Sour Chocolate

Of all the foods I have to give up on the Atkins diet, the only two that I really miss are ice cream and chocolate. However since we are in the 21st century, I think I can satisfy this craving without resorting to eating a lot of carbs.

Atkins recommends sucralose, marketed as Splenda, as an ideal artificial sweetener. It also turns out that unsweetened (baking) chocolate is not that high in “net” carbohydrates (go here and click for a report, chocolate has quite a bit of fiber). So I thought: why not mix Splenda with some decent unsweetened chocolate?

Yes, I know that several folks have already gone to the trouble of doing this and selling the result. I thought doing a little kitchen experimenting might be fun.

So I got out the saucepan, the chocolate and the Splenda. Put the pan on ridiculously low heat so I could melt the chocolate without burning it. Melted the chocolate and mixed in the Splenda.

I found out that you need quite a bit more Splenda than I expected: about 2 packs per ounce of chocolate and I like (liked?) my chocolate bittersweet. I used to frequently buy 50% - 70% cocoa bars, although I guess that 50% sugar would still look like a lot.

It came out really sour. Not so sour that it wasn’t delicious (its chocolate after all), but disturbingly sour. I thought it might be my saucepan (which I think is aluminum), so I tried by non stick skillet. A little better, but still sour. Also the skillet is worse for making small quantities. If I made a larger amount, I would go over my carbohydrate allotment very quickly. Even sour chocolate is hard to just leave around the house.

Sucralose

So I went looking around the web. I couldn’t seem to find a recipe for specifically adding sucralose to chocolate. I did find some interesting reading on the properties of sucralose (PDF, html is here) which mentions that it is quite stable with heat, so I doubt the sucralose is breaking down. This page mentions sourness as one of the attributes of sucralose, although pure Splenda is far from sour.

Looking at the ingredients of many sugar free chocolate bars I notice that milk and milk fat are used. I resisted this since I want dark chocolate not milk chocolate, but it might counteract the sourness. I am full from sour chocolate tonight, but I may add cream to my melting chocolate later.

I may also try making ice cream soon. My friend H_____ has a really nice ice cream maker, but it is unfortunately located in New Haven. It turns out that you can get a decent ice cream maker for fairly cheap, although it has the bowls you have to pre-freeze, not the built in refrigeration. Again, I may try it later.