J.R. Johnson

Today I am going to caramelize white chocolate, and then use it to make white chocolate passionfruit tofu pudding. 

There are a number of ways to caramelize the chocolate, the most traditional being a 250F oven for 45–60 minutes, stirring every ten minutes or so. A second option is to sous vide the chocolate at 90C for anywhere from 4 to 12 hours, but that’s a long time and I have dessert-making to do now.

I think I’ll start with the quickest of the options I’ve found so far: the microwave.

… (time passing)… (muzak from your preferred era)… (stepped away to make a lemon meringue pie because it’s Mr Man’s favorite and, you know, Valentine’s Day)…

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Success! It took seven minutes of microwave time total, plus all the opening the microwave and stirring and closing the microwave door and … you get the picture. I’m glad I tried it but next time I will test the sous vide method. It takes a lot longer but it’s all hands off.

That said, all that microwave time paid off. Caramelized white chocolate is freaking delicious. 

I made another batch of tofu chocolate pudding, subbing in the caramelized white chocolate for dark, passionfruit simple syrup for plain, and lime juice for the vanilla. It is quite good but a little too sweet straight from the blender. It may balance out once it chills. If I try it again I’ll reduce the amount of syrup considerably (half? less?) and up the lime. (Actually, next time I’ll probably just toss a block of tofu in the blender with the white chocolate and go from there.) 

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