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Chapter 19 – Making Gourmet Homemade Chocolate



Most of the time when people think about making homemade chocolate they think about someone working in the kitchen and making some chocolate that is tasty, but not really the kind of high end chocolate that you find in a gourmet store somewhere.  But you can make gourmet chocolate at home, and it doesn’t have to cost a fortune to make.

If you have a very sophisticated palette and you really enjoy gourmet chocolate but don’t like paying $7 or more for a gourmet chocolate bar you can easily make your own gourmet chocolate at home.

The ingredients make the chocolate. Whenever you are baking or cooking the quality of the ingredients that you use really make a difference.  If you bake cookies with butter instead of margarine you can taste the difference.  If you use real vanilla extract instead of imitation vanilla you will taste the different. The same principle applies when you’re making gourmet chocolate at home.  Using only high quality ingredients is a must if you want to make the kind of chocolate that your friends and family will swear you bought from a gourmet shop.

If you want to make gourmet chocolate but you don’t want to go to the extreme of ordering cacao beans, roasting them, grinding them, and going through the entire traditional candy making process you can buy melt and pour style chocolate bases that are made from higher end ingredients that most of the melt and pour style chocolate but you will need to get those from a specialty candy store not the local craft and hobby store.

Online there are several retailers that specialize in selling high end gourmet chocolate making materials to homemade chocolate makers. An online search should turn up a few shops that you can order high quality melt and pour style chocolate from.  Another ingredient that is really important when you’re making gourmet chocolate is the add-ins that you’re putting in your chocolate. 

The trick to saving money on your add-ins is to hit up your local farmer’s market or grocery co-op to get the best organic ingredients at decent prices.  You can buy organic nuts, make your own peanut butter blends, get special organic and luxury syrups and sugars and oils and fresh herbs like lavender and rosehips to add into your gourmet chocolate. 

When you’re making gourmet chocolate you can also add in different kinds of high end alcohol to some of your chocolate to give it a great exotic taste.  For example you could pair a high quality dark chocolate base with some raspberry flavored vodka and a few dried raspberries to make a wonderfully dark and sweet homemade chocolate.  Or you could add some high end cognac to a gourmet chocolate dipping sauce that you would use to dip fruit into. 

Making gourmet chocolate might take more practice than making regular homemade chocolate because the flavors in gourmet chocolate need to be very subtle but if you love gourmet chocolate you can learn to make it at home and have a lot of fun making your own gourmet chocolate flavors.
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