If you’ve been living the low-carb, sugar-free life style for a while, you’ll know that a good milk or white chocolate is a really tricky thing to come by.
Or basically just any kind of chocolate that doesn’t cost you an arm and a leg, is available locally and doesn’t contain any of the dreaded Maltitol/Isomalt or other sugar alcohol nasties.
And currently I know only of one brand of white sugar-free chocolate and Maltitol is the first ingredient!
There are some awesome sugar-free chocolates out there, but I can’t tolerate most of them.
Then there are those that I could tolerate, but they are WAY too expensive, and/or not available locally and with more months of the year being somewhere between 90 and 116 F than not, shipping is really not an option for me.
Making our own chocolate, even without being super purist and starting with the actual bean, has several factors working against us. All relate to the sugar-substitute. The ones that act a lot like sugar come with a lot of digestive issues for people, the ones that don’t hold a whole other set of problems!
- First of all, the kind of sugar substitutes that are available, suitable for this application and tolerable to me, are not that easily dissolved in fat.
- Then there is the fact that a lot of the milky creaminess of good chocolate comes from a melancher, which is a grinding machine that keeps on grinding and churning the warm chocolate for hours and sometimes days. Not only will that make sure you dissolve anything you put in the chocolate, it produces the tell tale mouth feel, how it melts creamily on your tongue and all that good stuff. There are some melanchers available for home use and chocolate making, but at this point in time, I can’t justify spending $400 to make a few bars of chocolate!
So I had to relent a little and just accept that whatever I am going to be able to produce at home will NOT have the fine Belgium chocolate kind of properties!
However, I am still working on ways to make a good sugar-free chocolate at home - and who knows, one day I might just get there. It will need some mad MacGyver skills, that’s for sure! To simulate a melancher - not to blow things up, in case you’re wondering! Even though one or the other could happen!
So while I haven’t really managed to make the perfect bar of milk chocolate yet, I have managed to make a fairly decent bar of white chocolate!
Since white chocolate has a whole lot less ingredients to dissolve and smooth, it seems easier to get a decent texture and taste without much grittiness! I do however still have a very faint grit, which is to be expected without a melancher. I have tried making the white chocolate with stevia only too, but that didn’t work out so well either. Somehow the taste and texture was effected by having no solid sweetener.
Homemade Sugar-Free White Chocolate
Ingredients:
- 3 Ounces Cocoa Butter
- 1 tsp Vanilla flavoring oil or powder (or the inside of a vanilla bean)
- 2 tbsp. erythritol, powdered
- 4-5 drops of stevia extract
- 1 tbsp. milk powder
- 1 tbsp. cream powder or whey powder (or all milk powder)
- 1/2 tsp lecithin
Preparation:
Place your cocoa butter in a microwave-safe bowl and nuke it for just a minute or two on medium powder, so that it liquefies. Be sure to keep an eye on it at all times, as it has a much lower melting point than a bar of finished chocolate.
Once completely melted, quickly stir in the remaining ingredients. Keep stirring and if needed, nuke it for a few seconds as you go. You want everything to be as dissolved in the fat as possible and the sweetener and milk powder take a while before they relent! *
Don’t worry if it looks rather yellow at this stage, just pour everything into your molds and it will be the right color once it all cools. If you’re not using molds, just line a baking pan, tray or loaf pan with some plastic wrap and pour it in there.
Tap the molds on the counter lightly so as to remove any air bubbles. Immediately place the chocolate in the fridge or freezer to harden. Since were not using sugar, the chocolate has a habit of separating, as in the heavier solids sink to the bottom and you have a layer of somewhat tasteless cocoa butter on the top. If you suspend it all straight away by cooling it down quickly, it all stays nicely mixed! You also get the separation if you haven’t stirred long enough and the milk and sweetener solids were not dissolved enough!
Not to worry though, if you should get a gritty or separated bar, just break it up, re-melt, stir, stir, stir this time and then go through the rest of the steps again! Or use it in my White Chocolate Custard recipe which I will be posting shortly!
