Hello I'm a business-owner that's just opened a donut shop in Honolulu, Hawaii, and I'm looking for some help on creating fruit-flavored coating chocolates.
We have about a dozen recipes that are pretty solid, and have a decent handle on how to incorporate liquids into our chocolate coatings, while still getting them to firm up again after cooling. I'll try to organize this post a bit so you can get a good understanding of what I'm asking;
Basically, our business sells donuts. Donuts that are covered in a single coat of chocolate (dipped, so about half of the donut is covered in the stuff - see photo for an example). Our current flavor offerings are: Honey Glazed (not chocolate), White Chocolate, Dark Chocolate, Matcha Chocolate (everything from here on is Chocolate, so I'm going to omit that from here), Lilikoi (Passion Fruit), Strawberry, Key Lime, Pumpkin Spice, Cookies & Cream, Espresso, Black Sesame & Earl Grey.
Our fruit flavors are based on fruit concentrates or purees (all natural, so far!) mixed with a cream cheese frosting base, that then gets mixed with high quality coating chocolate (Barry Callebaut, confectioner's coating chocolate). We heat and reheat the batches in order to coat the donuts throughout the day. All but 1 of our recipes is nice and consistent, with no real issues - the Strawberry.
We've begun making the strawberry in tiny batches because it browns/grays every time we heat/reheat it. The first batches come out nice and pink, and every re-use (re-heating) subsequent causes a pretty major color shift that we can't seem to get a handle on. We're doing our best to avoid food coloring, although I'm sure that would solve the problem.
I've been doing some research and it seems like I might be able to stop the browning by mixing in some ascorbic acid, or maybe some lemon juice?
Our current recipe looks like this:
Strawberry Puree (made from frozen strawberries)
Apple Cider Vinegar
Softened Cream Cheese
Whipping Cream
Powdered Sugar
----- Mix well in stand mixer until thoroughly incorporated
BC White Coating Chocolate
----- Melt Chocolate in double boiler, add strawberry base & heat, mixing until smooth
Unfortunately, I can't reveal the measurements of each ingredient, but I'm fairly certain that is not necessary to get help with this problem. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know!
Appreciate the help in advanced~
Odd. Strawberries aren't a fruit that browns quickly. Must be the particular red pigment in the fruit. Some do turn weird grey colors when mixed with white chocolate. Is the fruit cooked at all? Perhaps cooking it to reduce it would help. Otherwise, try freeze dried powdered berries and mix directly into the white coating. Or make the strawberry a dark chocolate glaze and hide any funky colors ;)
Agreed with babette feasts -- try using pulverized freeze-dried strawberries instead.
Hi Babette & Jo,
Thanks for the feedback! We'd considered freeze dried/powdered fruits, but as we're in Hawaii, these are not easily available (especially in commercial-sized quantities), and when they are available, they're prohibitively expensive. This certainly would be the most ideal (easy & best tasting) method, but since we have to maintain our COGS, we have to be a bit creative about how we approach things.
Babette, in regard to cooking - the chocolates are heated thoroughly when combined initially, as well as reheated (this is where the browning/greying usually occurs) to allow the chocolate to come back to liquid form for coating the donuts.
Thank you!
So another thought -- try experimenting with straight up cocoa butter instead of white chocolate. My friends at Soma Chocolate in Toronto make a raspberry bar with just cocoa butter, raspberries and sugar, and it's the tartest, most wonderfully raspberry-y experience. And the colour is so bright and vibrant.
Here's a pic: https://www.instagram.com/p/BMW4uenjf...
So you're just pureeing the frozen berries, not cooking the berries at all?
Try cooking the berries down with a bit of sugar until jammy, then puree. See what it looks like just equal parts cooked strawberry puree and white coating, then see if you really need to add the cream and cream cheese.
Jo, would love to use cocoa butter, we had thought of that initially, but I think the same issues are posed as with the white chocolate. But... actually, we might be able to keep white coating as the base, and mix the cocoa butter with the liquids to act as a carrier, and increase the volume of the solution so that any added sweetness is balanced. Will definitely see if this is something we can get locally!
Babette; Part of using the cream cheese/whipping cream was to help reduce the sweetness added by the additional sugar (powdered and already included in the fruits/chocolate). Adding sugar to the strawberries/chocolate would almost certainly make it over-powering and need something to balance it~
Dehydrated & powdered/crushed seems like a good option, not sure if we could buy the right equipment and have the time in our operation to make it, but maybe I'll look into it as an option. How long does the process usually take for strawberries ?
So try leaving out the powdered sugar, too. Try just cooked, pureed berries and your white coating and see where that gets you before adding a bunch more stuff. I don't think plain cocoa butter would affect the color as much as white chocolate. White chocolate has lots of sugar and milk solids added.
Or try just strawberry juice and powdered sugar without the white coating. Add lime juice or balsamic vinegar to balance.
eta:
this gd glitchy website.
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Had thought of that before, but "Natural Food Coloring" is prohibitively expensive out here, and very hard to find from a vendor (Read: we'd be buying it retail and would probably run out eventually). Our vendors don't even carry the all natural McCormick stuff, which wouldve made our lives so much easier.
Not sure this helps but . . . I make a rumtopf, which is just fruit that sits in rum and sugar for a few months until boozy and delicious. I've noticed that the strawberries have bleached/gone gray quite a bit during their time in the 'topf, more so than anything else has discolored. Some reaction between sugar and fruit and alcohol, I think. Maybe your vinegar is doing something?
Otherwise, I think your doughnuts look fantastic, and I hope to try them someday!
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