Level: Novice
Read Time: 9 minutes
I have 70% dark chocolate and some 100% cocoa mass. Can I add some mass to the 70% to get to 75% dark?
Yes.
Good talk everyone.
Alright, alright, I guess it isn’t over. I can say more. I can nearly always say more, can’t I.
Please try and ask the question you want the answer to, not a lead in question to your real question.
Lucky for those involved I can often recognize when the question asked isn’t going to lead to the desired answer. When that happens I start a brief Q and A to tease out what someone really wants to know.
Alchemist: Why do you ask? What concerns do you have?
Supplicant: How much mass would i add to 10 lbs of 70% to get to 75% and would I need to add cocoa butter?
A: Do you have a concern about doing it or are you just unsure how to calculate it?
S: both and don’t know if i should add cocoa butter
A: What concern do you have? I'd like to make sure I address it.
S: I don’t want to ruin 10 lb of chocolate
A: Are the two chocolates the same origin? Did you make them or are they purchased?
S: yes the same, I purchased it
Great. With that I can finally give the sought after answers.
The very first thing is that regardless of my answer, you should not be just running with what I give you and turning 10 lb of 70% chocolate into however much 75% chocolate you can make, all in one go. I can’t recommend enough that you make a few ounces to see if you even like it at 75%. You may not.
Is there anyone reading this who basically hated word problems in school and said “I’ll never need this in real life!!”? Guess what? No, not chicken butt. Your maths teacher was right. You needed to learn how to do this. But in case you didn’t, your handy dandy fancy Nanci friendly neighborhood Alchemist is here to show you how to do it with hopefully little of your high school math trauma rearing its head.
The Problem.
You have 10 lb 70% chocolate and 100% chocolate and want to make 75% chocolate. How much 100% cocoa mass needs to be mixed into the 70% to achieve this?
So you can visualize this, I like to break it down into what the 70% chocolate is made of. Literally by definition it is this:
70% cocoa mass (the total of cocoa solids and butter)
30% sugar
Since you have 10 lb, you multiply each component by 10 to tell you how many pounds you have. How do you multiply by a percentage? You can either memorize to just move the decimal place over to the left by two or do it long hand. It of course gives you the same answer.
70% / 100 = 0.70
10 lb x 0.70 = 7.0 lb cocoa mass
10 lb x 0.30 = 3.0 lb sugar
That is where you are starting. Now you need to know where you are going. You want 75% chocolate. Let’s calculate what 10 lb of 75% looks like.
75 / 100 = 0.75 (percent to decimal)
10 lb x 0.75 = 7.5 lb cocoa mass
10 lb x 0.25 = 2.5 lb sugar
Look at that. You need more cocoa mass (0.5 lb) and you have cocoa mass to add in the form of the 100% chocolate.
But there is a catch. Your 75% chocolate per the calculation up there only has 2.5 lb of sugar and you can’t remove sugar. So you need to ask yourself how do you get 3 lb of sugar in your 75%? You scale the recipe up and you do that by dividing what you want by what you have.
3.0 / 2.5 = 1.2 factor
You use that factor now on the 75% to see how much cocoa mass it needs.
7.5 lb x 1.2 = 9.0 lb cocoa mass
2.5 lb x 1.2 = 3.0 lb sugar
You have 7.0 lb of cocoa mass in the 10 lb of 70%. You need 9.0 lb in the 75% so subtracting on from the other
9.0 - 7.0 = 2.0 lb
shows you need to add 2.0 lb of the 100% to your 70% to make it 75%.
For those that want to use ounces, you would multiply 2.0 x 16 to get 32 ounces.
Now as I said before, you should NOT do all 10 lb at one time. Do a small 1 lb test batch.
To do that, you would just divide everything by 10. I hope you see why. 10 lb to 1 lb and all that. That means to make 1 lb (or so) of 75% test chocolate you would take 1 lb of 70% and add 3.2 oz. (by weight, not volume of course). Mix it all up, temper it and see if you like it.
You mentioned a concern about ruining it. This is why you are making a pound; to test that. Other than that, I have no idea what you mean by ruin, I have no way to predict if you’ll like it. You also mention purchasing it and it being the same origin. Not all 100% cocoa mass is refined for the length of time sweetened chocolate is refined so the resulting flavor may (or may not) be pretty different. Again, the test batch.
So that is how you would do it.
As for can you make it, or if you need to add cocoa butter, I’d love for you to be able to answer this yourself so let’s get into why and how you can answer this yourself.
I get you are asking the question because you don’t know if mixing them will ruin them. You don’t know what you don’t know. I get that. I’m saying in pretty much all mixing of chocolates and recipe formulations, there are only a few rules of thumb.
NO WATER....but you know that (no thumb there, that is a RULE)
Minimum 35% fat content (sometimes that can go as low as 30% and sometimes needs to be as high as 45% in some high solids milk chocolates)
aaaannnndddd that is about it.
We know the 70% chocolate is fine. It is chocolate. By the nature of selling it, we know it has enough cocoa butter in it. We know the fat content is going to be at least 35% (half of 70%).
100% cocoa mass is going to be 50-55% cocoa butter.
This is just kind of like basic math and averaging. If you have two numbers, say 35 and 50, can the average be anything but between 35-50? No, it can’t. It’s just math. Since your minimum fat for any chocolate is 35% and your average can’t be below 35%, you are by default, fully good to go.
And really, here is an even better rule of thumb that always falls out of that train of thought.
You can ALWAYS mix chocolates together and excluding flavor, you can’t ruin them and you don’t HAVE to add cocoa butter....but you can add more if you want. This becomes purely a matter of taste and desire.
A variant of this question is:
I have a dark chocolate. Can I add X, Y and/or Z to it and make milk chocolate?
This is where it becomes slightly complicated as the question is not about mixing two chocolates (dark and milk) but adding extra ingredients to dark to make milk. In that case, the calculations are similar in that you work out the ingredient contribution from the dark and then see how it is different from the milk chocolate you want to make, and add those ingredients. The catch though is you have to refine the chocolate to make it smooth again.
Although I didn’t build it quite for this case, you can do a lot with the Formulator.
That really is all I have to say about this except try not to over think it. Oh, and think about what you really want to know before posing a question. I said that already.
The question was not really, can I make 75% chocolate from 70% chocolate and 100% chocolate? but HOW can I make 75% chocolate from 70% chocolate? Can it be done is implied and I’m sure to let you know if what you are asking for isn’t possible.
Carry on.
