What words come to mind when you look at this bottle of milk?  Simple, Pure, Fresh.  Those 3 words should be in all the foods that you eat.  So today I’m talking about the ingredients found in a chocolate bar at the store:

Ingredients in a low-grade chocolate bar: SUGAR, CHOCOLATE, COCOA BUTTER, COCOA PROCESSED WITH ALKALI, MILK FAT, LACTOSE, SOY LECITHIN, PGPR, VANILLIN, ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, AND MILK

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ChocoVivo 75% Cacao chocolate bar: Cacao Nibs + Unrefined Cane Sugar

So why add all those ingredients?  When I was learning to make chocolate, a teacher told me to use soy lecithin or PGPR in my chocolate so the oils don’t separate.  And then she told me to start adding additional cacao butter.  Why? Why? Why?  PGPR was NASTY!  The smell was horrific.  Soy Lecithin, I don’t recall what it smelled like, but it’s basically a waste product when processing crude soy bean oil.  Here’s a very reliable article from the Westin A Price Foundation.  Soy is pretty much genetically modified these days.  And it’s still out there whether GMO foods do harm to your body.  You don’t really need all these additional fillers if you consume your chocolate quickly. These days, stores want food products to be shelf stable.  It’s all about the $$$$.  Not a bad thing, but you have to offer quality products.  And additional Cacao Butter – well, it’s just another processed method done to the chocolate.  It’s pressed from the cacao mass (nibs that have been ground up).  It creates a smoother mouth feel.  My philosophy has always been, use only whole ingredients.

So here are some quick definitions for some of the ingredients.

Milk fat – adds creaminess

Lactose – Milk by- product to keep the milk solid

Cocoa Processed with Alkali – cocoa is different than cacao.  Cocoa has not cacao butter so this needs to be separated from the cacao solids.  An Alkali is added to make the chocolate look darker and neutralize the acidity.

Just remember, the less the ingredient list the better.  There’s so much to learn about chocolate.  It’s definitely not black and white.  Stay w/ me and you’ll soon learn to appreciate chocolate.  It’s much more than just a bar of chocolate.

Joan’s on Third
8350 West 3rd Street
Los Angeles, CA  90048
(323) 655-2285
www.joansonthird.com

Currently Almonds + Sea Salt bar sold in the store.

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For my next blend, I wanted to use bananas.  I think bananas and chocolate are a great combo.  Peanut Butter + Chocolate was blend in my mind, but I have too many nutty blends at the moment.   I wanted to work with a unique spice, thus cardamom.

Cardamom is a very difficult spice to incorporate into foods.   It’s super strong and it can be overpowering as I found out the past couple of weeks.  It’s not like I can use milk or flour to help spread the intensity.  You put 2 intense ingredients together and things can go array quickly.  So I put 2 little pods in a 13# batch of chocolate and it was STRONG!  I kept adding 5 # increments of chocolate and after being in the kitchen until 2:00 AM last week, I decided that I needed to let this puppy sit so I could muster up enough energy to tackle this again.

Was in the kitchen last night and made it my mission to win this fight.  So I took about 1/4 of the original batch I made last week and stone ground it with more chocolate.  But I thought I’d make the blend a bit sweeter to about a 58% cacao.  It was too sweet!  So I ground 75% cacao and mixed it with the 58% cacao and WaLa!  It turned out perfectly!  The bits of chewy bananas with a hint of the cardamom is just right!  TKO!  Now I just have about 20# of chocolate + cardamom.  Well, you know what kind of chocolate I’ll be selling at the market for the next few weeks.  But Banana is the theme for the next month.