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Post by chococurious on Feb 3, 2018 7:09:00 GMT -5
There's a famous Belgian chocolate company who make liqueurs too, most including dairy products, but they make one, a "dark chocolate" version which only has cocoa, sugar, water and alcohol (15%), maybe some vanilla I don't know. So wondering how do they do that? Without the sugar/water syrup, it would just be chocolate extract. How to make a cocoa extract?
Poked around the Goog and found some recipes in a 1906 book, "Standard Manual of Soda and other Beverages" and they all call for cocoa powder, not beans or nibs. Later realized why: nibs will contain butter, if mixed into an ethanol solution, that butter would fast collect at the top and go rancid before the 7-day extraction could finish.
So my hunch says the Belgians must use cocoa powder with as low a butter component as possible. Their numbers are 6.2 grams of carbs per 1.5 ounces (about 42 grams), with 5.8 g of the carbs from sugar. So 0.4 g of carbohydrates per jigger come from the alcohol? Or cocoa butter?
Has anyone tried this since 1906? What does the residual 12% of cocoa butter in cocoa powder do when in an aqueous ethanol solution? Does it float or misc right in?
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Post by chococurious on Feb 18, 2018 23:46:11 GMT -5
Well, nobody has peeped up, so guess i have to try it myself. Got a weight of cacao powder, made from criollo beans of Peru. There are 4 recipes for cocoa extraction in that book, 1 uses cacao nibs and 3 call for powder. So will scale each one down to fit into a 4-ounce bottle, and run some tests.
Just need some cassia bark from the local Indian market, and i've got mace, but if i'm doing a real test then i'd want some fresher and better quality mace. Only other ingredient called for is ambergris, but that's been illegal for decades, and after reading up on it, sounds like its use in chocolate goes back to the 1600's. But after reading descriptions of what it tastes like, i can't think of anything i could substitute for the stuff. So we'll skip the whale snot.
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