Hello !

I make dark milk chocolate ( 60%) and I would like to try to make milk chocolate... 25% or 30% of nibs. Do you have some advices for the quantity of cocoa butter I have to add ?

Thank you in advance !

updated by @maria6: 04/14/15 17:10:09

I have had good success with formulations shared by others, including Chocolate Alchemy and some notes by Brad Churchill.

From my notes Cocoa Butter is generally 25% with the Cocoa Liquor ranging from 18% to 20% although taste is an important factor.

Here is the table with reference percentages adding to just above 100% but you get the idea:

Cocoa Liqueur Sugar Cocoa butter Lecithin Milk Powder Vanilla 20.0 35.0 25.0 0.20 20.00 0.20

For the Milk Powder, I've used 72% of non-fat-milk and 28% of ghee as it seems that the fat content in the full milk powder goes stale quickly.

Some threads which discuss the topic:

On powdered milk:

http://chocolatetalk.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=formulations&action=display&thread=410

On swiss milk chocolate:

http://chocolatetalk.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=formulations&action=display&thread=311

Hope it helps!

Hi Felipe !

thank you so much for your help ! The information is very useful, really... just one question about whole milk. when you say that the full milk goes stale quickly, do you mean that it can happen some weeks after, or the chocolat can be ok for some months but less than an year ?

Now, I make some dark milck chocolat, with only 10% full milk inside, and the best before is 1 year.

I hope that my question is clear, sorry for my english.

Mara,

Others should be able to correct me but the issue with the fat in supermarket dried milk is more of a 'stale' flavor than shorter shelf life.

It seems that commercial manufacturers have access to better dried milk than what we do in the regular food stores.Roller dried milk is hard to come by and spray dried milk is what most people use. Some sources like Beckett mention the benefits of using milk crumb, but that is also a sophisticated and complex process because it starts with wet milk.

If you look at commercial chocolate ingredients you will see that they sometimes mix the nonfat milk with whole milk. I guess an added advantage of using the ghee is that you can control the amount of fat very precisely.

I didn't get back to testing other formulations with the regular whole milk but if you have more than one machine you could try it and taste them side by side.

Felipe