December 30

Every morning, before I eat breakfast, I have a piece of dark chocolate. This habit has become so deeply ingrained in me that I basically wake up thinking about chocolate. More often than not, I also have a piece before I go to bed. Basically my day is a chocolate sandwich. But it is always, always dark. Preferably around 70%. Not only is milk chocolate pretty unacceptable, but white chocolate is even more so. All of the bitter, dark flavour is devoid in white chocolate, which is often made of sugar, milk and fillers if you’re not careful about the quality. Nevertheless, I had caramelized chocolate on my mind.


Like browned butter and brown sugar it seems like everything is better when it is browned. If not better, definitely different. It’s hard to compare the browned and un-browned versions of things. Browning transforms. Browning things give them a depth and complexity of flavour that just doesn’t exist otherwise. It becomes more toasty, more nutty and more caramelly than it was before. This is definitely the case with this caramelized white chocolate. It definitely has more caramel-y tones than before, but I must warn you, it is definitely extremely sweet. It does not take on a bitter edge at all. So beware, and pair carefully.



Making this caramelized white chocolate is a bit of a labor of love. It requires you to stir it about every 10 minutes. It’s a sticky operation that required a spatula and something to scrape the spatula with, but I didn’t really mind since I was just hanging out at home anyway. Make sure you use some decent white chocolate. As I mentioned previously, some of the lower-quality white chocolate is barely chocolate at all. Make sure it has at least 20% cocoa butter content. 30% is even better.

It’s pretty satisfying to open the oven and see the chocolate transform into a deep caramel colour. Make sure not to crank up the oven to speed things up. It’s all about the low and slow. I ended up with a little pot of this stuff and decided to use it here (coming soon!), but I can imagine that it’s delicious drizzled over a lightly sweetened cake (like this one) or some vanilla frozen yogurt.