pseudo choc

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….one more idea that has been floating around in the skull for some time

i think white chocolate might have been the starting point for this… or maybe it was the savory chocolate bars that i had at el bulli. they served these very cold, almost frozen tablets of savory chocolate. if i remember correctly black olive, yogurt and cassis were the flavors and they were one of the snacks at the beginning of the meal. they were so cold that i think i overlooked the obvious technique behind making them.

a couple years later in abu dhabi i was doing some showpiece work when a painfully obvious technique came into mind. it is very common to robocoupe chocolate to make a soft clay for modeling. a variation on this is to use a mixture of cocoa butter and powder sugar or corn flour to make a pure white robocoupe chocolate. the clear idea was born here but not acted upon until now.

lately i have thinking a lot about chocolate. i think this is because i have been looking into getting the tools to make my own bean to bar chocolate. the components in chocolate are pretty simple, cocoa beans and sugar. if you are making milk or white you add milk powder/crumb and remove some cocoa beans. in the case of white chocolate all of the beans are replaced with cocoa butter. sooo…. lets take it one step further and replace the milk powder with some other form of solid…. lets say fruit powder or in this case grahm cracker crust.

it is difficult to pinpoint the exact amount of cocoa mass, cocoa butter and sugar in any giving chocolate. only a handful of companies are starting to reveal this information. don’t be fooled, a 70% chocolate does not contain 70% cocoa. it contains 70% cocoa product, meaning cocoa and cocoa butter. a perfect example of this is valrhona’s couer de guanaja. it is 85% but contains the same amount of cocoa as there 100%. the 85% is the 100% only 15% cocoa butter has been replaced with sugar.

after doing a little research i found that your average white chocolate was 32% milk solids, 30% cocoa butter and the rest is sugar. these numbers are not set in stone or perfect but they are a good enough starting point to make my graham cracker chocolate. the first batch used a ratio similar to this.

i processed the graham cracker crust in the robocoupe with powder sugar to get it as fine as possible. then added the cocoa butter unmelted and processed it until i had an almost fluid dough. while it was blending i added a little heat with a torch but did not let it get above 35C. the final product was way to sweet, very gritty and had very little flavor.

round two saw much less sugar, more graham cracker and a little less cocoa butter. this time i processed the crumb/sugar in a vitaprep to make a paste. cocoa butter was added next, blended until smooth and cast into a mold. much better results. still a little gritty. i will try another batch in the thermomix to see if i can get the paste any finer but i think getting it smoother will have to wait until i get my wet grinder.