- Synopsis
- A caramelised white chocolate with brown butter and hazelnut praline
- Author
- Dom Ramsey
- Version
- 1.0
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
- Shortcut URL
- xtcchocolate.com/112
- Last Updated
- 19 January 2021
Ingredients
- 32.5% Cocoa butter (Deodorised)
- 33% Unrefined Cane Sugar (Golden Caster Sugar)
- 16% Whole Milk Powder
- 12% Roasted, Nibbed Hazelnuts
- 6% Brown Butter
- 0.3% Vanilla Powder
- 0.2% Sea Salt
Technical Information
- Grind / Conch time: Standard/Low (24 hours for 3kg Premier grinders, 48 hours for 30kg CocoaTown melangers).
Method
This recipe is an evolution of the Caramelised White Chocolate recipe, and the method is a little involved as it requires caramelising both the milk powder and the nuts/sugar. It also requires the production of brown butter, which is simple to do but also quite time consuming.
Due to the difficulty of producing large amounts of caramelised milk, the simplest method of production is to use a small melanger.
- Caramelise the milk powder.
For large batches of product, caramelisation will need to be done in several small batches.
Place milk powder into a metal pan or bowl and into an oven at around 120C. Stir the milk powder every 5-10 minutes with a metal spoon, being careful to break up clumps and thoroughly mix in any caramelised milk from the bottom of the pan.
Keep doing this until the milk is a rich caramel / biscuit colour and matching biscuity aroma. It is a slow process, so as long as it is watched and stirred regularly it shouldn’t burn.
This process may take 90 minutes and requires constant attention. I found the weight decreased by approximately 0.5% with caramelisation, so be sure to make enough and build your recipe based on the final weight.
- Prepare the hazelnut praline
Weigh out the hazelnuts and twice that weight of the sugar from the recipe above. Prepare a baking sheet covered in foil for cooling your praline.
In a heavy bottomed pan, heat the sugar until it melts, bubbles, and start to turn a rich golden brown colour. Once the desired level of caramelisation is achieved, remove from the heat and stir in the hazelnuts. Immediately pour out the praline onto the foil covered baking sheet to cool. Allow to set and cool completley.
Break up the praline and transfer it to a blender. Blend into a powder, ensuring no large lumps remain. We will be transferring this to the melanger and lumps can prevent the wheels from turning.
Note that both the caramelised milk powder and praline are hygroscopic and will absorb moisture from the air, so store them in air tight containers if you are not using them immediately.
- Prepare the brown butter
Brown butter can be made simply by heating unsalted butter in a pan until the water has been driven off and it starts to turn brown. You can find a good tutorial on the process here.
- Pre-melt the cocoa butter and slowly add it to the melanger along with the remaining sugar.
- Slowly add the caramelised milk powder, allowing time for the chocolate to return to a liquid state before adding more.
- Slowly add the brown butter and hazelnut praline. Give the melanger time to refine the largest lumps of praline before adding more.
- Add the vanilla and sea salt.
- Once complete, the chocolate can be tempered using your standard method for white chocolate.
- For added texture and flavour complexity, prepare some extra hazelnut praline and sprinkle onto the bars in the moulds before the chocolate sets.
Notes
Consider the addition of sunflower lecithin to this chocolate at up to 0.5% by weight. The high milk powder content and the fact that it is caramelised tend to make the chocolate a little thick. Although the chocolate flows well, lecithin would likely help with tempering and moulding, and may allow for a small lowering the cocoa butter content, thus intensifying the flavour.
As we are caramelising the milk powder, it’s questionable how much flavour the brown butter is bringing to this particular recipe. We think it works very well, but if you want to save some time you might want to remove the brown butter from the recipe and replace it with milk powder and cocoa butter.
Temper this chocolate as per a normal white chocolate. You might find that it takes longer to set and release from the moulds than usual – in our tests, it took over an hour for the moulded bars to fully release, but the chocolate was still fine.
The chocolate will be a little softer than normal white chocolate because of the added fats in the butter and hazelnuts. This is completely normal.
License
Caramelised White Chocolate by XTC Chocolate is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://xtc.tc/112.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://xtc.tc/licensing/.