Bean to bar for diabetic

[keychris]

Hi all,

 

Does anyone have experience with making a bean to bar using a sweetener other than sugar? Not sure I want to jump in and waste my beans if the road has been troden and found to be a mud track to nowhere...

 

If you've had success, can you share so I can copy you shamelessly

 

Chris

[jimb0]

there are a number of posts about non-nutritive sweeteners in the forum you can find with some searching; i’d link but i’m on my phone at the moment. 

 

with that said you should look at allulose first, which you can generally sub in directly for sugar and reap all of the same properties as sucrose. it’s not quite as sweet but it’s close. erythritol can be used in small amounts in conjunction with allulose as it’s cheaper, but if you use it on its own it can result in a cooling effect on the tongue (although at 80% and above i find this to be minimal to unnoticeable for the most part). 

[keychris]

cheers Jimbo. UNfortunately looks like allulose isn't approved for use in foods in Australia at the moment... I'll have a search on here for those other topics

[jimb0]

in addition to erythritol a number of the low-carb chocolate makers will use one of the long-chain sugar-starches like polydextrose or inulin, which aren't sweet, but are possessed of many of the properties of glucose and fructose, respectively, and then a supersweetener like sucralose, monkfruit, or splenda for the actual sweetening power.

 

you can also combine these with xylose or erythritol / other sugar alcohols (but definitely avoid maltitol).

Edited February 8, 2021 by jimb0 (log)

[scott123]

I've been working with and researching alternative/artificial sweeteners for 17 years. What you're describing, a viable sugar free chocolate bar, would take an R&D department and at least $500K to develop.  There's not an edible sugar free chocolate bar on the market that hasn't devoted these kinds of resources towards development.  And even throwing that much money at the problem, the bars are never that good- forget about any kind of snap.

Unless you can keep erythritol dissolved, it will not only have that horrible cooling effect that @jimb0 described, it will provide very little sweetness.  Also, because of it's minuscule molecular structure, it doesn't really provide any of the sugary texture/bulk that you would want a sweetener to provide. 

Polysaccharide are somewhat effective at keeping erythritol dissolved, and, as the thermometer goes up, perhaps a small amount of erythritol could be kept in a glassy state with a hard polydextrose stage- that might be able to be used as a powder.  But polysaccharides are insanely hygroscopic- and I've never heard of anyone doing this.

This is absolutely a 'mud track to nowhere.'

A sugar free ganache, though, that might be feasible.

[Mjx]

@keychris I've seen various bean-to-bar options with stevia (Ethereal, Pascha) and...something else which escapes me at the moment, in health food shops, so this seems to be a possibility. This article discusses the use of stevia in chocolate: https://chocolatedisorder.com/2016/03/

[Kerry Beal]

Art Pollard @Art here on eG made a rather respectable bar with the erythritol/monkfruit sweetener made by Lakanto. 

[jimb0]

On 2/7/2021 at 9:53 PM, scott123 said:

I've been working with and researching alternative/artificial sweeteners for 17 years. What you're describing, a viable sugar free chocolate bar, would take an R&D department and at least $500K to develop.  There's not an edible sugar free chocolate bar on the market that hasn't devoted these kinds of resources towards development.  And even throwing that much money at the problem, the bars are never that good- forget about any kind of snap.

Unless you can keep erythritol dissolved, it will not only have that horrible cooling effect that @jimb0 described, it will provide very little sweetness.  Also, because of it's minuscule molecular structure, it doesn't really provide any of the sugary texture/bulk that you would want a sweetener to provide. 

Polysaccharide are somewhat effective at keeping erythritol dissolved, and, as the thermometer goes up, perhaps a small amount of erythritol could be kept in a glassy state with a hard polydextrose stage- that might be able to be used as a powder.  But polysaccharides are insanely hygroscopic- and I've never heard of anyone doing this.

This is absolutely a 'mud track to nowhere.'

A sugar free ganache, though, that might be feasible.

 

a lot of the big hippy brands of SF chocolate (like lily's) use inulin, poly-D, and/or dextrin for bulk and erythritol plus/or a super sweetener for the rest of it. they aren't as hard as a standard sucrose bar, but they're not terrible. i just hate inulin personally. their white chocolate, on the other hand, is awful. so much recrystallized erythritol that it actually affects the texture.

 

i don't think it would require $500k to figure this out, and certainly not a whole department. a little scientific acumen and a few weekends would be enough for a small-time chocolatier to put out a reasonable product. i just think most big companies don't care to spend the resources because the roi mostly isn't there for them.

Edited February 10, 2021 by jimb0 (log)