Making dark chocolate at home
I want to make plain dark chocolate at home.
The process is tricky in my experience, not simply mixing cocoa, cocoa butter, milk powder, sugar, etc.
Can you share some practical tips for doing the process and choosing the right ingredients.
Best Answer
Sorry to rain on your parade, but making good quality chocolate in a home kitchen without special equipment is basically impossible.
The magic tool is a conche - a machine that grinds the cocoa solids so finely, that you can't feel them with your tongue any more. We are talking about a particle size of 10-20 micrometers here. It also distributes fat and sugar in a very specific way. At the same time, temperature rises in a controlled way, altering the flavour profile of your ingredients. For very high quality results one batch took up to 90 hours. Modern technique recently brought this down to an hour or so for good results, provided the chocolate mass is pre-treated to remove unwanted aromatic compounds. Note that we are talking about an industrial scale here, small-batch conches still need 12-24 hours.
The bad news is that even if you committed yourself to manually "conch" for hours, the results would probably be not very satisfying: the precise parameters (time, temperature, humidity...) are a carefully guarded secret of each manufacturer as they significantly contribute to the specific taste and mouthfeel of the brand.
Pictures about "Making dark chocolate at home"
What are the main ingredients in dark chocolate?
Dark chocolate contains 50-90% cocoa solids, cocoa butter, and sugar, whereas milk chocolate contains anywhere from 10-50% cocoa solids, cocoa butter, milk in some form, and sugar.How is dark chocolate made step by step?
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Making homemade dark chocolate is probably easier than you think. It's made with only 5 ingredients: cocoa powder (or cacao), coconut oil, honey, vanilla, and sea salt. All you need is about 5 minutes of melting and whisking plus thirty minutes in the freezer and you're good to go.How do you make unsweetened dark chocolate?
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