When we were in Hawaii my son found a chocolate company on the big island that is growing their own cacao plants. I've had a number of single-bean chocolates, this one had some interesting notes to it. It was kind of pricey, but I guess they're going for the tourist trade.
Stover (in western PA) has 11 pound bags of Callebaut dark chocolate for $43.99, plus shipping, though I usually buy the 2.5 kg bags, currently $22.37. I've not found a local suppliers (as far as Des Moines or Kansas City) whose prices come close to that.
If you want a slightly healthier version of this recipe (it will never be health food), I've found that white whole wheat flour can replace the AP flour, which gives the cookies some wholegrain fiber.
The chocolate chips can be deleted if you choose.
I also found that 1/3 cup canola oil can replace the 1/2 cup of melted butter. Go ahead and put the oil in a measuring cup, add the chocolate and carefully microwave and stir. If you use this oil option, I suggest scooping the dough immediately onto parchment-lined baking sheets, flattening the balls slightly, then refrigerating the pans for 30 minutes before baking. I haven't run a test, but my oil-based pie crust recommended refrigerating the pie dough in the pan for an hour to "relax the gluten," and my oil-based cookies seem to bake with better texture when I do a short refrigeration.
-
This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by
BakerAunt.
The oil version can be an emergency "I'm out of butter!" option. It's also non-dairy, which might be necessary for some people.
I've told my husband that we each are limited to one per day. (The man has no self-control when it comes to chocolate, unless I issue a fiat.) As they are large, substantial cookies, they are nice for slow nibbling with a glass of milk or cup of coffee.
CWC Design--we have not heard from her for a long time--liked the spray that KAF offers.
I've also tried to get away from spray cans. I do keep an olive oil spray can, which I use for pizza (a light spray before drizzling olive oil on the pan) and for casseroles or roasting racks. It takes a long time for us to go through these sprays. I attempted to buy a pump spray, and the mechanism broke when I opened it, so it was back to the can.
With the baking sprays, I felt that the cans did not last all that long and had a tendency to clog and become useless. It also seemed to result in a darker crust. So far, the Grease has worked well for me and saved money I would have spent on the baking spray cans, as well as decreased my non-recyclable trash. I've used it on large muffins, but I do not particularly like to do standard muffins (takes a long time to prepare the pans so I often just use Crisco), and I'd be very unhappy if I had to coat a large quantity of mini-muffin pans.
-
This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by BakerAunt.
On Tuesday afternoon, I baked the Espresso and Kahlua Brownie Chip Cookies (the recipe is here at Nebraska Kitchen), substituting 1/3 cup of oil for the butter, using white whole wheat flour, and omitting the chocolate chips. For further details, see the "A Chocolate Question" thread. Yum!
Drum Roll: Here are the results:
On Tuesday, I tried an experiment, using the recipe for Espresso & Kahlua Brownie Chip Cookies, which was first posted by Lorraine on the Old Baking Circle, then re-posted onto the next version of the Baking Circle. When KAF dismantled the BC, this is one of the recipes that I saved and re-posted at Nebraska Kitchen. My experiment was to replace the AP flour with white whole wheat, replace the ½ cup butter with 1/3 cup canola oil, and eliminate the chocolate chips. My goal is a cookie with less saturated fat and a bit of a health benefit, although most of that will be wiped out by the saturated fat.
I was able to melt the chocolate with the oil. (Note: I used 2 oz. Bakers German Chocolate and 4 oz. Ghirardelli Bittersweet Chocolate, as that is what I had on hand and needed to use up.) After mixing the dough, I used a ¼ cup scoop (Zeroll 13) to scoop not too full amounts onto two parchment-lined baking sheets, with seven on one sheet and eight on the other. I refrigerated these for 30 minutes. I baked each sheet at 325F for 19 minutes. To try to equalize the chill times, as I only bake one tray at a time, I took the second one out of the refrigerator after 40 minutes and let is sit at room temperature while the first tray finished baking.
Results: The taste is excellent, they have the same crinkles on top, and the texture reminds me of when I baked them with butter. Even with my changes, the saturated fat is not trivial; it’s 45g total (4g of it are from the eggs and 5g from the canola oil), which means 3g per cookie (I got 15 from the recipe). With the white whole wheat flour, it is wholegrain, so there is fiber, but I have no illusions that I’m eating health food. I cut the saturated fat by 51g by substituting canola oil for butter, and I cut it further by eliminating the chocolate chips. I would bake the recipe again.
I've actually had both mice and bugs get into chocolate, so I always check it carefully.
I haven't found a local supplier for Callebaut chocolate yet, at least not at a price I'm willing to pay. So as long as we make periodic trips to Pittsburgh, I'll continue to buy my chocolate at Stover Company in western PA. I've considered having them ship it, but for at least 6 months of the year shipping chocolate 900 miles by the usual carriers is not a good idea, and it gets expensive. I'm unlikely to ever need to order enough to have it shipped by refrigerated truck.
I was never all that impressed with Ghiradelli chocolate, at least not the stuff available on the retail side, I think they also have some wholesale chocolate lines. Guittard is IMHO better than Merkens, but Callebaut and Vahlrona both make far better (though usually more expensive) products. There are a few other high-end chocolate makers. I look for couverture grade chocolate these days.
