Are Your Hand Dipped Chocolates Healthier?

The question I am asked more often than any other about our hand dipped chocolates  is, “Are hand dipped chocolates healthier than commercial chocolate candy?”

Hello! Of course they are, that’s a silly question, even if no one actually ever asked it.

Let’s look at the facts. First: The more ingredients you add to any food, the odds that something nefarious sneaks in increases.

Homemade hand dipped chocolates have only five basic pure ingredients:

1. Cream

2. Butter

3. Sugar

4. Corn Syrup

5. Love

From here the various types of hand dipped chocolates may include nuts, vanilla or other flavor extracts, all innocent, I assure you. Except for the rum flavor. I’m not convinced rum is all so innocent. Too many people dive into a box of chocolates and hog up the rum flavored first, and then ask ‘Why’s the rum gone?’

As for the chocolate, (and we will dive into the differences between the various chocolate brands we use in future articles) we favor milk chocolate as our mainstay, in which there are six ingredients.

1. Sugar – as mentioned in an earlier article about the origins of chocolate, it’s the Europeans who added sugar to the pure chocolate of the original Mesoamericans, so it’s their fault we’re addicted.

2. Cocoa butter

3. Milk

4. Unsweetened chocolate

5. Soya lecithin

6. Pure vanilla

A word about the soya lecithin since that’s a fancy sounding ingredient. Soya lecithin is listed last as an ingredient because so little of it is used. Soya lecithin is an *emulsifier added to chocolate to lower its viscosity. This gives a more consistency to the chocolate, which becomes easier to temper and to mold. (A future article will focus on tempering chocolate. You may notice we talk about the future a lot. That’s because there’s no time like the present to put things off till the future.)

 So that’s about it for the ingredients in our hand dipped chocolates.

Compare that simplicity to commercial chocolates. According to packaging, an Almond Joy, which is similar to our popular coconut chocolate, features an ingredient list that reads like a scientific journal.

“Corn Syrup, Sugar, Coconut, Vegetable Oil (Palm Oil, Shea Oil, Sunflower Oil, Palm Kernel Oil, and/or Safflower Oil), Almonds, Chocolate, Skim Milk, Contains 2% or Less of Lactose (Milk), Cocoa, Whey (Milk), Salt, Lecithin (Soy), Milk Fat, PGPR, Cocoa Butter, Hydrolyzed Milk Protein, Sodium Metabisulfite (to Maintain Freshness), Vanillin (Artificial Flavor).

Notice how the cocoa butter, which is a real ingredient is toward the end of the list, that’s because not much is in it. In our hand dipped chocolates the cocoa butter is high on the list. Just sayin’

Now, in Russell Stover’s turtles, which are supposed to compare to our home made turtles which consist of pecans smothered in caramel and dipped in chocolate, we find another rocket scientist collection of ingredients:

‘CHOCOLATE CANDY {MALTITOL, CHOCOLATE, COCOA BUTTER, SODIUM CASEINATE (MILK), MILK FAT, SOY LECITHIN (AN EMULSIFIER), SUCRALOSE, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, SALT), MALTITOL SYRUP, PECANS, POLYDEXTROSE, PALM KERNEL OIL, SODIUM CASEINATE (MILK), MALTITOL, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, SOY LECITHIN (AN EMULSIFIER), FD&C COLORS (YELLOW #5 & #6, RED #40, BLUE #1) AND SODIUM BENZOATE (PRESERVATIVE).’

Do I need to go on? In an earlier post one of our focus group members claimed a reason our hand dipped chocolates are so special is because they are fresh. That it true, we never add mafia characters like Sodium Metabisulfite and Sodium Benzoate to maintain freshness. We don’t have to. Hand dipped chocolates never last long enough to go stale.

So if you ask if our hand dipped chocolates are healthier? Reports from many scientific journals claim that happy people who are loved, are healthier people, so we can comfortably say yes. After all, what’s a happy loved smile worth? *And I thank “The Chocolate Journalist”  in an article I found very informative for helping me appreciate how the emulsifiers work in chocolate. https://www.thechocolatejournalist.com/blog/soy-lecithin-chocolate