70% has become one of the standards for many chocolate makers, including us! It’s a great balance between getting a strong flavour of the cocoa you’re using and just enough sweetness to balance the final taste of the chocolate bar. There are a couple of ways to make 70% dark chocolate, depending on if you want to add any cocoa butter and if so how much. Here’s the recipe we use to make our 70% dark chocolate 1200g cocoa nibs 600g sugar 200g cocoa butter Changes you can make are not adding any cocoa butter (add 200g more nibs instead) or adding 5% more nibs and 5% less cocoa butter. We add cocoa butter to our recipe for 2 main reasons....
No. Cadbury chocolate isn’t Fairtrade, even though used to be. Cadbury had been part of the Fairtrade programme from 2009 up until 2016, when Cadbury left the programme and started using its own, in house equivalent (big red flag) - Cocoa Life. Cocoa Life sounds excellent if you read about it on Cadbury’s website. They claim to teach cocoa farmers to grow crops in a way that looks after the environment, It ensures cocoa farmers can earn a better living, meaning better quality of life for their families & communities and It cares for cocoa growing communities, so children can have access to education. But is this all true? Again, no. Not doing a great job here Cadbury… In a...
Is dark chocolate vegan? The answer to this question is, that it should be. High quality dark chocolate should only contain a few ingredients. High street dark chocolate will commonly be made with sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, sugar, vanilla flavouring and soya lecithin. Chocolate makers like us can make dark chocolate from just one ingredient, cocoa beans! But this will be 100% dark chocolate and might not appeal to everyone. Our dark chocolate is vegan and is made from just three ingredients. Cocoa nibs, sugar and cocoa butter. No added flavouring or lecithin. Some makers don’t add cocoa butter so it will just be cocoa nibs and sugar. So dark chocolate is vegan by default because there’s traditionally no...
Tempering chocolate can be a scary phrase when you start working with chocolate. There are horror stories of lumpy chocolate that doesn’t set and everyone’s worst nightmare, getting water in your chocolate! But what is going on when tempering chocolate? The answer is very scientific so let’s dive in! Tempering chocolate, or precrystallisation, is a process of bringing chocolate to its ideal crystalline form. When tempering chocolate you’re actually tempering the cocoa butter that’s in the chocolate. Chocolate has 6 different forms that it can set in, depending on the temperature. At various different temperatures, cocoa butter crystals will form and set in various ways, think of it like building blocks or lego! The ideal form for chocolate is form...
How do we temper small batches of chocolate by hand? By using the silk tempering method. What is silk?! Its cocoa butter which has been heated to a certain temperate and when is added to melted chocolate it kick starts the cocoa butter crystallisation process which tempers chocolate with little to no fuss. You don’t need to heat chocolate in the traditional temperature curve, all you need to do is melt it to one temperature. There’s two different stages for silk tempering. Making silk The first stage is making your silk. You can buy it, but it’s not readily available everywhere. The easiest way to make silk is with a sous vide. Step 1. Seal a small amount of cocoa...
