Category: Baking Ingredients

Milk Chocolate

Milk chocolate is the lightest and smoothest of all the major chocolate varieties, containing only about 10-20% chocolate liquor. It is the only type of chocolate that contains milk (or cream) solids, those take up roughly 15% of its volume. Milk chocolate is usually 50% sugar and the very smoothest varieties — you know, those very expensive Swiss bars — can be up to 30% cocoa butter. It all makes for a silky and delightful eating experience, if a decidedly less “chocolate-y” one. It’s for that reason that you don’t find terribly much milk chocolate in the pastry kitchen, as that small amount of chocolate liquor is easily lost when it’s used as a glaze or

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Semi-Sweet Chocolate

Semi-sweet chocolate also goes by the name of “dark” chocolate, at least when it’s in candy bar form, though interestingly it contains more sugar than even most milk chocolate. Semi-sweet chocolate is about 60% sugar by weight. The rest of its volume is made up of cocoa solids (about 15%) and cocoa butter (27-32%). Like bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate it has no milk solids in it, which I suppose is what makes it “dark” by some standards. Semi-sweet has fewer uses than bittersweet in my opinion, which I think is why you don’t see terribly much of it except as an inclusion in chocolate chip cookies, muffins, ice cream, that sort of thing. A lot of people just like to eat it, and really, who can blame them?

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Bittersweet Chocolate

Bittersweet (often simply called “dark”) chocolate is probably the most useful type of chocolate in the pastry kitchen, which is why I always have a little on-hand in one form or another. It’s also the most variable in its composition. Chocolates in the bittersweet family can contain as little as 35% cocoa solids or as much as 70%. Similarly, cocoa butter content can be anywhere from 25-38%, sugar content 30-50%. Bittersweet chocolates contain a small amount of lecithin and no milk solids.

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Unsweetened Chocolate

Unsweetened chocolate is nothing more than tempered chocolate liquor. Not too pleasant to taste for all but the most die-hard chocaholics, it is little more than ground cocoa bean, though the degree of grinding and processing varies from maker to maker. Most unsweetened chocolate weighs in at about 47% chocolate solids and 52% cocoa butter (which means it melts very nicely), the final 1% is usually a stabilizer like lecithin which keeps the chocolate emulsion from breaking.

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A Chocolate Primer

Before we start talking about chocolate I should make clear that I draw a distinction between the sort of chocolate you find in candy shops and the kind you find in bakeries or pastry shops. The former is a confection meant to be consumed on its own. The latter is a component meant to be consumed in concert with other components: flour, butter, eggs, sugar, caramel, vanilla…you get the idea. So don’t blame me (as many do) for taking a utilitarian approach to the stuff. For I look at chocolate no differently than I do any other ingredient in baking, which means that just like everything else in my kitchen chocolate is subject to Joe’s Inverse Law of Ingredient Dynamics which goes like this: as the number of ingredients in a given recipe goes down, the quality of those ingredients must go up. That means if, say, you’re making a flourless chocolate cake — where chocolate is clearly the star — you should use very good chocolate. Conversely it means that if you’re using it as a drizzle for your caramel macadamia nut tart, a chocolate of middling quality is fine. In fact it’s probably more than enough, as the delicate flavors and aromas of a rare and expensive chocolate will get lost in an ensemble.

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Agar (Agar)

Agar is like carrageenan in that it’s extracted from seaweed. Only where carrageenan was used mostly in Ireland and Scotland until about 1930, agar was the go-to gelling agent in southeast Asia. Indeed “agar”, or actually “agar agar” is the Malaysian word for “jelly”. Makes sense to me! Since it’s “discovery” by Western scientists in 1882 it has been the preferred medium for growing bacteria in petri dishes. There’s a little bit of trivia you can throw out at the dinner table this evening!

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Rennet

What would a tour of thickeners be without a quick look at humanity’s first functional food ingredient/hydrocolloid? Rennet is of course the stuff responsible for thickening milk into the gels we call curds, the basis of cheese. A protein-digesting enzyme is what it is, found in the stomach of calves less than 30 days old. Why less than 30 days? Because that’s the point at which the biology of the calf changes and the critical enzyme, chymosin, fades from the animal’s system and is replaced by others. Today chymosin can be made artificially, by genetically engineering vegetables to produce it, and indeed most cheese in the U.S. is made with vegetable rennet these days. Most European cheese is still made with the traditional calf-derived enzyme. Some people don’t like that, but then some people don’t like GMO products either, which is why cheese is problematic for food ethicists of a certain stripe.

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Carrageenan

Is it just me or does that sound like the name of a town in Ireland? Oh right, it actually is the name of a town in Ireland, a little spot on the northeastern coast where this red seaweed-derived thickener was originally harvested and put to use. It’s been used to thicken puddings and custards in that region since at least 1810. Oh, and in Scotland as well. Locals would boil the local weed to extract the long-chain sugars, add borax to the hot solution to make them clump, then strain the whole mess out and dry it to a powder. The process was steadily improved to the point that in 1930 carrageenan became a mass-market product. It’s been a staple thickener for food makers (and some home cooks) ever since.

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Guar Gum

Guar gum is a seed gum (a so-called “galactomannan”) found in the endosperm of the guar seed, also known as the “cluster bean” which grows in India and Pakistan. Though it’s a very different thing than xanthan gum, which is produced by fermentation, guar gum is used in much the same way and has many of the same benefits. Like xanthan gum it’s about six times as potent as cornstarch for the same job and it doesn’t need heat to activate. You sprinkle it over whatever it is you’re trying to thicken, hot or cold (don’t pour, as guar gum can clump) and apply the whisk. Thickening happens more or less instantly and the texture is smooth and shiny, though not terribly clear. For that reason guar gum is generally recommended for dairy-based gels. Combined with xanthan gum it makes gels of unusual elasticity.

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Instant Flour

Instant flour is the go-to of meat gravy makers everywhere, at least here in the States. Instant flour is pre-gelatinized, which means it’s been steamed to initiate the breakup of the starch granules into individual starch molecules. The process isn’t completed because at least some of the bigger granules are needed for starch thickening to work. The great thing about instant flour is that you can just pour it into a hot liquid without making a slurry first. Clumps don’t form, the thickening happens virtually, well…instantly, and delivers a result much like a traditional roux but without the added fat. Handy stuff if you have a hot sauce that needs to be thickened just before serving. Of course like other starch thickeners you don’t want to boil it too long, knowadimean?

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