Q: I recently ran out of my favorite dark chocolate cocoa powder. Can I substitute a dark chocolate bar in place of the cocoa powder? If so, are 8 ounces of chocolate bar equivalent to 1 cup of cocoa powder?
Cocoa powder always seems to be more expensive than chocolate bars, so subbing the chocolate bars could be cost effective too.
Sent by Sarah
Editor: Sarah, we presume you are asking about baked good recipes here. (It's quite easy to make hot chocolate or other drinks with chocolate instead of cocoa!) We consulted Joy of Baking (a great web resource for this sort of thing) and it says that you can indeed substitute chocolate for cocoa powder. You do need to add a bit of baking soda, too, and also compensate by slightly reducing the other fats in the recipe.
• See the proportions here: Chocolate for Cocoa Substitution at Joy of Baking
Readers, any advice on this? Have you ever substituted chocolate for cocoa?
Related: Pantry Basics: What Is Dutch Process Cocoa?
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never done it but i have a bar of unsweetened chocolate and was wondering what to do with it. why do i buy mystery ingredients? it's a mystery!
i adore taza mexican xocatl! it is so good! i once tried to "crumble" it up so that I could use it instead of chocolate chips...but it didn't work. Any advice on how to make chocolate chips from your fav choco bar (rather than buy the bag)?
@SydneyBristow, I actually chop up chocolate to use in chocolate chip cookies quite a lot. Were you trying to melt the chocolate, or use it as chips in cookies? The grainy, stoneground texture of Taza might have been part of the problem, but I'm not sure.
FYI the joy of baking sub is for unsweetened chocolate like bakers not for a typical chocolate bar so you'd need to compensate for the sugar level too---which should be listed in grams. But as mentioned above for hot cocoa I actually think the bars are superior since its an all in one solution.
I adore Taza chocolate!
If I'm using bar chocolate in place of chocolate chips I just chop it up with a knife.
Um, there are some good but involved answers to this question! If you can get a copy of Alice Medrich's Bittersweet she has some really great information and charts regarding substituting various chocolates and cocoa in a recipe.
Formulas for converting recipes from one chocolate to another (unsweetened, milk, semi-, various % of bittersweet) start on page 349. Cocoa powder and chocolate subs are covered on page 354. Pages 47-57 are info and notes that are helpful with the conversion.
Here's a link for some of those pages: Bittersweet p349
maybe it's my knife then, because i couldn't make a dent in the taza! (i was trying to use them as chips for cookies)
IMO, that's a terrible, terrible idea. Cocoa powder mostly contains the chocolate solids (or "liquor"), while chocolate is a mixture of the chocolate solids, cocoa butter, sugar, vanilla, and emulsifiers like lecithin. While cocoa powder does have cocoa butter in it, it doesn't have much, and in fact, cocoa powder in a recipe actually acts more like flour than any other type of ingredient. The amount of fat in chocolate is much higher and will throw off a recipe based on cocoa powder. Yes, you can decrease the amount of fat in the rest of your recipe, but to do that, you need to compare the percentage of cocoa butter in the type of cocoa recommended in the recipe versus the bar you hold in your hands. Don't do it.
@Taza, chopping your own chocolate is really best! Some recipes are really temperamental, so you want to put your chopped chocolate in a sifter or sieve to remove the chocolate "dust" that results from chopping.
I love that you show Taza chocoloate in the photo. It's my favorite and I'm sad it's not sold in my corner of the woods.
My kids have a nut allergy and the one brand of cocoa that is available here has peanut oil in it. So for years we didn't bake chocolate goodies at all... But I started replacing the cocoa with a slab of 85% Dark Lindt and now we bake anything... and life tends to be just that little bit more full of joy!!!