Level: Novice
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I have been going over your Excel spreadsheet formulator, and the formulator depends on using cocoa liqueur, not nibs. Also, I would also like to use Allulose instead of granulated sugar. Is there a way to "tweak" the formulator to:
1. Allow for the use of nibs instead of cocoa liqueur? Then this might then throw off the percentage of cocoa butter you need?
2. Since allulose is only about 60% as sweet as granulated cane sugar, would it be necessary to tweak that part of the formula by 40%? i.e.: if it calls for 100 grams of regular sugar, you would substitute 140 grams of allulose, but then this would throw off the other percentages?
Before I get into this question I want to pass along some good news. Over the past year or so that Chocolate Alchemy has been offering Allulose, the question of whether or not it is GMO or not has come up repeatedly. So far all I’ve been able to say is that is that I didn’t have information about the corn used to make it. As of last week I found out that it is now certified non-GMO. For those that don’t care for the pseudo double negative, that mean no GMO materials are used in making the Allulose we offer.
And now, onto the show.
Cocoa liquor is just ground up cocoa nibs so they are the same thing in the context of this whole conversation. The only time they would not be the same is if you are weighing out the nibs and then putting them through the Champion juicer as you will lose about 6oz since some will stay inside the Champion. I recommend now adding warmed nibs directly to you Melanger now.
So whenever you see cocoa liquor, cocoa mass, unsweetened chocolate or cocoa nibs, from a calculation standpoint they are all the same.
Allulose is about 70% as sweet as sucrose, not 60%, but being that as it may, yes, you will need to tweak your formulations a little bit. It isn’t quite like you lay out though, but it is close.
If your recipe called for 100 grams of sugar, you would divide 100 by 70% and get 100/0.7 = 142.9 g to get approximately the same level of sweetness. So anywhere in the range of 140-145 g is where I would start. That 70% is just a subjective range and you may need/want more or less.
In many cases the substitution is straight forward. In most 65% bars made with sucrose, you have no issue with viscosity since half of 65% is 32.5% and that is enough cocoa butter (over the 30% recommended minimum) to allow good flow. The recipe with sucrose would look like this:
65% sucrose Chocolate
- 650 g Cocoa nibs
- 350 g Sucrose.
The Allulose recipe, following the conversion above (350/0.65 = 500) would yield this recipe:
“65%” Allulose Chocolate
- 650 g Cocoa nibs
- 500 g Allulose
Notice I have 65% in quotes. That is because it is going to taste like a 65% bar from a sweetness standpoint but is really lower. It is really 56.5% (650 / (650 + 500) = 0.565). I really only bring this up because of labeling should you be doing this commercially. There are going to be no set rules for this that are going to work well. Calling it 65% isn’t true, but calling it 56% is going to make people think it is sweeter than it is. And I don’t have an answer for you about how you should approach it. I think it is going to come down to customer education. But that really was not your question, so I will leave it there, with this one other label consideration. You also can’t call it sugar free (Allulose is an epimer of Fructose and still a sugar) and technically you have to list it as a sugar on the nutritional label even though it is a non-digestible sugar. Frankly, the FDA is struggling with this too and to my knowledge doesn’t have a solid answer except to say it is ‘made with a low calorie sweetener’.
Ok, moving on.
The larger issue with the above recipe is that since your cocoa content is 56.5%, your fat content is only about 28% which is has a high chance of making your chocolate too thick. To be safe, I would add 8% cocoa butter. You can use the Formulator to get it exact but I would personally shotgun it by just reducing the cocoa nibs by 8% and adding 8% cocoa butter like this.
650 x 0.92 = 598 g
And I would personally round this to 600 g to make the math easy. Since I am removing 50 g nibs, 50 g of cocoa butter is added and the recipe looks like this:
Fat adjusted “65%” Allulose chocolate
- 600 g cocoa nibs
- 50 g cocoa butter
- 500 g Allulose
You can see pretty quick ( [600/2 + 50] / 1150 ) that the fat content is 30.4% and you are good probably to go. 10% might be needed.
So, yes, substituting Allulose may through off your other percentages but if you know what is going on (your fat is dropping) you can fix it.
The last thing I will say about Allulose chocolate is that 65% sucrose chocolate and “65%” Allulose chocolate are probably not going to taste the same. Each sugar has a different flavor contribution to the chocolate. That is absolutely NOT to say one is better or worse than the other ( I think sugar alcohol chocolates made with erythritol and xylitol for instance always taste worse) but just different. Just keep that in mind. The sweetness should match but the flavor profile has a good chance of altering.