I was taught (never went to chocolate school sadly but in generic baking/cooking classes from pastry chefs friends) that chocolate is, at its essence, cocoa and cocoa butter. That's what my unsweetened chocolate it. I forget the cocoa percentage and I won't be home to check for a couple days.
Most chocolate only talks about cocoa percentage. No one thinks about cocoa butter, even when buying white chocolate which should be cocoa butter with no cocoa. If you look at what passes for most white chocolate out there it is mostly anything but cocoa butter. It's milk and sugar and vanilla and lots of other stuff.
My semi sweet is cocoa, cocoa butter, sugar, and lecithin. Bittersweet is the same ingredients in different proportions - more cocoa and less sugar.
Dairy is semi sweet plus milk which can vary itself in terms of fat and sugar content.
I use Callebaut for bulk chocolate and Guittard for chocolate chips. I cannot buy Callebaut chips except by mail-order and my favorite pastry chef of all time favors Guittard. I cannot tell the difference between Guittard and Toll House but my family likes them. When I'm not lazy I chop my bulk chocolate into chips and use it.
Of the stuff I buy Milk is usually in the mid 30s for cocoa, semi sweet in the 40s-50s, and bittersweet in 60s and up. Then there is "dark" which is anywhere from the 50s on up. I sometimes will use Bakers semi sweet and unsweetened, especially if I do not have a scale to weigh it out. I've never used their German chocolate. I like their product it's just harder to find these days. Not sure why.
I wish the same government org that gave Callebaut a hard time about ruby chocolate would put a bit of that effort behind "dark".
One more addition - pure cocoa butter from the Chocolate Man! When I lived in Seattle I ordered from him a couple of times. He was selling out of his house back then and one order was during a particularly hot summer. He came by and personally dropped of the order rather than chance it sitting on my porch in the heat. VERY nice man and very generous with his expertise.
Both of the bars I'm using have cocoa butter, but as Mike notes, there is no mention of how much.
German chocolate ingredients: sweet chocolate (sugar, chocolate, cocoa butter, soy lecithin--emulsifier
Ghirardelli Bittersweet Chocolate (60% cacao): unsweetened chocolate, sugar, cocoa butter, milk fat, soy lecithin--an emulsifier, vanilla
I just took the first tray out of the oven, and they look good. I'll post more details later this evening after we have one for dessert.
-
This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by BakerAunt.
Lecithin is more of a solidifying agent, though it does impact mouth feel. Increasing lecithin while decreasing cocoa butter produces a similar (though IMHO less satisfying) mouth feel at a lower cost.
Similarly, other fats (such as coconut or palm kernel oil) are a lot cheaper and less temperamental than cocoa butter and are used in cheaper chocolates.
It's fairly easy, just time-consuming.
I cut the onions into slices (not rings) for soup, then put them in my 12 quart stock pot with a stick of butter. (You need some fat to coat the onions, this is basically a sauteeing process.) 7 pounds of sliced onions fills the pot to about 3/4 full at first, though it cooks down to just a few inches. I know from past experience I can get 10 pounds in this pot, though, and probably more if I compacted them, but that makes stirring them harder.
The oven was at 350 and there was a lid on. I stirred them every now and then, generally every 30-45 minutes. It took about 6 hours for them to caramelize. You can do it faster on the stove, but you're more likely to burn them.
Once the onions were caramelized, I added the chicken stock, which I started heating about 45 minutes earlier. A little sherry, some salt and pepper, and they're ready to go in the soup bowl, generally with some stale bread and cheese, so they go under the broiler long enough to melt the cheese and get a few brown spots.
Most restaurant make French onion soup with beef stock, but it is probably more accurate historically to make it with chicken stock, because only the gentry had much access to beef. IMHO the chicken stock does a better job of pairing with the onions without trying to dominate them. (Most restaurants put in way too much salt, too. My rule for most foods is if it tastes salty, you put in too much.)
Cocoa solids are just that--solid. They determine the intensity of the chocolate flavor, but it is the cocoa butter that determines the mouth feel, because cocoa butter is a fat that is solid at room temperature but liquid at mouth temperature. And while the marketers will sometimes tell you how much cocoa solid there is in your chocolate bar, you generally have to buy chocolate packaged for confectionery usage to get much information about cocoa butter content.
You wouldn't eat a teaspoon of pure cocoa solids, but you wouldn't want to eat a teaspoon of pure cocoa butter, either. (We did taste some of both at chocolate school.)
KAF recipes often use a small amount of sourdough starter for the overnight levain. (See Jeffrey Hamelmann's rye bread recipe on the KAF site.) I find it a bit iffy, having tried baking the rye bread on two occasions, as there seemed to be a small window between when the levain was ready and moving on to the next step. I need to try that recipe again.
One of the things I did during my steam test was to take a picture through the oven door window every 20 seconds during most of the bakes.
I have a tool that should be able to stitch them together into a movie, but I don't think I'll post them because they'd probably be huge. Also, the picture quality isn't all that great because I'm shooting through the window and the oven light isn't very bright.
But I've been stepping through them manually in my photo editor and they're kind of fun to watch. First you see the oven spring then you can (more or less) see the Maillard reaction and some caramelization taking place.
Chocolate can be mixed with oil, the better the grade of chocolate (ie, how much cocoa butter it has) the less oil you'll need to add.
