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Post by etalococh on Jul 18, 2019 14:40:35 GMT -5
What do chocolate producers do to their chocolate to keep it nice and melted even though it has long been cooled?
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Post by Ben on Jul 18, 2019 15:56:39 GMT -5
Chocolate can only have cocoa butter as the fat, which is solid at room temperature. So, if it's still a liquid when cooled, it's not technically chocolate. I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, but it may just have a different fat (like vegetable oil) added, which keeps it from solidifying when cooled.
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Post by etalococh on Jul 18, 2019 20:45:34 GMT -5
Not liquid exactly. Like how chocolate chips in cookies never really harden again and it's melty and unctuous. They somewhat hold their shape but smash easily between your teeth.
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Post by Ben on Jul 19, 2019 7:29:26 GMT -5
Ah. Maybe someone who knows this for sure will weigh in, but my guess is just that the chocolate chips are tempered when you buy them and become un-tempered when baked in a cookie. Even when cooled and re-solidified, the un-untempered chocolate is softer than the tempered. The added milkfat (in the case of common chocolat company often boycotted for it's other products and marketing Tollhouse chips) probably contributes to this.
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Post by Chip on Jul 19, 2019 8:37:06 GMT -5
The chocolate chips we used to use (common chocolat company often boycotted for it's other products and marketing's) would regain their hardness if the cookies were left to cool overnight. The only time they were "soft" was when they were warm. For instance, get ahold of a pack of Chip's Ahoy cookies and you will see the morsels baked into them are hard.
The only way I can think of to make the chocolate softer is to make a more sturdy type of ganache, using less cream, making it almost a hard ganache but retaining softness? Other than that, I noticed on the common chocolat company often boycotted for it's other products and marketing's ingredient page they use soy lecithin and "natural flavors" which may be attributing to this?
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Post by adrianwalton on Aug 6, 2019 18:05:36 GMT -5
Not liquid exactly. Like how chocolate chips in cookies never really harden again and it's melty and unctuous. They somewhat hold their shape but smash easily between your teeth. etalococh - do you mean melty like Icy Squares?
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fred
Novice
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Post by fred on Dec 8, 2019 19:25:45 GMT -5
This is an interesting topic and I wondered about it. At first I thought maybe the chips get infused with butter or other ingredients in the batter that lower the melting point of the chocolate chips, but it could just be that the temper is lost and the transition back to a solid might take longer and/or happen at a slightly lower temperature. Since you have to get below 85F or so for the chips to solidify this might take a while if the cookies are in a warm kitchen or near a stove (or maybe even in a warm room). Also I think because the chips have lost their temper they may be a bit softer if they cool down slowly. A related question I've wondered about is how to do you make a "soft" chocolate? Milk chocolate is generally softer than dark chocolate, and dark chocolate usually has a "snap" when tempered correctly, but how do you get a soft dark chocolate? Well, John has tried to address this: chocolatealchemy.com/blog/2018/3/9/ask-the-alchemist-242One suggestion he has is to add 1-5% clarified butter. Some other oils in very low amounts may also work (you have to be really careful with coconut oil). He also suggests changing the tempering a bit for a softer chocolate (allowing fewer type V crystals to form). This seems pretty tricky to me.
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Post by Chip on Dec 10, 2019 21:16:22 GMT -5
fredIf you notice the longer a chocolate chip cookie hangs around, the harder the chocolate morsels get. It's almost like some type of evaporative process is happening, or a capillary effect from the dough surrounding the morsels? LOL. I know that baking the chocolate definitely makes it lose its temper. Using ghee (clarified butter) carefully would be one way of getting a softer chocolate. However, milk chocolate is much softer than dark, but is it the type of milk fat or solids used in the milk powder? Or is it the impact of the powder itself on the chemical composition of the chocolate? One way to test this would be to use some dutched, regular or raw powdered cocoa and add that into a dark chocolate formulation and see if they reduce the snap or hardness of the chocolate.
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fred
Novice
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Post by fred on Dec 10, 2019 22:01:36 GMT -5
Chip - that's a really interesting idea! It's easy to add cocoa butter but hard to take it away - adding more chocolate solids in is an easy way to reverse that. I was just looking at "Hershey's Special Dark" ingredient list and they actually add cocoa powder (oddly they also add milk fat and lactose - in "dark chocolate"!). Probably for them it is just a cheaper way to restore the chocolate flavor after adding too much cocoa butter and milk fat lol! I can confirm a very dark milk chocolate is a good thing!
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