A Chocolate Question

[BakerAunt]

I've been looking at the Espresso & Kahlua Brownie Chip Cookie recipe, which is posted on this site. I've baked it before, and we loved it. The combination of chocolate, espresso, and Kahlua is divine.

I'm wondering about trying the recipe with oil rather than butter. I'd use 1/3 cup oil. The original recipe melts the chocolate and the butter together at the start. Would I be able to melt the chocolate with the oil, or is it best to melt the chocolate separately? I'm not sure how chocolate would do with oil.

I'm gambling that this recipe may work with oil rather than butter since it uses melted butter, and I'm counting on the chocolate to prevent my missing the butter. I'll leave out the chocolate chips. That would put the cookies at 45g saturated fat for the entire recipe, that makes about 14 cookies.

Thanks for any thoughts or suggestions. I do miss cookies, and my husband says I am chocolate depriving him.

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[Mike Nolan]

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.

[BakerAunt]

Thanks, Mike. I'm not using "great" chocolate. I have 2 oz. Bakers German Chocolate, which I plan to melt with 4 oz. Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate. I want to use up some of the chocolate that has been sitting in the refrigerator.

After I make the dough, I plan to go ahead and scoop out the cookies, then refrigerate each tray for about 30 minutes before baking. The resting time worked well with the oil-based biscotti that I baked a couple of weeks ago.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Thanks Mike. I didn't realize it was cocoa butter that determined the quality of the chocolate. Looking at the chocolates at the grocery store now the only thing anyone seems to think about is the amount of cocoa.

I know my favorite chocolate cake recipe uses melted unsweetened and semi sweet chocolate and oil. I've used both Bakers and Callebaut successfully.

But the recipe does not call for melting the chocolate with the oil. The oil and coffee are added to the dry ingredients and then the melted chocolate is added. Butter and chocolate are often melted together because they both need to be melted. Is there an advantage to melting the chocolate in the oil?

[BakerAunt]

Hmm--Good question, Aaron. One advantage might be being able to get the chocolate out of the bowl in which it was melted.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Yes. My mom always swore it was easier to melt the butter and chocolate together for just that reason. It's never helped me though.

[Mike Nolan]

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.)

[aaronatthedoublef]

Makes complete sense. I thought that lecithin was also for mouth feel too.

I have tasted cocoa and cocoa nibs but I've never tried cocoa butter.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[BakerAunt]

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 4 years, 2 months ago by BakerAunt.

[aaronatthedoublef]

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.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by aaronatthedoublef.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by aaronatthedoublef.

[BakerAunt]

I had the German chocolate leftover from another recipe, so I wanted to use it up. Other than the bittersweet chocolate, I had only unsweetened in the refrigerator. I still have some high quality bittersweet chocolate chips, but I wasn't going to "waste" them in a cookie recipe. They were awesome in the Bischofsbrot that I baked in January where they nicely set off the maraschino cherries and the dark and golden raisins and walnuts.

I bought some Callebaut to make a wondrous KAF chocolate tart. Those days are over. Sigh.

I'll probably be baking my husband's favorite chocolate cake when his birthday rolls around next month, so I need to check my store of Ghirardelli and Guittard dark chocolate chips. I also need to see exactly what chocolate ingredients I have in the apartment refrigerator. I moved it all out there when I started the low-saturated fat diet. I have some confidence now that I can keep a balance, but I still don't want to keep it in the house refrigerator.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Sometimes the "mice" find and eat chocolate at my house too! Occasionally they've even broken into the unsweetened chocolate which no one does more than once.

The chips go faster than the bulk.

[Mike Nolan]

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.

[BakerAunt]

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.

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