" Ooh La La !
This is Marc Chinchole's reaction when shown a bar of Lindt Extra Fondant milk chocolate.
“There are 10 ingredients in this tablet.
I only need four to make a milk chocolate, ”continues this craftsman at the head of the L'Instant Cacao brand in Paris.
For our Food Checking video series, he accepted the challenge of replicating this industrial product in order to understand what was inside.
And it starts with sugar: “There are 50g of it if you look at the nutritional information on the back of the package.
So that's half of the tablet.
Is it a lot?
“Yes, not bad,” he said euphemistically.
Marc Chinchole also uses it in his own tablets, of course, but in much smaller quantities.
Then come lactose, skimmed milk powder, barley malt extract… "I don't know what he's doing there, I don't know what it is, I've never used that…" "Then soy lecithin" which serves as a binder ", the vanilla flavor" which is generally used to enhance the tastes ... Or hide the defects "and the concentrated dairy butter.
Milk powder, on the other hand, is a common ingredient in making artisanal milk chocolate, just like cocoa butter and cocoa mass.
After spending 16 hours in a “grindstone”, which allows the ingredients to be crushed and smoothed, the chocolate preparation is poured into tablets, cooled, unmolded… Then crunched.
“It's almost the same!
»Judges the craftsman after comparing his replica to the original tablet.
Dark chocolates are richer in cocoa, therefore less sweet
This Lindt tablet has nothing to do with its homemade counterpart, certainly, but is it bad for your health?
“Look at the list on the label, the closer an ingredient is to the first position, the more important it is in the composition of the product, recalls the dietitian Pauline Ansquer, behind the Instagram account @lapaulinediet, while it is shown the back Lindt Extra Fondant Milk Chocolate.
Here, the first ingredient is sugar.
This is where the problem lies.
Normally, the first ingredient is the cocoa mass (here in fourth position) which should be the basis of chocolate.
It is better to turn to another product.
As a whole, dark chocolates are richer in cocoa and therefore contain less sugar: preferable, therefore.
But you can still find milk chocolates on the shelves where sugar is only the second ingredient.
This is for example the case of Lindt “45% cocoa”.
Sugar is a flavor enhancer
In order to find out whether the differences in sugar levels had an impact on the pleasure of tasting, an expert was invited to taste three milk chocolates blindly: the Extra Fondant containing 50% sugar and the "45 % cocoa "containing 39% sugar, as well as a Monoprix Gourmet chocolate" Origin Peru "with 38% sugar.
“I can smell a scent of vanilla,” says Apollonia Poilâne, a famous baker and member of the Club des croqueurs de chocolat, blindfolded, after tasting Lindt 45%.
I find it a little too sweet.
The bar does not, however, contain any vanilla.
On the other hand, this is her impression when she tests the following chocolate, Lindt's Extra Fondant with vanilla flavor: “It's more strongly vanilla.
Like the bag of vanilla sugar.
"She notes another interesting thing:" I find the same profile as in the previous chocolate but it's just as if we had turned up the volume of the sound system.
"
And for good reason: sugar is known to be a flavor enhancer and it is much more present in this recipe.
"The last bar is the one with the richest variety of scents, but it is not the most pleasant to taste", comments Apollonia Poilâne about the Monoprix Gourmet, the least sweet.
Its classification follows the order of tasting: Lindt 45% cocoa (€ 2.48 for 100 g), Lindt Extra Fondant (€ 1.65 for 100 g) and Monoprix Gourmet “Origin Peru” (€ 2.55 for 100 g).
“So we don't pay a lot, but on the other hand we pay for sugar,” the expert quipped about Lindt Extra Fondant.
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So, black or milk?
Chocolate being a product that it is better, anyway, to consume in small doses, with each to make his choice without feeling guilty.
But if you are mindful of your health, then be careful to choose products where sugar is not the first ingredient!
