I never realized how much I liked chocolate until the industry separated it enough from the sugar industry and started pumping out 85%+ dark chocolate recipes. The biggest problem with the bar industry, though, is that I like chocolate together with nuts or fruit. And inevitably all the chocolate-covered or mixed products use a much sweeter chocolate. So I found myself recasting melted dark chocolate with other ingredients.
Finally I just researched making my own dark chocolate and it turned into a fascinating project. It turns out that formulating chocolate has quite a bit of science behind it (hence the famous stories behind the Swiss chocolatiers etc.). It’s quite easy to find the proper ratio of ingredients for whatever percent chocolate floats your fancy (e.g. 85% dark chocolate contains 15 wt% sugar). The tricky part is getting the consistency correct through temperature control.
You see, the fat in chocolate actually forms crystals and has various polymorphs (essentially different crystal shapes/forms). The polymorphs have different melting points. Only one of these polymorphs, crystal form V, has a melting point far enough above room temperature and below body temperature to be ideal for eating (hence M&M’s famous saying of ‘melts in your mouth, not in your hands…). This polymorphism is best explained here. The key for capturing the right polymorph is what’s called tempering in the cooking world (and annealing in the formulation world).
So anyway, I dove pretty deep into chocolate making, although I still haven’t started from roasting beans. I summarized my recipe starting with cocoa butter and cocoa powder in the ‘master batch record’ attached below. There is so much additional variety you can add to this by sourcing your cocoa from different regions also. Post a comment below or contact me if you want more information.
So inevitably more information was requested, so here I go…recipe updated (if you downloaded before Thanksgiving 2019 then you should re-download), and some sources for my ingredients along with pictures to accompany the step-by-step instructions:
You can actually find pretty decent cocoa powder and cocoa butter on Amazon. Look for as pure, unadulterated products as possible. Play around with different cocoa powder sources, as the tastes can vary nearly as much as something like grapes/red wines. I’m a bit extreme, though, so I get mine usually from food distributors. Here’s exactly what I’ve used for most of the past couple of years, with a bunch of different cocoa powders from different countries thrown in for experimental purposes:
- I get my Valhrona cocoa powder from a friend who works in the food industry (thanks MG!), but this is the closest you can find on Amazon: cocoa powder link
- My cocoa butter I get in bulk from this place in Braintree MA: JEdwards chocolate. If you get them in wafers they’re easiest to work with.
- I recently switched to baker’s sugar (thanks for the tip, Aunt S!). Just beware that despite the labels it is more dense than powdered sugar. Hence you will end up with chocolate that is sweeter and more granular if you don’t scale back to <10% the total volume (go 5:5:1 for powder:butter:sugar). From Amazon here: sugar link or search ‘caster sugar’ or ‘bakers sugar’
