Black Onyx Cocoa powder is excessively dark. The powder features soft, rounded chocolate flavor with no pointed chocolate edges. It is softened by the alkaline procedure which changes its texture and color. It smells like earth with a slight essence of bitter chocolate. It looks dangerous but is mere a base of deep chocolate.
Processing of chocolate for usage is a complex and several-step procedure. Cocoa bean is available pods which are the size of footballs, harvested from cocoa trees. These pods are set in trays of water and allowed to ferment for few days. Once fermentation takes place, roasting is done to change them to brown. After that winnowing is done to crack the bean shells and remove the nib. Then with the help of a hydraulic press, the cocoa butter is squeezed and the cakey material is left to dry out which is further transformed to cocoa powder. While the natural cocoa powder is slightly acidic, so, it is turned alkaline using the Dutch process. This changes the properties of cocoa powder and raises it pH level to 8, making it dark brown, almost black.
Tips from the kitchen
In order to know the right working of Black Onyx Cocoa Powder, you need to understand some Chemistry first. As it is alkaline, if you use it for a dish like cake which requires leavening, it needs a slight acidic base to cause the rise. Hence, you can mix this in half quantity with natural cocoa powder that is acidic in nature and then to make it rise, use baking soda. Or, you can also use complete Black Onyx Powder and use baking powder which will offer a base and alkaline to the cake and creates its own rise.
If you are baking something that doesn’t need leavening, such as cookies, frosting, pudding, then go for Black Onyx powder and normal cocoa powder in 1:1 ratio. Because of the Dutching procedure, the Black Onyx Cocoa Powder doesn’t have any moisture or fat, hence it can lead to a dry product. So, you need to add some butter, yoghurt or cream to add moisture to it. The powder works as an amazing coloring agent, so if you need black icing on your cake, then just swap the food dye with black onyx powder and allow it to develop its color in sometime.
Add some milk and sugar to it to make dark hot chocolate. Dust it over a bowl of fruit or any pancakes or any other sweet dish to get a rick contrast. Mix it with peanut butter to get rich smoothies or use it to make a black velvet cake. There are so many uses of black onyx cocoa powder. However, what’s important here is to order the legit one. You can order genuine powder online at Little Istanbul. It is available in different quantities at highly affordable rates. The best thing is that it can be shipped anywhere around the world.