Level: Apprentice
Read time: 10 minutes
I have been making your milk chocolate using your suggested 25% blend of cocoa, sugar, milk power, and cocoa butter. I'm curious what the best way would be to try different percentages without messing up the end product? For example, if I wanted to increase the amount of cocoa nibs, how do I figure out how much to back off on one of the other 3 ingredients? In your opinion, would increasing the cocoa nibs to 35% or 40% make much of a difference in flavor?
Before I get into this, I want you to know that I’m announcing a new chocolate making short course of a sort and thee details are at the end of this Article. **
Well, there are precious few ways to mess up a formulation. Really, the only way I can think of is not getting enough fat in there. Everything else is just personal tastes and preferences. If you keep the total fat content to at least 35% you should be just fine. That includes the 50% contribution from the nibs, the extra cocoa butter you add, plus the contribution from the milk. And if by chance the mixture is too thick, and you think it is ruined, it really isn’t. You can just measure out more cocoa butter (don’t forget to record it) and add more until it is flowing well. There is also a caveat I should give. The 35% minimum is generally for dark chocolate. When you add milk, their solids can start to form bonds and the result is a thicker chocolate than you would expect for a given fat content. I wish I could give you a benchmark like “milk chocolate should have a minimum of 42% fat” but as much as I’ve tried, a solid benchmark just doesn’t seem to happen. Some recipes need 38% and others are barely fluid at 45%.
As for how to change the ratios once you adjust the nibs, or any other ingredient, you need to think about your goals. Making methodical changes and evaluating those changes based on your expectations is one flavor of the scientific method.
For instance, it is helpful after tasting the base chocolate (25% everything) to ask yourself, of the remaining ingredients, do you want more or less prominent. To answer you initial question, yes, increasing from 25% cocoa nibs to 35 or 40% will indeed made a difference and that is a good place to start. To go from there, you want to ask yourself if you want it about the same sweetness, more sweet or less sweet. The same goes for whether you want more milk flavor; same, more or less. Once you have those decisions made, you formulate accordingly, trying to really only affect one variable. And it is very much worth noting you are probably going to have to do multiple batches to fully explore the changes in flavors and how they play together. How about we run through some examples based on different decisions?
The simplest case is if you decide you want to only adjust the cocoa content, meaning you want the sugar and milk level about the same. In that case, the cocoa butter is the only other ingredient you can adjust, and it is worth keeping in mind, not all recipes are going to be possible due to viscosity/fat content.
If you increase the nibs to 40%, or 15% more, then the other ingredients have to be reduced in total 15%. Since we have decided to not change the sugar or milk, that leaves us with the cocoa butter meaning it goes from 25% to 10% (25 – 15 = 10). That is fine and good, but can it be made? If you calculate the amount of fat (I’m going to ignore the milk fat since it isn’t changing) you get 20% from the nibs (they contain about 50% cocoa butter) plus 10% from the cocoa butter and you end up with 30% fat….which isn’t going to be quite enough most likely. Technically there are infinite ways you can adjust this but practically there are really only two good choices. You can either not increase the nibs quite so much, so that there is more cocoa butter or you can add more cocoa butter and lower the sugar and milk.
Instead of 40% nibs, how about 35%? The cocoa butter contribution is then 17.5% and the extra butter would be 15% and adding those together you get 32.5% fat….and that is barely right on the cusp. It might work or it might be a little thick and that is really cocoa bean dependent as we are assuming 50% fat in there but in reality it can be upwards to 57% or as low as 45%. The other thing in the nibs that can make a huge difference is the fiber content. Were you aware cocoa is considered a high fiber food? YAY colon health!! There is somewhere between 20-30% fiber on a weight basis. I’ve personally found that this affects viscosity way more than the amount of fat. It isn’t something you can look up or test easily. I mostly want you to know it isn’t all about the amount of fat and why formulations don’t seem totally predictable. There are unknown variables. Getting back to the subject, you have 32.5% fat and since that is close, I would suggest testing it out…..assuming the original recipe was not on the edge of being too thick already. Sure, it has 37.5% fat but as I just mentioned, depending upon your nib choice, that might be thin, average or thick, so you have to take that past experience into play.
To that end, let’s go ahead and assume it was previously a bit thick so we don’t even want to try this recipe at 32.5%, what do you do? You do the only thing you can and that is to leave the fat content where it was by increasing the butter to get to back that original level and reduce the other two ingredients accordingly. I would personally recommend dropping them evenly so the milk to sugar ratio stays about the same. To get to 37.5% fat we have to add an extra 5% cocoa butter or 30% total. With 40% nibs, 30% butter, that leaves us 35% to divide between sugar and milk, so 17.5% of each it is, so we get this:
35% cocoa nibs
30% cocoa butter
17.5% sugar
17.5% milk powder
That is a totally viable recipe….but it IS going to drop the sweetness, and we had decided we wanted the same sweetness, right? Well, I would still make the above recipe to add to your own personal knowledge base but I would also shift the sugar/milk ratio to keep the sweetness the same and make another batch. Leaving the sugar at 25%, and keeping the nibs and butter the same, we then just have to drop the milk powder so the total is 100%. That would look like this:
35% cocoa nibs
30% cocoa butter
25% sugar
10% milk powder
Now that is a little low on milk. It might be ok, and you won’t know fully until you make it, but to me that now leads to the final test I would do, namely keeping the milk powder where it was (25%) and dropping the sugar even more so it looks like this:
35% cocoa nibs
30% cocoa butter
10% sugar
25% milk powder
Now that is not going to be a sweet bar at all, but given the lack of bittering agents from the lower cocoa nib content, it could well be significantly more enjoyable that you might expect for a chocolate that is only 10% sugar. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that getting technical, the sugar content will actually be higher than 10% since milk powder has nearly 40% lactose so in actuality there is (does maths behind the scenes) 20% sugar in this recipe, 10% coming from the milk.
And there we go. We’ve applied math, logic and past experience to create three new recipes that will then add to our past experience that will allow us to apply more math and logic and continue iterative process of learning how to formulate chocolate recipes. Over time this will give you a deep base of knowledge where eventually your brain will make connections and allow you to judge how one change leads to others and the resultant flavor impacts.
**With that, I want to announce a minor change in the Chocolate Kit of the Month. Starting this month I am going to be effectively doing just what I did up there, namely changing one percentage variable (if possible) at a time. We are going to start with a 75% dark chocolate and vary the amount of cocoa butter to explore and examine how that affects the mouthfeel, perception of sweetness and overall flavor impact. We’ll go from no extra cocoa butter up to 15%. You’ll specifically be asked to hold back a bar or two each month so at the end of three months you and some friend/family/pod members can sit down, and have your own comparative chocolate tasting. I’m leaning toward an array of dark milk chocolates after that, not dissimilar to what we just did above. The unstated hint (damn, I just made it I stated) is that this would be a great time to hop on board for an iterative chocolate making micro course. You have the option (of course) to cancel after 3 months or you can stay on board for continuing education from your own home.