Mod cons 2: cooking with chocolate

Here's another mod con we've been conned into: recipes that use chocolate (meaning by that bars of ready made chocolate) in order to flavour something that is supposed to taste of chocolate when it's finished. This is a dotty idea.

Of course, if you want chocolate chips in something you need to put bits of chocolate in. If you want a chocolate coating on something, you need to coat it with chocolate, or something that ends up like chocolate. In those cases it may make sense to start with something that is a bit like the finished article. But if you want to make something taste of chocolate, it isn't chocolate you want to put in it, but the stuff that makes chocolate taste of chocolate.

I mean, think of it this way. If you start with chocolate that tastes nice, nice and chocolatey, and then you mix it with something else that is not nice and chocolatey, the end result will be less nice and chocolatey than it was before. No matter how much chocolate you put into a pudding or a cake it will always be less nice than pure chocolate, because it will have a lower proportion of cocoa solids. So how do you increase the proportion of cocoa solids? Well, clearly the way to do that is to add cocoa solids. If you add more chocolate, you will also be adding sugar (mainly sugar) and fat and a few other tasteless things: this won't help to make your cake or pudding tasty. It will make it sweet and tasteless. Besides which it's difficult to use, because chocolate is made to be hard and snappy, so you can't mix it into a recipe without melting it first, and that is a very tricky job. Why choose to use that then? It's mad, because it wasn't designed for the purpose and is very ill suited to it.

Here's another mad example: someone gave me some supposedly luxurious "hot chocolate", which was supposed to be nice because it was made of flakes of "real Belgian chocolate". What a stupid idea! For, (a) flakes of chocolate do not melt well, and certainly don't mix into hot milk. There is no easy way to generate a mug of hot chocolate from a mug of milk and a pile of chocolate flakes. And (b) however much chocolate you put into the milk, it will never taste sufficiently of chocolate, because if the chocolate tastes right on its own it will taste of virtually nothing when you've diluted it with half a pint of milk.

The way to get something to be luxuriously chocolatey is to put lots of chocolate powder into it: by which I mean plain cocoa powder. Cocoa powder contains no sugar, just cocoa solids. 100% cocoa (not 90% or whatever the best of chocolate has). Cocoa powder contains 21.7% fat: that's the cocoa butter that comes naturally. It contains no sugars. It has 23.1% protein. 1375 kJ energy per 100g. It's good stuff: rich and tasty. If you put three 5 ml spoons of it in a mug of milk, and one spoon of sugar, THEN you get a really luxurious rich chocolatey drink. Yum.

85% plain chocolate (which is certainly among the best) has 2515kJ per 100g, 9.7% protein, 15.9 % sugars, and 51.5% fat. In most cases you will also find it has some rubbish in it, such as emulsifier and so on. And that's before you've mixed it with whatever else you are supposed to be adding in your recipe.

So why do we get tempted to buy something when it says "made with real Belgian chocolate"? There's no reason to suppose it will be at all nice. In fact, rather the opposite.

Chocolate

Results of anti-soya chocolate investigations shows the following ranking.

First prize to Traidcraft Organic Swiss Made Chocolate. The Cappuccino variety is heavenly, despite containing some vegetable oils. Other varieties sampled so far are also delicious: the milk chocolate version has nothing but wholesome ingredients.

These chocolate bars contain no emulsifier at all.

Runners up:
Plamil Organics, non-dairy and gluten free. Contains sunflower lecithin.
Peter Rabbit Organics. Seems to be designed for children, but is sadly dairy free and made with fructose not sucrose. Contains sunflower lecithin.

Flavour not wonderful in either case, doubtless due to the lack of the yummy bits like sugar and milk.

Also ran:
Tesco value chocolate, contains lecithin from Rapeseed. The flavour is fine, but I don't really approve of rape plantations, or of Tesco.

Help! Chocolate mountain!

Too many chocolates have soya lecithin in them!
I have five useless boxes of chocolates here, one started and four unstarted.

Can't bring myself to give them to anyone, because I don't like to pass on rubbish. (But if anyone wants to volunteer to relieve me of one, let me know).

Even Green and Blacks organic ones have the dreaded soya-based emulsifier. I must write to them and complain. Funny how they don't mention the dreaded soya gunk when they describe how they make it.

More on what's wrong with soya in future posts. Watch this space...