SUMMER EXPERIMENTS : CHOCOLATE : 2

Making my kitchen into a chocolate factory!

In the Swedish health store life, I found raw cacao liquor and cacao butter and I was inspired to try making my own chocolate at home! Cacao liqour is also known as unsweetened, 100% chocolate and is exactly what is used when making the chocolate you buy in the store. My first manufacturing experiment is white chocolate.

Chocolate types

Before throwing myself into making chocolate I want to understand the differences between the different chocolate types.

The types of chocolate you can find are:

Raw chocolate (råchoklad): has not been heated, roasted or mixed with other ingredients. This is classed as a Super food.

Unsweetened chocolate (osötad choklad): as the name states it is not mixed with sugar. But apart from raw chocolate it has been roasted in the process and might be mixed with extra fat/butter to form a bar. It is often used within baking and cooking and called bitter chocolate.

Dark chocolate (mörk choklad): is split into bittersweet and semisweet chocolate. The "dark" part of the name means it does not contain milk (although it might contain some, since it is made with the same equipment as milk chocolate). Bittersweet chocolate contains less sugar and more cocoa solids than semisweet. Confusing enough, dark chocolate doesn't necessary need to be "dark" in the color; with low cocoa solids and high sugar content it gets quite pale. (In Sweden we would call semisweet chocolate for "ljus choklad")

Milk chocolate (mjölkchoklad): has milk as one of the main ingredients, or more likely milk powder. In the Nordic Countries, Fazer is the only chocolate producer that use fresh milk, the rest use powder. In Sweden we often confuse Mjölkchoklad and Ljus choklad saying they are the same, but in fact you can make a "dark" milk chocolate, with high cocoa solids AND containing milk.

White chocolate (vit choklad): is made only from the cacao butter. With sugar and milk it is a sweet "chocolate" - some people claims it should not even be called chocolate since there are no cocoa solids in it.

Cocoa solids

The US and EU have different classification of what is allowed to be called, and sold as, "dark", "milk" and "white" chocolate.

Raw chocolate contains 100% cocoa solids (including liquor and butter - without the butter it is in the form of powder) - there is nothing extra added.

Dark chocolate, mixed with sweetener I think most think of 70% chocolate (in a 100g bar, 70g is cocoa solids, 30g is sugar). But actually in EU the minimum for cocoa solids is 35%, to be allowed to be called "dark chocolate". Is the US the percentage is minimum 15%.

Milk chocolate must contain at least 25% cocoa solids and 14% milk in EU. In the US it must contain 10% cocoa solids and 14% milk.

White chocolate can be called white chocolate in both EU and the US when it contains at least 20% cocoa butter and 14% milk.

Making white chocolate!

After my research I found I need cacao butter, sugar and milk for making white chocolate. As mentioned before most producers use milk powder, but Fazer use fresh milk so I figured "If they can, I can too!".

First I grated the cocoa butter, melted it, mixed with sugar and milk (60% butter, 20% sugar & 20% milk), and then tempered it. I split the batter into three bowls and sweetened them with three different types of sugar: coconut sugar, raw sugar and icing sugar.

60% cocoa butter and 20% sugar did not really work. I wanted to reduce the amount of sugar, but it tasted a bit strange. And adding icing seems to soak up all moisture for me, making the mixture turn into a sort of ganache, neither melting or hardening. (Same happened when I tried to make dark chocolate). What I might have done wrong is adding the sugar too quickly. Reading a couple of instructions it says you should add it slowly, one tablespoon at a time.

This is a recipe (from Jessica Heichel) which I will try next time.

makes 100 g of white chocolate

60 g cocoa butter

32 g icing sugar

8 g milk powder

pinch of vanilla powder

1. Combine the milk powder and icing sugar.

2. Melt the cocoa butter in a double boiler and as it starts melting slowly add the dry sugar mix, one tablespoon at a time.

3. Add the vanilla when everything is well combined and melted.

4. After tempering (see below), pour into a silicone mold or on a baking sheet to form a chocolate bar.

About tempering white chocolate

In my last post about cocoa you can read more about tempering chocolate. The point is to melt, cool down and melt the chocolate again to get the characteristic shine and snap to the chocolate. There are several different methods to temper chocolate, for example on a double boiler or in a microwave oven, letting the mixture cool in the bowl, only melting half the chocolate and adding the rest when to cool it down (seeding method) or spreading the mixture on a marble surface (tabling method). I am still an amateur when it comes to tempering techniques (would love to get taught by a professional!) so at the moment I am experimenting to see what works for me, in my kitchen. If you want to read more abour tempering chocolate and methods I recommend Chocoley's website.

The temperatures you should reach when tempering white chocolate are:

Melt to 110 F (43°C)

Cool down to 78 F (26°C)

Melt to 82 F (28°C)