BULK CHOCOLATE

Many people have the tradition of making candies and baking for the holiday season. It seems that this is the time of year that people want to share gifts from their kitchens. For people that have been making candies for years they realize the need for buying quality ingredients. For beginners, the process of candy making, especially chocolates, can be frustrating if poor quality or the wrong ingredients are used. Chocolate is a very tricky ingredient to work with and if it is not dealt with correctly the end results can be disappointing.

I have been making homemade candies since I was a young girl. I still make my mother’s coconut balls recipe each year. When I was growing up my mother would coat her coconut balls with a mixture of chocolate chips melted with a small amount of paraffin. The paraffin wax keeps the chocolates from turning chalky and also hardens the chocolate so that it sets up hard enough so that the coconut balls can be handled. The chocolate still had a great taste and the candies had a great sheen to them. When I was a teenager the first bulk chocolate became available in grocery stores. My mother thought this would be a great substitute for melting the chocolate chips and paraffin. The bulk chocolate already had the wax in it. For the first few years this was a good substitute, but then cheaper brands of bulk chocolate became available and the good tasting brand was taken off the shelves.

The cheaper brands of bulk chocolate, which are still the ones available in the grocery store today, consist of wax with chocolate flavoring. They are very easy to work with, they melt well and set up with a nice glossy finish, however they do not taste like real chocolate. There are only a few stores that carry bulk chocolate for dipping that contains real chocolate, not flavoring. They can be found in cake and candy making shops as well as in import shops. This bulk chocolate does cost more, but the taste is worth the price. It does not make sense to me to spend the time making homemade goodies if they are not going to taste good. There are times when I will use my mother’s recipe of chocolate chips and paraffin. It is important to make sure that you have a high quality chocolate chip, so many of the chips today have filler ingredients to make them cheaper. It is important to make sure that the chocolate that you are using is made for dipping. If it is not a bulk chocolate meant for dipping it will turn a grey color after it hardens from being melted.