xylitol in chocolate?

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Permalink Reply by Robert Shea on May 30, 2009 at 3:12am

Xylitol is rather cooling, so it tends to make chocolate waxy (especially since chocolate is cooling by itself) you could try and mitigate this effect in solid chocolate by taking advantage of eutectics.

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Permalink Reply by Brad Churchill on May 30, 2009 at 3:33am

There's a great thread on alternative sweeteners for chocolate at the following website:

http://chocolatetalk.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=diet&action=...

It gets pretty scientific in some places, but is a culmination of deep knowledge from industry professionals.

Best Regards.
Brad.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Heim on June 1, 2009 at 10:28am

Xylitol will work but has a cooling effect when it dissolves in the mouth, due to negative heat of solution. There are other sugar replacers that do not have as strong a cooling, such as maltitol. I would not depend on fat eutectics as the cooling is only while eating, not storage, and adding another fat to soften, it will stay softened in storage, handling, etc, and you need to watch for bloom.

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Permalink Reply by Robert Shea on June 4, 2009 at 6:21pm

Bloom is not an issue, mixing dissimilar fats is used to create compound chocolate, that doesn't require tempering.

Eutectics do not necessarily involve making the chocolate soft, but lowering it's melting point, thus if done correctly, it too would only be apparent when it dissolves in the mouth. (As I think it is safe to assume that storage is not taking place within a few degrees of the melting point.)

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Permalink Reply by Nat on June 7, 2009 at 3:05am

I've made some chocolate with xylitol as the sweetener and found it to be quite strange and no one I gave it to liked it much, though I never gave it to any diabetics or others who can't eat sugar-sweetened chocolate. Normally everyone devours my chocolate, but the xylitol one they were not gonzo over.

It has the weird cooling effect others have mentioned, and the supposed sweetness factor (something like 1.5x sweeter than sugar) the manufacturers claimed didn't seem to play out in the over-sweetness of the final bar.

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