Recipes for white chocolate style cake (or ice cream/truffle/…) coatings (the snappy kind, not soft frostings) tend to rely on cocoa butter, shortening, sugar… and milk powder as a filler. Soymilk powders are not available everywhere and make an unreliable substitute due to very brand dependent additives and properties. What can be used as a reliable, non-dairy filler?
Cake – What non-dairy filler to use in white chocolate style coatings
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Related Solutions
Yes, you can use the choco. chips. One square of chocolate is normally one ounce. Half a cup of chocolate chips is usually around three ounces. If you are looking to use 8 squares (8 ounces), you will need about 1 and a quarter cups of the chips (maybe just a tad more).
Some folks may come on and say that the chips are sweeter, less intense in flavour, etc., but when you are in a pinch, you can sub them out just fine. Doubtful you will notice any difference.
Abstract: Ganache is delicious, but not everyone eats dairy. We examined whether coconut milk can be used for the creation of a non-dairy ganache. We ran a series of experiments. The answer is that, with some creative techniques, you can use it, but it does not come anywhere near to the real thing.
Introduction. Someone wrote a question on Seasoned advice about coconut based ganache and we got curious.
Background. We love ganache even more than pure chocolate, and make it often ourselves, so we think we have all the prerequisites needed to create and judge a coconut based ganache recipe. Our favorite ganache recipe 1 (which we used as a starting point) is: 100 g chocolate, 72% cocoa (only made from cocoa, sugar, and cocoa butter, no vegetable fat or emulsifiers); 100 g cream, at least 30% (non-UHT), 25 g butter.
Method. We prepared the base mix as follows: 25 g coconut milk were heated until boiling. They were removed from the heat. 25 g chocolate (72%) and 6g cocoa butter were added. Everything was left to dissolve. After 5 minutes, the mixture was whipped with a handheld mixer at the second-to-highest setting. This was Version 0. It was divided in two batches. Different versions were made from each batch by gradually adding guar (a knife-point-ful), egg yolk (1, in lieu of lecithine) and sugar (8g per batch). Each version was whipped for at least 3 minutes. The final versions (1c and 2b) where put for 30 min in the refrigerator, then taken out and whipped again. As there were no observable changes after the cold whipping, we do not treat them as a different version. We also made a small portion of dairy ganache for comparison purposes.
Results. These are listed in Table 1. The numbers in the ingredients columns of the table represent the order of adding the ingredients to the mixtures.
Table 1. Experiment results.
The final consistency of version 1c is documented in Figure 1. Note that the peaks do not drip and you can rotate the bowl at 180° without anything falling out. The piece of chocolate was added for color comparison.
Figure 2 shows a zoom of the blue bordered area in Figure 1.
Discussion. It is possible to make a profiterole filling with coconut milk based ganache, but it isn't quite like the real deal. Also, it resembles non-whipped ganache more closely than whipped ganache.
The basic ganache recipe can be done with coconut milk instead of cream and cocoa butter instead of butter. However, it tastes fattier than real ganache, and it is runnier. Unlike dairy ganache, whipping does not result in aeration.
We think that eliminating the cocoa butter altogether will somewhat alleviate the fatiness problem, but we did not test this proposal yet.
A thickening and or emulsifying agent can improve the ganache texture. Even though egg yolk improves aeration, is not a good choice, as it results in a slimy feel. Guar is a better solution.
The addition of sugar ruins the chocolateness of the taste. If bitterness is not desired, a sweeter chocolate (50%) should be used. Only dedicated sugar lovers or Americans should resort to adding sugar. In that case, it should be added before the guar (we would suggest dissolving it in the coconut milk before boiling it) as not to interfere with the texture of the final product.
Threats to validity. First, there was a single tester (the quasi-royal we). Second, this tester is already biased in favor of dairy products in general and specifically for dairy based ganache. Third, many interesting combinations (including xanthan gum and corn starch) could not be tested due to lack of resources.
Conclusion and outlook. We found the experiment very inspirating. It was also yummy. But we'd like to issue an warning: This experiment is dangerous. In the preparation phase, we discovered a penchant for guared coconut water deep fried in coconut fat we'd rather not have known about. Nevertheless, we are looking forward to offering the results for peer preview to a chocolate-loving lactose intolerant co worker.
References: 1 My own recipe book
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Best Answer
Honestly, I would look at almond flour.
what milk powder gives to the recipe is proteins, sugars, and fats - all of which are present in nuts. This is also why almond milk is totally a thing, there are a lot of similarities.
Two major differences are, there will be an almond flavor instead of a (milder, more "neutral") milky flavor. And, almond milk has some of the almond solids removed, using almond flour is therefore "grittier" (not quite sure how else to put it) that using milk powder. A true substitute would be extracting and dehydrating almondmilk, so those extra solids aren't present. But, honestly that's a lot of work, and almond flour will probably work well enough - though you might revisit if you're using a lot, or if you think it's worth the extra work.
Of course, any other nut flours will also work, and even soy flour or coconut flour (both of whose precedents can be made into -milk) can be adapted. The extra flavors will be in the finished product, but they can be left as subtle, or celebrated, or something.