Substitute for cocoa butter

Cocoa butter is widely used in chocolate making, confectionery and baking because it has neutral flavour, withstands high temperatures and sets very firm.

Cocoa butter is part of chocolate coverture and it’s the ingredients that help to get your chocolate nice and shiny and to have a great snap when you break it. 

If you buy cocoa butter separately, you’d know that it can be quite pricey. In fact that’s the reason why cheaper chocolate doesn’t contain much cocoa butter and is regularly replaced by other butters and oils. 

So, what do you do if your recipe calls for cocoa butter and you don’t have any? Or if you are concerned about the cost of cocoa butter and want to use more affordable ingredients?

In this blog post I want to explore some of the options you have when you want to replace cocoa butter in your chocolate making or cooking.

What are the best substitutes for cocoa butter?

• Regular unsalted or salted butter
• Coconut butter
• Coconut oil

The actual use of the different substitute for cocoa butter will depend on what you are trying to achieve.

Regular chocolate making

First of all, I should point out that cocoa butter is plant-based, so there is no need to replace it in case you are adapting your recipes for vegan diets. 

No matter what you replace the cocoa butter with, you need to understand that the consistency, texture and the flavour or your final product (chocolate) will change. As long as you are fine with that, then go ahead and swap the cocoa butter for something else.

For chocolate making you ideally want your cocoa butter substitute to be firm enough and withstand slightly higher temperatures. 

Best substitute for regular chocolate making

• Coconut Butter
• Coconut butter is firmer than coconut oil. It’s not as firm as cocoa butter but it will work well. 
• Cocoa Oil
• Regular Butter (salted or unsalted)

Raw Chocolate Making

The best replacement for cocoa butter in raw chocolate making:

• Cold pressed cacao butter
• Cold pressed coconut butter or oil

Cooking

• Vegetable oil
• Sunflower oil
• Coconut oil

Baking

• Vegetable oil

Confectinery

Cocoa butter is used in confectionery to firm up, add shine and fluidity to certain recipes. My favourite recipe for nougat uses cocoa butter to make the texture more shinny. I this case I know I can easily use any kind of oil or butter to make this recipe as the butter is there not to firm up the texture (like in chocolate making) but to add shine and fluidity.

Be careful about using coconut oil in confectionery that has a delicate flavour, because the coconut can overpower it. In my nougat recipe, if I have to replace the cocoa butter, I use basic sunflower oil, because it doesn’t have any taste and it’s affordable to use.

• Vegetable oil
• Sunflower oil
• Coconut oil
• Regular dairy butter
• Coconut Butter

What is Cocoa Butter?

To put this simply, cocoa butter is an ingredient in a chocolate. It’s a natural fat derived from cacao beans and used for chocolate making, cooking, baking and also widely used in cosmetics. 

When cacao beans are harvested, they are dried, roasted and then go though a process where all the main ingredients (cocoa butter, cocoa mass and cocoa solids) are separated. The ingredients are then put back together to create coverture based on individual recipes.

This process allows for the creation of milk chocolate (where sugar and milk powder is added) and also white chocolate (only cocoa butter is used together with sugar and milk powder). It also allows the manufacturers to produce a different strength of chocolate like 50% – 85% cocoa solids plain chocolates.

Cocoa butter is also sold separately for individual culinary uses, chocolate making and the cosmetics industry.

As I mentioned before, cocoa butter is quite expensive, which often leads the mainstream chocolate manufacturers to replace it with a cheaper alternative like vegetable fats or palm oils.

Unfortunately (or not, depending on your point of view) the cosmetics industry can easily charge £60 for a pot of face cream with cocoa butter, where an artisan chocolate producer struggles to push a chocolate bar for £6. Both use cocoa butter for their product, but sadly the customers are used to paying different prices. 

Cocoa butter nutritional facts

One tablespoon of cocoa butter is a pure fat. It’s 120 calories and 14 grams of fat and nothing else. This is about 900 calories per 100 grams, but you are unlikely to use that much in a single recipe. There is no protein, carbohydrates, sugar or fiber, which is something to bear in mind if you are counting calories.

Cacao butter

Cacao butter comes from the same cocoa beans as cocoa butter, but the process of extracting the butter is a bit different. Cacao butter is perfect for using in a raw chocolate making as it’s extracted by cold pressing the cocoa beans and it all happends under the low temperature of 46-48C.

Some also argue that cold pressed cacao butter is also healthier, but please bear in mind it’s still pure fat and has the same nutritional value as cocoa butter. It does mean that this way, the cacao butter still contains high antioxidant levels, which is why it’s highly regarded. The process is more complex and takes longer than the regular way of extracting the cocoa butter, so be prepared to pay more for a raw cocoa butter.

Since cacao butter is the closest to the cocoa butter, you can substitute it in any recipe or chocolate making without any problems. The taste, smell and the texture will be exactly the same.