Here's the story I usually include, so others can duplicate the sauce
...and sometimes I add a fru-fru label to the jars.
Since I had already published the original recipe here and it works well as a sauce, I include the original story, the original recipe and the adapted recipe that Meryl worked out and the one I now use if I'm sending out jars of sauce.
REMINDER: The original sauce has too much sugar and will eventually start crystallizing. Don't jar that version.
Dyslexic Bittersweet Chocolate Sauce
Back in 2007, I decided to comparison test two chocolate sauce recipes. Mom's Hot Fudge Sauce (from the HomesickTexan blog) included 4 ounces of unsweetened chocolate, 3 cups of sugar, 1 stick of butter, 12 ounce can of evaporated milk and promised 44 ounces of gooey chocolate delight. Meanwhile, Dave's Hot Fudge Ice Cream Sauce is a scaled-down version of Mom's with less sugar and proportionally more chocolate and butter. Huzzah! A smaller finished product (20 ounces) meant fewer ounces of associated guilt when I inevitably ate it all.
Postulating the "mo chocolate is mo better" theory, I started with Dave's recipe and—in my rush to get to the taste-test stage of the experiment—completely skipped reading the instructions. Apparently I’m dyslexic when images of chocolate sauce flood my brain. Grabbing a Teflon pot, I added a cup of sugar, a stick of butter, and a can of evaporated milk, put it over low heat and reviewed my chocolate options. Both recipes called for unsweetened chocolate and I had none. What I did have was 11 pounds of 70/30 bittersweet and 11 pounds of 55% semi-sweet. Surely I could get to the Promised Land of Chocolate Sauce from here?
Because I’m an engineer, I assumed that a ratio exists for replacing 100% unsweetened chocolate & sugar with other cacao percentages. I riffled through Alice Medrich’s Cocolat looking for substitution tables. No luck. Then I pulled out Fran Bigelow’s Pure Chocolate and read about cocoa solids, cocoa butter, and cacao liquor. No ratio table there either. I went back to my bookshelf and scanned four more chocolate books and oh, for the love of Escoffier! Would someone please tell me the frigging ratio!
I finally gave up and substituted 5 oz of bittersweet for 3 oz of unsweetened chocolate. I stirred until it melted, thought the sauce looked a little watery and then read the instructions.
Oh.
Okay. I jumped right to the ice-bath step but quickly came to the realization that no amount of cooling would thicken this sauce. That’s when I re-read Dave's ingredient list for help.
Oh.
Did I mention the part where I can't read when chocolate is involved? Blame it on my parents for having such a large family, but we never had "small" cans of evaporated milk in our house. There was one size of evaporated milk and that was a 12-ounce can. I still don't know what a small 5-ounce can looks like.
Having used 2.5 times the amount of liquid called for in Dave’s recipe, I added another stick of butter, another cup of sugar and eleven more ounces of 70/30 bittersweet chocolate in the spirit of “Waste not, want not.” If 70/30 meant that the chocolate contained 30% of sugar, did 16 ounces of bittersweet equal 5 ounces of sugar and 11 ounces of unsweetened chocolate? Who knew? I didn’t. And if Alice or Fran knew, they weren't telling me.
Let me cut to the chase. Here is my rescued result. It's thick. It's rich. And if David were here, I'd plant a kiss on him while apologizing profusely for completely ignoring his instructions.
Marilyn's Dyslexic Homage to Dave's Hot Fudge Topping
WARNING: Follow this recipe only if you plan to use it immediately, such as in a fondue, truffles or sundaes. The sauce is dense with super-saturated sugar and will cause granularity if repeatedly heated and chilled.
2 cups sugar
1 12-oz can of evaporated milk.
16 ounces of 70/30 bittersweet chocolate* chopped into fine slivers
2 sticks unsalted butter** (8 ounces), room-temperature
Place chopped chocolate in heat-proof bowl. Add sugar and evaporated milk to a non-stick pot and stir continuously over medium heat until mixture comes to a gentle boil. Simmer and stir for 4 minutes to insure the sugar is completely dissolved. I use a silicon spatula. Remove from heat and pour over the slivered chocolate. Stir continuously until melted. When the chocolate has cooled enough to touch, stir in the butter.
Produces 52 addictive ounces, which the Clever and Witty Reader will note is not only more than Dave's 20 ounces, but even more topping than Mom's 44 ounces, whose recipe was initially not used because the tester (moi!) did not want that much chocolate sauce in the house.
(SECOND VERSION (no sugar issues))
NOTE: Your jar contains this adapted version
Dyslexic Bittersweet Chocolate Sauce
1 cup pure-cane sugar
1 12-oz can of evaporated milk.
2 TBL water
3/4 C light corn syrup (Karo)
12 oz. 70% bittersweet chocolate* chopped into slivers
8 oz. 54% semi-sweet chocolate* chopped into slivers
8 oz. unsalted butter** room-temperature and cut into chunks
*Callebaut, **Plugra
Place chopped chocolate in heat-proof bowl and partially melt over simmering water. Remove to counter. To a non-stick pot, add sugar, evaporated milk, corn syrup, and water and stir continuously over medium heat until mixture comes to a gentle boil. Simmer and stir for 4 minutes to insure the sugar is completely dissolved. Remove from heat and—using a small strainer to remove the milk solids—pour over the melted chocolate. Stir continuously until all the chocolate is melted. When the chocolate is cool enough to touch, stir in the soft chunks of butter.
Boil six 8-ounce canning jars for 5 minutes. Remove, dry and while jars and rims are still hot, ladle the chocolate in and seal. When cool, store in the refrigerator.
Microwave for 30-second spurts at 50% power to warm.
Enjoy,
Marilyn in FL
