Dairy-free milk chocolate: how we make it creamy without milk
Cashews, coconut and cacao butter do the job milk powder does in other bars.
“Milk chocolate” and “dairy-free” sound like they can’t both be true. The name comes from the milk solids that give classic milk chocolate its softness and creamy taste. Take the milk out and you’d expect something thin and flat.
Our Original Milk and Roasted Pistachio bars are milk-style chocolate with no dairy at all. Here’s how that works.
What milk does in chocolate
In a traditional milk chocolate, milk powder does three things. It mellows the bitterness of the cacao, it adds fat that makes the bar melt smoothly, and it brings a round, slightly sweet flavor of its own. To make a dairy-free version, you need something else to do all three.
Cashews and coconut
We use two ingredients. Organic cashews, ground fine, give the creaminess and a gentle, almost buttery flavor. Organic coconut adds more of the fat that makes chocolate melt the way it should, plus a hint of its own sweetness. Together they do the job milk powder does in other bars, and they do it with ingredients that happen to be plants.
The rest of the bar is what you’d expect from us: organic cacao, organic cacao butter and organic unrefined maple crystals. Our Original Milk is 42% cacao, which puts it in milk chocolate territory while keeping plenty of real chocolate flavor. No refined sugar, no milk, no soy.
What it tastes like
Expect a creamy, mellow bar with a caramel warmth from the maple and a nutty softness from the cashews. It’s not a copy of a candy-aisle milk chocolate, and we didn’t want it to be. It’s a milk chocolate for people who like to taste the cacao.
The Roasted Pistachio version adds roasted organic pistachios on top of the same base, for crunch and a toasty, savory edge.
Who it’s for
Anyone who avoids dairy, whether that’s by choice, for a vegan diet, or because milk doesn’t agree with them. Both bars are vegan, paleo-friendly and certified kosher parve, which means no dairy ingredients and no shared-dairy status under the kosher rules.
One honest note: these bars are made with cashews, a tree nut, and the Roasted Pistachio also contains pistachios. If tree nuts are a concern, our Original Dark and Coconut Crisp are the bars to look at.
Try it
If you’ve been missing milk chocolate since giving up dairy, the Original Milk is the one to start with. Keep it at room temperature and give it a second to soften on your tongue. That’s the cashew and cacao butter doing their work.
Shop the dairy-free milk chocolate bars →
