My discovery requires an explanation, or clarification, or admission of my ignorance; whatever.

Was the previous article wrong, naïve, or just inaccurate?

So, delving into the corn syrup ingredient controversy, I found myself vindicated. Corn syrup is not an additional ingredient at all, it’s just another form of sugar. Ha!

Corn syrup is simply a liquid sweetener. It’s a sugar made from cornstarch. Corn syrup comprises pure glucose, a simple sugar. Table sugar, the white crystal sugar I dump in my Cheerios and you into your coffee in the morning, consists of sucrose, which comprises glucose and fructose.

Because of its properties as a liquid sweetener, we use corn syrup in candies to provide shine and to prevent the crystallization of the sugars. Corn syrup also provides moisture to caramel, helping maintain its softness.

Let me defend the good name of the corn syrup we use while making caramel we use with hand dipped chocolates. Lots of nutty health folks these days (and I’m not talking about nuts in caramel, I’m talking about nuts in the media) like to confuse the public when they criticize high fructose corn syrup. Corn syrup is not the same thing as high-fructose corn syrup. High-fructose corn syrup, which you can’t buy in the supermarket or even in the mini-mart, is completely different. High-fructose corn syrup is a commercial sweetener that is made by taking ordinary corn syrup and converting some of the glucose into fructose by adding enzymes. That conversion makes it almost twice as sweet as table sugar. That extra sweetness, along with the fact that it is cheap to produce, makes high-fructose corn syrup ideal for commercially produced foods like soda, candy, etc. So, why are the nutty folks against high-fructose corn syrup? I guess because it will make you fatter, faster.

There are two varieties of corn syrup, light and dark. Light of course is colorless and has a pure, sweet flavor. The dark corn syrup includes molasses which gives it a darker color and more of the caramel-like flavor. You can interchange them, but the flavors are a bit different, as is the appearance.

Culinary experts with a bit more experience than me, claim corn syrup enhances not just my caramel, but its use pays off with homemade ice cream, sugary syrups and even cakes. It does this because corn syrup is such an excellent smoothing agent. It prevents hard crystals from forming in the sugar, which has the tendency to recrystallize making your finished product grainy or gritty, and yes, that is redundant.

Before I get all scientific here, let me state for the record – sugar is sugar, and I’m a big fan. In fact, because of sugar, I am big. So, let’s get that out of the way. But while we talk about such sweet things, let’s talk sugar in general. There’s more to sugar than just the white stuff on the table and corn syrup in the cupboard. I mentioned glucose and fructose, but what about all the other ‘ose’ ending foods, like lactose, dextrose, and sucrose?

In an effort to confuse you and make smart people who think they know chemistry go crazy; let me explain what all these ‘ose’ sugars are. They’re disaccharides. I think that means ‘double sugars.’ In other words, they’re just different combinations of molecules that come from different plant and animal sources and they differ in the way the plant or animal creates and utilizes them and the way we extract and use them. They are the energy system for life. Wow, was that brilliantly said?” And then of course, if a disaccharide is a double sugar, then a monosaccharide is just a plain old lonely sugar. And yes, they are carbohydrates. (Now you can relax because I used a word you recognize)

Let’s briefly look at each of the common sugars.

SUCROSE

Sucrose, is table sugar, and it is the most common disaccharide that us non-dieting humans eat. It comprises the monosaccharides, glucose and fructose. When we digest disaccharides like sucrose, they break down into their simple sugars we use for energy.

MALTOSE

Maltose, also known as malt sugar, is formed from two glucose molecules. Malt is formed when grains soften and grow in water, and it is a component of beer, starchy foods like cereal, pasta, and potatoes, and many sweetened processed foods.

LACTOSE

Lactose, or milk sugar, is made up of galactose and glucose. The milk of mammals is high in lactose and provides nutrients for infants. I once read that most mammals can only digest lactose as infants, and when humans are able to digest dairy products in adulthood, it’s because they have a mutation that allows them to do so. I also read that this mutation became prevalent in our populations around 10,000 years ago. I need to get a t-shirt that says I’m a proud mutant.

TREHALOSE

Trehalose is also made up of two glucose molecules like maltose, but the molecules link differently. We find trehalose in certain plants like fungi, and in animals like shrimp and insects. They say the blood sugar of many insects, such as bees, grasshoppers, and butterflies, is made up of trehalose. Because of it breaks down efficiently, it provides rapid energy for flight.

