Recipe For Making White Chocolate

by Angela Brown
(Rogers, AR US)

I need to find a recipe for making white chocolate from scratch. One without soy powder but real milk solids. Can you help?

---

Hi Angela,

That's a tough one. I've never actually made my own white chocolate from scratch. I tend to just buy the chocolate and melt it, chop it, or grate it, for whatever candy or recipe I'm making.


It's a little time consuming to make chocolate from scratch, but it can certainly be done if you're determined.


I had a look around and located an interesting discussion on the subject over at the Cooks Illustrated Bulletin Board. Here's the process as described by one of the member posts...

Try using 52% sugar, 30% cocoa butter, 18% whole dried milk (yes, pros use it) and whey powder with 1% vegetable ( soy) Lethicin and vanilla.

Composition:
Cocoa Butter 30.0%
Whole Milk Powder 15.0%
Whey Powder 3.0%
Sugar 52.0%
Add 0.3 to 0.5% Lecithin E322 and 0.01% natural vanilla.

I grind my own sugar finely instead of using confectioner's sugar which has cornstarch added. The Santha dry/wet grinder does it perfectly. Use immediately to avoid clumping.

Since you're unsure of what the final product should feel or taste like, here are a couple of important pointers in the conching/tempering processes:

Refining process, using heavy rollers - help smooth and improve texture; followed by the penultimate process using the conch to continually knead this refined and blended chocolate mass to even more smoothness, while the fractional heat produced by this process keeps the chocolate liquid.

The length of time given to the conching process determines the final smoothness and quality of chocolate. The name 'conching' comes from the shell-like shape of the rollers used. The longer chocolate and any ingredients added like milk, vanilla, extra cocoa butter is conched, the more luxurious it will feel on your tongue. After the process is completed store this at about 46°C/115°F, ready for finally to temper it.



Understanding the Tempering Process: Because cocoa butter exhibits an unstable (polymorphous) crystal structure, in order for chocolate to cool into a hard candy and not a mushy goo, it must be tempered.

This is a process where the chocolate is slowly heated, then slowly cooled, allowing the cocoa butter molecules to solidify in an orderly fashion. The chocolate must be first heated, cooled and heated again in a very precise manner to encourage the stable crystal formation needed to produce the desirable properties for good tasty chocolate.

Melt the chocolate blend at about 46°C/115°F. It's cooled to about 29°C/84°F , then warmed up again to about 31°C/88°F. It can only then be held 'in temper' at this temperature for use as required. Check your temperatures.

Use accordingly as for coverture, coating, biscuits or other coated products. Or poured into moulds and cooled as solid chocolate bars. But every time it is allowed to harden and is re-melted it will have to be re-tempered again.

Well-tempered chocolate has a good shiny gloss, a snappy or brittle bite and a smooth tender melt on the tongue, leaves a long lasting flavour and a generally wonderful taste.

I don't know if that will be of any help to you. It's not exactly a complete recipe for making white chocolate, but at least you'll have a better idea of what is involved.


If anyone else has some input to share with Angela, please chime in using the comments link below.


Let us know if you tackle the project and reach success, Angela. You can be the one to add the final recipe for white chocolate candy making when you figure it out. ;-)

~Angie