Baking & Snack - June 2005 - 79

Mr. Lyon said.
"More typically, 'compound' refers
to a product made with a vegetable oil.
These can range from coconut to palm
to soy and others," Mr. Johnson said.
So why use coatings? It's all about
flexibility. With coatings, products can be
made with high melting points to withstand the summer distribution channels.
Compound coatings don't need to be
tempered, and they are also typically less
expensive than chocolate, he said.
Although coating can simulate being
chocolate, it's important to remember
that it is not chocolate. "The Food and
Drug Administration has very stringent
standards: You can use coatings, but you
can't call it chocolate," Mr. Lyon said.
Coating can taste waxy because it
doesn't melt as quickly as chocolate,
which has the same melting point as
body temperature. Coating is also subject to things like bloom, he said.

ADDING IT TO THE MIX
When adding chocolate to baked foods,
there are several factors to consider. If it
is being added to the formula to color or
flavor the entire mass, as in chocolate
brownies, the chocolate is most easily
handled in a small form that is easy to

ᮡ The cacao pod reveals its contents
of soft beans surrounded by white mucilage. The coatings and beans must
ferment and dry before the beans can
be roasted.
ADM

ᮣ Compound coatings are often used in
snack icings to provide chocolatey flavor
and longer shelf-life.

84 / BAKING & SNACK / June 2005

scoop and melt, Mr. Johnson said. This
form is most often referred to as buttons.
"This makes them more manageable for
the baker and speeds up the process because they melt fairly quickly," he said.
Another way to add chocolate to
baked foods is as an inclusion, for example, as a chip in a chocolate chip cookie.
"In that case, the form can be the traditional chocolate chip, which varies in
size from very, very small to very large
and indulgent, and from chunks to rods
to lots of other shapes," he said.
To add chips to a warm cake batter,
several tricks will help the chips remain
in solid form and disperse throughout
the batter, rather than dropping to the
bottom. According to Mr. Urbanski,
freezing the chips before incorporating
them into the batter helps stabilize them.
Mr. Lyon said that dusting the chips
with flour also helps the chip float better within the batter. "The flour acts like

a grabber in the batter so that they don't
sink to the bottom," he said.
According to Phillippe Bouvier,
marketing director for Barry-Callebaut, Montreal, QB, all types of chocolate don't work well for all types of
bakery applications.
If a bakery wants to enrobe donuts,
he said that a very shiny chocolate that
will not separate is the best choice. "A
good compound coating will work well
for this because cocoa butter alone has
a fusion point that is too low to support
the heat of the donut," he said.
For bottoming cookies, Mr. Bouvier
recommended a high-end couverture
chocolate. To be considered couverture, the chocolate must contain at
least 32% cocoa butter. This type of
chocolate will typically set up desirably on the cookie.
For chocolate chips to be added to
cookies and cakes, use pure chocolate,
he recommended. "Do this because it is
not cheap, and it is chocolatey," he said.
To successfully add pure chocolate chips
to cookie batter, it is important to understand dextrose. The more dextrose in
the chip, the less it changes form when
heated. "With less dextrose, the center of
the chip will remain hard, but the outside will melt around it," he said.
When making chocolate brownies,
use pure chocolate. Mr. Bouvier recommended couveture here, too. "In the
brownie, the amount of chocolate will
be quite high in the recipe, and you will
need to fine tune it in terms of taste profile," he said. Follow this rule for cake
batter as well.
And when icing donuts, he suggested using compound coatings for
glazing. Pure chocolate can be used to
glaze, but the blooming effect can happen quickly. "The best icing is a mixture
of compound coating with couveture
chocolate," he said. But for extended
shelf-life, he suggested to exclusively
use compound coating; this way there
is no condensation when the dessert/
donut is thawed. Also, with compound
coatings, the best shine is achieved.
With an ingredient like chocolate,
handling and storing is just as important as quality and quantity. So it's no
surprise that proper selection and use
of chocolate products can mean the
difference between a great final product
and an average one.
Ⅲ

Baking & Snack - June 2005

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Baking & Snack - June 2005