Tool
Baking substitution converter
You have cocoa powder and the recipe wants unsweetened chocolate, or you are swapping a 55% bar for a 70%. This works out the replacement weight and the sugar and fat adjustments that keep the recipe balanced.
Use instead
60 g of natural cocoa powder
- Acidic. Works with baking soda.
- Cocoa powder swaps change the leavening. Natural cocoa is acidic and reacts with baking soda; Dutch-process is neutral and needs baking powder. Swapping one for the other without adjusting the leavener gives a flat, soapy result.
- Sugar adjustments come out of the recipe's own sugar, not on top of it. If the correction is larger than the sugar the recipe contains, pick a different substitute.
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See the chocolate fountainsThe principle
Every form of chocolate is a different mix of three things: non-fat cocoa solids, fat and sugar. A substitution works when you match the cocoa solids and then correct the fat and sugar back to where the recipe expected them. Cocoa powder is nearly all solids and almost no fat, which is why swapping it in always means adding fat. Chips contain stabilisers and less cocoa butter so they hold their shape, which is exactly what you do not want in a ganache.
The categories and what separates them are covered in dark, milk, white and ruby, and the percentage arithmetic in what the percentage means.