I like chocolate, especially milk chocolate, but I don’t like the overly sweet taste of it. I’ve been looking for less sweet varieties, but all I was able to find is sugar-reduced (or sugar-free) dark chocolates. Some claim to be sugar-free milk chocolates, but what it usually means is that they use some other sweetener, staying at least as sweet, essentially defeating the purpose of being sugar-free.
Is sugar required to manufacture milk chocolate in some way? Or is just the market that limited that nobody is producing it?
In: Chemistry
Chocolate is what is called an “emulsion”: a smooth mixture of things that normally don’t mix. So similar to butter (milk fat and water) or mayo (oil and water), but instead its main ingredients are cocoa solids, cocoa fat and sugar. To get the texture and taste of chocolate just right, you really have to dial in the proportions of these ingredients.
So if you want to remove the sugar, you’re going to have to replace it with something else. The usual way is to increase the content of cocoa solids to replace sugar, which will result in a harder and darker chocolate. Now I don’t think there’s anything stopping you from making milk chocolate with something like erythrit instead of sugar, but that might be a too niche market for anyone to bother with.
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