Homemade usually tastes best: Many people are familiar with this statement. But you can’t easily prepare everything yourself at home, such as chocolate – or can you? We will tell you how you can make chocolate yourself and not only customize it according to your individual taste, but also make it healthier.
We often buy chocolate that only contains traces of cocoa, but a lot of sugar. Milk chocolate, in particular, isn’t the best choice for a snack: It’s usually made up of 35 to 50 percent cocoa, with the rest being mostly sugar and milk — and adding calories. Dark chocolate, i.e. dark and bitter chocolate, on the other hand, consists of around 70 to 99 percent cocoa and is therefore healthier: it contains less sugar, although more cocoa fat. But due to the high cocoa content, it contains plenty of healthy secondary plant substances, the so-called flavonoids. Dark chocolate thus has a beneficial effect on the blood vessels and can reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases such as strokes. This is proven by a study by the German Institute for Nutrition Research (DIfE).
If you want to make a healthier but tasty alternative to conventional chocolate from the shelves, you should ideally use a lot of cocoa and then refine this dark chocolate with ingredients such as nuts, dried berries or spices and ideally avoid industrial sugar.
To make chocolate at home, you need three ingredients for the basic recipe: cocoa powder and cocoa butter and sweeteners. For the latter, (whole cane or coconut blossom) sugar, agave syrup or something else is suitable. Cocoa (high in cocoa) and cocoa butter should be mixed in equal parts. If you take about 100 grams of cocoa powder, you should mix it with 100 grams of cocoa butter and sweetener according to taste. As a rule, two tablespoons of sugar or syrup are well suited, and less if less is required. You can change the basic recipe to taste and refine it with other ingredients. There are ideas in various recipe books.
With the basic and individual extra ingredients, it is then time to make the chocolate yourself:
If you want to make it a little easier for yourself, you can also use ready-made sets that contain everything you need to make chocolate yourself. You can usually use it to make different types of chocolate yourself (white, milk or dark chocolate) and there are already ingredients to refine and decorate them as well as instructions.
In other sets, for example, there are also boxes of chocolates that you can write on to give away the homemade chocolate. Because if you want to make chocolate yourself, you can also share it with others. A great, individual gift idea.
Tip: In order to have some of the chocolate for as long as possible, it should be kept at room temperature between 16 and 18 degrees. In a tin can, it will keep for several weeks without turning white or dull.
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