LACTULOSE

Lactulose is formed from fructose and galactose. It mostly has medical uses. Some countries use it in food, but not in the United States, where it’s viewed as a pharmaceutical that might potentially harm diabetics.

CELLOBIOSE

Like maltose and trehalose, cellobiose is also made up of two glucose molecules, but they are linked even more differently. Since I don’t wish to learn more science that doesn’t result in the taste of my caramel. This is all the ‘ose’s we’ll discuss here.

From all of this ‘ose’ rambling, what we need to know is, we often use corn syrup in making our caramel because it’s a great sweetener and an outstanding agent in helping the other sugars behave themselves. Corn Syrup is not mandatory. We use a variety of recipes for caramel, and they don’t all call for corn syrup. But now you know why with some, we do. In a future article, we’ll cook two versions side by side and compare the final products.

The post Corn Syrup, The Sweetener For All Ages first appeared on handdippedchocolates.com.

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

The post Are Your Hand Dipped Chocolates Healthier? first appeared on handdippedchocolates.com.

Back sometime in the early 1960’s, which is after the Spanish conquered the new world and took the cacao bean back to Europe and ruined it by adding sugar and figuring out how to mold into bars to addict innocent children and lonely women; my mother learned how to turn her kitchen into a devilish addiction factory.

It was Myrtle Rappeley!* She is to blame. Just as the Spanish introduced xocolati to the unsuspecting royal courts in Europe, Myrtle introduced my mother and her best friend Mona Brown to the art of hand dipping chocolates. If I remember the details correctly as they played out some 60 years ago, (I don’t dare ask my siblings if this story is true because those older than me have lost their minds and those younger were too young to pay attention.) our local church congregation was participating in the building of a new chapel and everyone was expected to contribute a certain amount of money to the construction. The group of Relief Society women, as they are called, were asked to generate a portion of the assessment. As my mother was one of the leaders of this local group of women. It was suggested they make homemade hand-dipped chocolates and sell them to fund their portion of the new building’s construction.

When Myrtle suggested they make hand-dipped chocolates my mother responded saying, “I don’t know how to make hand-dipped chocolates.” Myrtle quickly said, “you will.” How prophetic she was.

The chocolates were not only wildly popular but the fund raising effort was wildly successful. The tradition of hand dipping chocolates began.

My mother’s sisters, all magicians in their own kitchens, went all-in as well. This art of hand dipping chocolates spread quickly through my mother’s family. To this day, the tradition lives on.

This past Christmas season, fourth and fifth generation grandchildren participated in the process of making hand-dipped chocolates, including my sons and daughter. I’m not talking about just the eating part of the process, my young grandchildren, nieces and grand nieces are quite proficient at hand dipping.  And of course we’ve all mastered the eating process as well.

Thank you Mom.

*Quote from Myrtle’s obituary – “She was especially famous for her hand-dipped chocolates, buttercream mints, and toffee.”

Obituary of Myrtle (Hess) Rappleye

The post How Did It All Start? first appeared on handdippedchocolates.com.

A dear friend with whom we’d shared a box of hand dipped chocolates asked how many boxes like the one he’d received did we produce and share with friends and family.

When I told him, he did a bit of math and said “that must cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars.” I confirmed that “yes in deed it did.” He paused and said, “and that doesn’t even begin to include all the time and energy.” I confirmed his assessment with a nod.

He then asked the question that led me to the theme of this post. “Why do you do it?”

Each year when we’re up to our elbows in chocolate, butter, cream and nuts, I ask that same question. I’ve long since given up trying to speed it up or cut corners to save on the time and energy part. My wife – the brains and talent behind our hand dipped chocolates tradition, claims “it’s a labor of love.”

Love trumps all the logic levied to streamline the efforts.

Reflecting on the countless complements, rave reviews, thank you’s, etc. this past year, I couldn’t help but ask, “why are hand dipped chocolates so much better received and appreciated than the many commercial chocolates?”

So I did. I went around asking what made our hand dipped chocolates so much better than other chocolates.

I got answers, like “They’re creamier,” “they’re smoother,” “the chocolate blends with the centers better,” “their mellow flavor is not so overpowering,” “their texture is more fine,” “they’re fresher.” Variation of answers like these came to a screeching halt when my 11 year old grandson, just as confident as any fine chocolate connoisseur could be, simply said, “It’s the love.”

That says it all. You can buy, and spend, and mix, and dip, but the magic, the secret, the unpatentable ingredient is love.

The post Why Hand Dipped Chocolates Are Better first appeared on handdippedchocolates.com.