You've Heard of "Fat-Free?"

Okay, I'm totally hooked on making my own sugar-free chocolate. I admit I still think Valor 70% Dark Sugar Free is the best sugar-free chocolate I've ever had, and Guylian's Sugar Free Dark is nearly as amazing. But my homemade sugar-free chocolate has some advantages, not the least of which is: It is fart-free.

No, no, not "fat-free." Fat-free chocolate wouldn't be chocolate. The texture of chocolate is a super-important part of its appeal, and the cocoa butter is a major determinant of that texture. Indeed, I have had reduced-fat chocolate, created not as a diet product, but rather for the Army. When I was a kid, my summer camp bought Army surplus field rations for us to take on overnights. Yes, I have eaten K-rations. They were... okay. But one summer Eagle's Nest had bought a lot of "jungle Hershey bars" -- Hershey's milk chocolate designed not to melt in jungle heat. In other words, with a lot of the fat taken out. They were weird. Remember, body temperature is in the neighborhood of jungle temperature, so we're talking chocolate that doesn't melt in your mouth or your hand. I didn't even finish mine.

No, fat-free chocolate is right out; I add extra fat to my chocolate. I'm talking about fart-free chocolate. I have learned that nearly all social offensiveness on my part can be attributed to the single source of commercial sugar-free chocolate. It's nearly eerie, how completely this has stopped since I started making Splenda-sweetened chocolate.

I've pretty much got a formula now: 6 squares bitter baking chocolate (Baker's brand), 2 tablespoons coconut oil, and... well, concentrated liquid sucralose. I've used both EZ Sweetz, and another brand I have that's now off the market, and isn't as concentrated as EZ Sweetz, so I haven't standardized quantity. Both of these sweeteners, however, are concentrated enough that they don't contain sufficient water to make the chocolate "seize," and mess up the texture. I pretty much go by taste. (I've been using the discontinued brand of sucralose lately because I can't find my last teeny bottle of EZ Sweetz. One of the advantages of the three-pack of EZ Sweets for this disorganized cook with a cluttered kitchen is that when I have three bottles around I can usually locate at least one when I need it. However, since I'm down to just one it has been subsumed in the mess. Time to order more, I guess.)

I'm making my chocolate quite bitter, probably the equivalent of an 85% bar or darker; it's for serious dark chocolate fans only. I tried making some a bit sweeter, I was trying to get to about the same sweetness as a 70% bar. (Please note: the percentages do not mean that the chocolate is only 70% sugar free or 85% sugar-free or whatever. It means that they're 70% bitter chocolate; the higher the percentage, the less sweet the chocolate.) I got something of an off-flavor; it just wasn't... right, somehow. I'd rather go with the quite bitter chocolate than the oddly fake additional sweetness.

It takes me only about 0 minutes to make a batch. I put my smallest saucepan over lowest heat (if your stove doesn't have a true "warm" burner, you might use a heat diffuser or double-boiler, since chocolate scorches easily. That, or you could melt your chocolate in the microwave.) While it's melting, I line an old baking tray from a toaster oven with waxed paper. The toaster oven baking tray is exactly the right size for 6 ounces of chocolate. When the chocolate's melted, I stir in the coconut oil, then liquid sucralose to taste. I spread this on the waxed-paper-lined tray and stick it in the fridge. It then lives in the fridge till I finish it a day or two later, 'cause the coconut oil means it melts pretty readily at summer room temperature, at least in my house.

I've had some people ask why coconut oil rather than cocoa butter? The answer is simply that I have coconut oil on hand. I will, however, get some food-grade cocoa butter and try it; it will be interesting to see what this does to the texture. My reading tells me that it will yield a chocolate less likely to melt at room temperature, which would be nice.

Coconut oil is known for its healthful properties, but cocoa butter is good stuff, too. Much of the saturated fat in cocoa butter is in the form of stearic acid, which behaves like a monounsaturate in the body, lowering LDL and raising HDL. (Another major source of stearic acid is beef fat, which means that the stuff can actually lower your LDL and -- more importantly -- raise your HDL. How about a heart-healthy dinner of beef followed by chocolate? We'll throw in some red wine, too.) Cocoa butter is mostly made up of saturated and monounsaturated fats, with very little polyunsaturated fat which means it isn't a big source of pro-inflammatory omega-6s. Worth looking into, and I shall.

Because my homemade sugar-free chocolate has no polyols (sugar alcohols), it is far lower carb than the commercial stuff. I do not subscribe to the theory that we can completely discount maltitol from our usable carb counts. From what I have been able to discover, we digest and absorb about half of the stuff; accordingly I count half the grams of carbohydrate in commercial sugar-free chocolate. Looking at the label of the Valor Sugar Free Dark chocolate (a little sweeter than the 70% bar) a 1.4 ounce serving has 23 grams of carbohydrate, of which 19 grams are maltitol, and 3 grams are fiber. Since it lists 0 grams sugar, I assume that extra gram is starch, and must be counted. Going with my figure of half the maltitol, this means a serving will have 10.5 grams of usable carb.

By contrast, my homemade sugar-free chocolate has 8 grams of carb in a 1 ounce serving, 4 grams of which are fiber, for 4 grams of usable carb per serving, or 5.6 grams if we go with the 1.4 ounce serving to equal the Valor label. That's about half the usable carb count of the commercial stuff.

(Aren't you impressed by chocolate's fiber content? That's better than twice the fiber count of a slice of whole wheat bread, and better than five times the fiber of a whole cup of cooked brown rice. And wouldn't you rather have chocolate?) (Of course, what this really demonstrates is that whole grains are a pretty lousy source of fiber.)

None of this means I will never eat commercial sugar-free chocolate again; I certainly will. Not only is it way yummy, but it has cooking qualities I'm pretty sure my home-made stuff lacks. And let's face it, in the search for non-blood-sugar-spiking chocolate nirvana, a little embarrassment is a small price to pay.

Still, it's nice not to worry, especially when I have a massage client. Or go to a Toastmasters meeting. Or want a romantic evening with That Nice Boy I Married.