Whether you are making white chocolate icing or want to make your favourite chocolate chip cookies without ruining your sweet tooth. Baking chocolate is a must-have ingredient in any baker’s kitchen.
Baking chocolate can be used in any chocolate recipe to help give your baked goods that rich chocolatey taste without adding too much sweetness to the recipe.
It is sold in a range of varieties, from milk chocolate bars to white chocolate chips, as well as in a range of sweetness and cocoa levels.
Though baking chocolate is not usually expensive, many stores still do not stock it. But there are plenty of ways around such an issue.
Our 4 Substitutes for Baking Chocolate
Baking chocolate has a robust cocoa flavour, even when you use a lower percentage variety. This is because baking chocolate has little to no added sweeteners, getting to natural chocolate flavour from cocoa butter and solids.
As such, baking chocolate can often be bitter and lacks the creaminess of other chocolate products due to a lack of added milk.
However, with cocoa butter making up the vast majority of baking chocolate’s composition, it is the perfect chocolate for tempering.
Here are our top 4 substitutes for baking chocolate:
1) Dark Chocolate
Like regular chocolate bars, dark chocolate includes ingredients other than cocoa butter and cocoa solids.
However, its cocoa percentage is usually higher than other chocolates.
Because of this, dark chocolate tastes much more bitter than milk or white chocolate, which is closer in flavour to baking chocolate.
Dark chocolate does come in a range of sweetnesses. Find a dark chocolate with high cocoa and low sugar content for the closest match to baking chocolate.
Can You Temper Dark Chocolate?
Dark chocolate can be tempered so long as it is melted at 50-55°C and cooled to 31-32°C when being tempered.
2) Unsweetened Cocoa Powder
Unsweetened cocoa powder is only made from cocoa solids, whereas baking chocolate combines cocoa solids and cocoa butter.
This means unsweetened cocoa powder has a stronger, more bitter cocoa flavour, resulting in richer bakes.
The absence of cocoa butter reduces the amount of fat in your bake, which can alter the texture of the final result. You will need to substitute this fat with some butter or oil.
Know Your Cocoa Powder to Baking Chocolate Ratios
Substitute 3/4 as much cocoa powder in your recipe as baking chocolate. Make up that final 1/4 with additional fat.
3) Regular Chocolate
The difference between the chocolate bars everyone loves to snack on and baking chocolate is the amount of added ingredients used in commercial chocolate bars.
Baking chocolate is edible chocolate in its rawest form. This is why it is good to use in baking recipes, as you can get that chocolatey taste without making your bake overwhelmingly sweet.
Regular chocolate is full of sugar, milk and any number of added ingredients. While this does make the chocolate taste delicious, creamy and addictive, your bake will change depending on the chocolate you use.
It will be both heavier because of the added dairy and much sweeter. You will need to reduce the sugar you use in your bake to combat this.
Can You Use Flavoured Chocolate in Baking?
Avoid using chocolate with fruit pieces, nuts or anything other flavourings. If you must, ensure you remove these ingredients once the chocolate is melted.
4) Carob Chips
Unless you have specific dietary restrictions, you have probably never needed to use carob chips. However, they are not too different from regular chocolate chips, so they can be used as a baking chocolate substitute.
Carob chips are made from the carob pod of the carob tree, which is harder to source than cocoa, often making carob chips more expensive.
The pulp of the pods is naturally sweet. A sweetness that is emphasised when the pulp is dried, roasted and turned into a powder or chips.
Alongside this sweetness is a lack of bitterness that is replaced with a nutty taste. This creates quite a unique flavour, which is not the same as baking chocolate but can still be used in the same instances.
Just make sure to taste the chips before you use them to see if you like their flavour before adding them to your recipe.
Do You Need to Add Sugar to Carob Chips?
Due to their natural sweetness, you will want half the sugar you use in your bake to prevent making the final result overly sweet.
Other Substitutes for Baking Chocolate
Baking should be an enjoyable, easy experience that results in a delicious treat, not a stressful task to find the perfect ingredients. Here are a few more baking chocolate substitutes that you may already have to hand if you don’t have any of the above:
- Sweetened Cocoa Powder – So long as you don’t mind the added sweetness, sweetened cocoa powder can be used instead of baking chocolate in recipes that don’t require tempering.
- Carob Powder – Use carob powder as you would cocoa powder but keep in mind the difference in flavour.
- Chocolate Spread – If you have no other chocolate to hand, chocolate spread such as Nutella can be used instead of baking chocolate, but only to provide a rich chocolate taste.
Summary
Baking chocolate is not as easy to replace as some may think. It is chocolate in its rawest edible form and doesn’t include added ingredients like other chocolate.
If you need to replace baking chocolate, dark chocolate will work best because of its bitterness and high cocoa content.