Once the bars are solid, leave the chocolate sitting on the counter, loosely covered for at least a day and a night. 3 days would be even better!
The chocolate seems to “cure” during that time, developing the flavor some more and it also seems to help with stability, as it just melt as easily when you pick it up anymore. It acts a lot more like “real” chocolate.
After the curing, wrap and store.
With my ingredients (the King Arthur Flour milk powder has 2.3 g of carbs per tbsp.) each bar comes in at 1g carbs each.
(Note: I don’t count erythritol. Over time I have tested myself and it has no effect on my blood sugar at all. If you count erythritol, please adjust your carb count accordingly!)
* If you have Chocolate Electric Melting Pot, this would be excellent to use. Just put it on melt initially and keep it on warm while your stirring to dissolve everything with a wooden spoon or plastic spatula!
What other sweeteners have you tried? Do you think you can omit the stevia? Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI've been experimenting with sugar-free, gastric-distress-free (for me) chocolate for many years and none of the other sweeteners turned out very well. The numerous other sweetener combination either presented a textural problem as they either didn't combine well with the cocoa butter or didn't dissolve and made it gritty, or made it seize up etc)or a flavor problem.
ReplyDeleteSo, the erythritol and stevia combination is the only one I can stand behind in terms of success, even though chocolate making seems a little temperamental in itself!
If you just omit the stevia you'll get very bland chocolate as most of the sweetening power is in the stevia. You could try the sucralose/splenda single packages (not the bulk splenda) and see if that dissolves. However, splenda/sucralose can be very bitter in combination with cocoa and cocoa butter, so that may not be a good solution either.
There's a sweetener called ogliofructose that is part of a sweetener combination in a commercial chocolate bar that may work, but I haven't tried it yet. I suspect that as with many, getting sweetener to dissolve, so the chocolate has a smooth mouth feel would be a real challenge, unless you have a chocolate melancher.
Like I said, the other sweeteners present a host of other problems.
If you can do the carbs, you could try a little real honey with erythritol, but if you use much more erythritol than stated, you'll run into the problem of not getting it to dissolve in the fats again, which makes for very gritty chocolate.
So, that was the long answer to your question.
The short answer is, yes I have tried many other sweeteners and none of them worked very well except for the one stated in the recipe. HTH! :)
Did you use liquid or granulated lecithin? I bought granulated as it says is turns to liquid when heated, but have yet to try it. The liquid only came in a 500ml bottle and considering I only need so little for this recipe, it was more cost effective to buy the granules. Would you think this would work? My first batch of sugar free white chocolate was with Splenda and it didn't taste very good (very gritty and overly sweet) and I don't want to waste too much more cocoa butter! Thanks for your help and your recipes!
ReplyDeleteHi there! I have used the granules before in baking and never had any dissolving issues, but I haven't used it in chocolate making. I use lecithin a fair bit in home made ice cream, so I now tend to go for the liquid one. And the larger quantity :) Unless the brands vary greatly, you shouldn't encounter a problem though! Maybe try a half recipe first just to make sure!
ReplyDeleteWow! Thanks for your quick response. I guess I'll just give it a try and see how it goes... I've never read about using it in ice cream, I'll have to look into that.
ReplyDeletehow about using powdered stevia?
ReplyDeleteHow about using Stevia powder?
ReplyDeleteThe issue with powder can be that it won't disperse properly, especially when added to oil (it may clump.) Then again, in very small quantities it may work just fine! If you do try, please let us know how it worked!
ReplyDeletethanks, I think I have to try and see :)
DeleteWhat about adding peppermint extract to this? To make white chocolate peppermint?
ReplyDeleteWhat about adding peppermint extract? I love white chocolate with peppermint!
ReplyDeleteYou can add flavorings, as long as they are oil based. If they are water or alcohol based they will seize up the chocolate.
ReplyDelete