How can I make my chocolate solid?

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Permalink Reply by George Trejo on July 5, 2012 at 3:01am

You're not making chocolate, your making some sort of frosting at best, but it sounds more like chocolate flavored butter.

Chocolate contains CACAO butter, not milk butter

You're using butter which is soft and has a lower melting point, cacao butter is solid, so when it's room temperature it is naturally hard.  You'll never get butter to turn hard.

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Permalink Reply by Brad Churchill on July 6, 2012 at 12:49am

what you have is a buttercream icing that will work nicely on a cake.  It isn't even close to chocolate.

Chocolate is a suspension of tiny particles of cocoa solids, sugar, and vanilla in cocoa butter, not real butter.  The emulsifiers listed on bar wrappers are actually NOT emulsifying anything.  They are actually coating the solid particles and allowing them to slide easier through the fat.  It's a manufacturer's way of making the chocolate less expensive to produce, as it makes it more fluid without adding cocoa butter.  Having said that, forget about the so-called emusifiers as they won't help you anyway.

 

Hope that helps explain things a bit better.

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Permalink Reply by Tinashe Chakawa on July 10, 2012 at 2:11am

Thank you for the responses. That indeed does clear things up! I used butter because I could not get cocoa butter.  I live in Zimbabwe, and I have done a little researching over the past few days and have found out that we actually do not make/ have cocoa butter in Zimbabwe at all.Are there any less complex fats I can substitute for cocoa butter?

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Permalink Reply by Brad Churchill on July 10, 2012 at 2:35am

No.  Technically cocoa butter is the one ingredient that must exist in ALL chocolate - whether it's milk, dark, or white.  Cocoa butter is the medium that suspends all of the little particles of solids, and has properties that other fats don't have.

 

Sorry.  Without cocoa butter you don't have chocolate.

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Permalink Reply by Tinashe Chakawa on July 10, 2012 at 2:53am

I see. thanks for the help.

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Permalink Reply by Clay Gordon on July 10, 2012 at 2:03pm

You can use other fats - they are called CBEs (cocoa butter equivalents) or CBRs (cocoa butter replacements) and cocoa powder to make what's called "compound" "chocolate" (or coating). Legally in most countries (US, Europe, etc.) you can't call it chocolate because you're not using cocoa butter, you're using other fats.

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Permalink Reply by Laura Marion on July 14, 2012 at 5:46am

you don't have chocolate but you could make a compound with a cocoa butter replacement but it is not named chocolate it would be a "chocolate compound" you would not need to temper it and in my opinion the taste would not be a match to chocolate the texter would be different to   

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