535
‘I took two bites and had to spit it out’: candy makers are phasing out real cocoa in chocolate
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
535 points (99.3% liked)
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Guys (and gals), there's simple solution to all that: learn to bake.
We are a community of makers. We write our apps ourselves, we host our shit by ourselves, we stream our music and our movies by ourselves. So what should we do when bad corporations are taking away our snacks? Make them yourself!
Recipes are free and open. The tools are not expensive (not much RAM in the oven). There's nothing stopping us.
So, do we need baking community?
Edit: So... !baking@lemmy.curiana.net ? It's my self hosted server. Will that work?
This has basically been my mantra for the last 5 years. "Fuck off, I'll do it myself."
Yes. Host recipes. Get productive.
!bready@lemmy.world
Chocolate is often candymaking, not baking, though.
That's just bread. I'm talking about cakes.
Chocolate is candy but brownie is cake :)
Baking is relatively easy, but how do you make your own chocolate? I don't think you can properly do that at home.
It can be done, but it's not easy.
You can, but you also don't have to make it from scratch. Various forms of real, non-ultraprocessed-and-candified chocolate are guaranteed sitting lonely and forgotten in grocery store baking aisles around the world at this very moment. There's also the option of finding a reputable local chocolatier, if you have one. I've never lived anywhere where there aren't at least several local options, if not countless, but maybe I'm just lucky that way. Even if not, there's always online ordering.
I'm from Austria, so plenty of options for high quality chocolate here. But they have gotten quite pricey lately.
Either way, I should lose weight (:
I've seen recipes, which are basically just cocoa butter and cocoa powder, and they seem pretty simple, though I've never tried them.
Most chocolate "making" just starts with chocolate callets. Melt them, temper it, put it in moulds, and add filling. I've done this, and it's not that difficult. Of course, the quality here depends on the quality of the callets, so if you start with Hershey's (not sure if they even make callets), it'll still taste like vomit.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IaCZcdWk1DU&t=1965s&pp=ygUTbmlsZSBibHVlIGNob2NvbGF0ZQ%3D%3D
I recently made brownies from scratch, and they came out so much better than the box brownies that I usually make, that my entire family noticed, and really loved them. It wasn't that much more work than the box, you just had to measure out the flour, sugar, and cocoa, but the difference was huge. Well worth the slight extra effort.
Don't leave us hanging. What's the recipe?
I don't know, I found it on the Internet, they were all more or less the same.
Did you use butter and milk or oil and water in the box mix? That's usually the only difference. The box mix is just flour, cocoa powder, salt, etc. The quality of those ingredients doesn't vary too much.
Butter yes, milk no.
I saw an old Good Eats episode where Alton Brown put the brownies in for about 15 minutes, took them out for 10 minutes, then put them back in the oven until they were finished. He claimed that the interruption changes the chemical reaction somehow, and makes them better. I've tried it in the past, and they seemed to be marginally better, but it m.not sure.
He frequently does things that make recipes 2% better for 50% more effort. Which is appreciated, but often a little silly. Sometimes though it is well worth it.
I doubt that would be significant. Real butter and real milk are the biggest difference between real rich brownies and the cheap stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzanNNq_JZU&t=47
I read your comment in her voice
Great, that exactly the voice I wrote it in :)
Cooking nerd here. You can kind of make your own chocolate.
You almost certainly can't make chocolate from scratch. You could, in theory do all the steps but even in the old days it was an industrial process and it's nearly impossible to get the quality control tight enough at home. The fermentation, roasting, and grinding steps all have to be done under very precise conditions or you won't get good chocolate.
You could just go really old school and use the Aztec recipes but that's not "chocolate" as most people would know it. It's more like a spiced tea.
Home cooks can buy chocolate (it's worth it to splurge and get nice chocolate if you're going through this much trouble) and mix it and shape it. You can make a wide array of flavored ganaches, coat things in chocolate, fill chocolate shells with stuff, etc.
The hardest part is tempering. Chocolate is actually a crystal. The short version is that if you don't control that crystal formation through careful temperature and movement control, your chocolate will get weird and chalky; if you get that all right it's smooth and snappy. There are books and videos on it but you'll need to mess up a bunch of batches before you learn it.
if you don't like capitalism stop eating corpo food.
This.
Might be a little time consuming but very rewarding. Also, they can be a easy gift to friends and families.
The solution is, for all of you (us) who can't find a direct source of cocoa, buying industry standard chocolate for baking and food preparations and using it. 50%, 80 an 90% cocoa bars are usually available, but they are just bars that you use as an ingredient.
Good luck finding cocoa powder or baking chocolate which is pure rather than mainly sugar.