a <$200 gift to yourself you’ll enjoy daily for years.
Wait a moment. Drinking chocolate and cocoa are not the same thing. Cocoa is powdered cocoa solids. Drinking chocolate contains sugar (even the non-‘instant’ type)
The two terms are used interchangeably in my family. I thought that was a pretty widespread thing. So does wikipedia, taking a look. Hot chocolate, also known as drinking chocolate, cocoa…
We’ll distinguish between the powders (as cocoa powder can also be used for baking) but not the drinks, as they’re basically the same aside from sugar being added at a different stage; cocoa powder can be used to make drinking chocolate, and drinking chocolate powder could be used to make a nice mug of cocoa. Maybe it’s a regional thing.
IME, “cocoa” as a beverage is a fairly thin concoction of sweet milk chocolate and hot milk (or occasionally (shudder) water). Typically served in a coffee mug-sized container.
“Drinking chocolate” is a thick almost gooey concoction of rather dark chocolate, little sugar, and little milk. Typically served in a demitasse-sized container.
IWO, “drinking chocolate” is the espresso to “cocoa”'s ordinary coffee. (or if the cocoa’s made with water, instant coffee (shudder again)).
I have no doubt the terms have lots of regional variations and marketing driven segmentation to boot.
