From elastic to fragile chocolate
I tried to make a homemade chocolate by mixing
coco powder (5 teaspoon)
milk powder (3/4 cup)
butter (1/4 cup)
sugar syrap (1/4 cup sugar) [to completely dissolve the sugar particles]
the resulting chocolate was quite good but too elastic. I am curious what in the ingredients (or the procedure) controls the chocolate structure to become elastic or fragile?
How to play with the ingredients and process to prepare different types of (simple and basic) chocolate?
Best Answer
It is not really practical to make homemade chocolate, although you can make chocolate flavored confections like syrups or fudge.
The reason is that true chocolate has two main ingredients: cocoa butter (the fat native to the cocoa bean), and the cocoa powder (which is is made by taking cocoa mass and pressing out the cocoa butter). Sweetened chocolate then has sugar, perhaps vanilla and salt, and usually lecithin added.
In order to have the right consistency (hardness) and melting characteristics, your fat would absolutely have to be cocoa butter. No other fat has the unique crystallization characteristics or melting point that cocoa butter does. It is possible to buy cocoa butter, although it is expensive.
The problem is that cocoa powder is not ground very fine, so the product will be gritty on the tongue and not have the same accessibility of flavor. In true chocolate manufacturing, specialized devices called conches are used to grind the cocoa particles down to very small size, to the point where they cannot be felt on the tongue; this is what gives chocolate its characteristic smooth texture together with the cocoa butter.
Conching is not practical in the home.
Your best, and most likely most cost effective bet is to simply purchase chocolate.
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Answer 2
Butter has a lower melting point than cocoa butter (and also softens at lower temperatures than it melts at), which would make your chocolate much softer than normal chocolate. Also, the syrup would have a softening effect on the finished product. Sugar syrups are frequently added to ganache to make it more pliable when set.
To make a better "chocolate", you'd need a fat with a higher melting point and less liquid in your recipe.
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