How to Make Mushroom Chocolate Bars

Mushroom chocolate is growing in popularity, and for good reasons! Mushroom chocolate tastes delicious, is super shelf stable, and is very easy to portion or dose anything else that’s inside, like your favorite mushrooms.

If you use high-quality cacao in your chocolate, which we definitely recommend, you’re also getting health benefits from this wonderful plant. Cacao is high in antioxidants, flavonoids, and essential vitamins and minerals, such as magnesium, iron, and calcium. Cacao supports heart health, and energetically is known as a heart opener.

Combining cacao with your favorite medicinal or magic mushrooms to make chocolate is a tasty way to support your mody, mind, and soul! 

By the end of this article, you will know how to make your own mushroom chocolate! You can start completely from scratch using a chocolate refiner, or we’ll also teach you a low-tech method if you just want to buy chocolate bars from a store and mix your preferred mushrooms with them. 

👉Do you learn better visually? Check out our Mushroom Chocolate tutorial on YouTube!

Thank you to Maestro Chocolatiero, Paddy from Corazon de Cacao (Etsy shop here) for lending his expertise to this article and video!

Mushroom Chocolate Ingredients

Did you know that chocolate comes from the fruit of the cacao tree? The Mayans even used to use it as money — so back in the day, money did grow on trees!

Here’s a quick list of everything you need to make mushroom chocolate. Read on for more about proper sourcing and the process!

Ingredients/Equipment:

  • Chocolate refiner
  • Cacao beans (dried, roasted, and peeled) OR high-quality chocolate bars that are 80-90% cacao
  • Sugar of choice
  • Powdered dry mushrooms/powdered mushroom extract
  • Kitchen scale
  • Spatula and spoon
  • Bain-marie 
  • Bowls for water baths (bigger than bain-marie)
  • Kitchen thermometer
  • Chocolate bar mold or other container like Tupperware/baking dish
  • Optional: Syringe

Sugar

We like to use panela! Panela is derived from cane sugar and is a less refined, less processed form of sugar. It’s rich in minerals and higher in fiber. 

If you can’t find panela, the most important thing when making chocolate is that you use a dry ingredient — something like a muscovado sugar would be too wet, but almost any other type of sugar is acceptable, like white sugar, brown cane sugar, or coconut palm sugar.

Do not use maple syrup, honey, or agave nectar to make chocolate. If you use something that’s wet, you’re creating a different kind of product. Chocolate is a dry, stable product. You can buy a chocolate bar and if you store it well, a year later it’s in exactly the same condition — and might have even gotten better! But if that chocolate had moisture inside it, then it wouldn’t be stable, it would mold and decay. 

Mushroom Powder

You will also need dried mushrooms to make into powder, or a dried mushroom extract powder. 

PRO TIP: Certain mushrooms you can use dried, like Lion’s Mane, Cordyceps, or Psilocybe, because they don’t contain much chitin. If you want to make chocolate bars with mushrooms like Turkey Tail or Reishi, you will need a mushroom extract powder* instead of a direct mushroom powder. Otherwise there’s too much chitin, which will give you stomach aches. 

*We at Fungi Academy personally use and recommend mushroom extract powder from SuperFeast! Use code FUNGIACADEMY for 10% off your order.

If you’re starting with whole dried mushrooms, make sure to powder them first before putting them in the chocolate refiner (more on that below).

How to Make Mushroom Chocolates from Scratch

Here’s an overview if you’re interested in making your own mushroom chocolate. Cacao and chocolate refiner machines are now available all over the world, so it’s super doable with a small investment to be making your own mushroom chocolate at home.

👉If you want the low-tech method of making chocolate, click the button below!

1. Grind your cacao beans

To transform the dried cacao beans into chocolate, make sure to grind them up first. We traditionally incorporate sugar at this point. 

2. Refine your cacao beans

If you want to make mushroom chocolates using cacao beans, then you’re going to need a machine called a chocolate refiner. The main job of this machine is to refine the solid particles in your recipe down to below 30 microns, which ensures a silky, glorious, incredible texture!

Why is this necessary? Cacao is a very crunchy bean; it has a lovely texture, but it is not smooth like chocolate. This bean is about 50% fat (also called cacao butter) and 50% solids. The cacao butter is what makes chocolate smooth, but it doesn’t have a lot of flavor, and so it’s the solids in the chocolate that make it really tasty and super special.

You’ll want to add your cacao beans, mushroom powder, and sugar of choice to the machine (at the ratios below) and let it mix until the particle size is below 30 microns, which takes about 2-3 days. 

Mushroom Chocolate Recipe:

  • 75% cacao beans
  • 15% panela or natural sugar
  • 10% mushroom powder

For this next part of the process, we will temper the chocolate. Tempered chocolate is beautiful, crisp chocolate that is shelf stable and tastes great!

3. Melt the chocolate in a bain-marie

Transfer the chocolate into a bain-marie and begin melting the chocolate. This can be done by holding the bain-marie over a pot of hot water on the stove and continuously stirring it until the chocolate is melted. IMPORTANT: Make sure the temperature always stays below 100° Fahrenheit. 

4. Lower the temperature of the chocolate

Once the chocolate is melted, put the bain-marie inside a cold water bath and, with a rubber spatula, turn and fold and mix your chocolate. If you have kids or are a child at heart, you can sing this song while you do it!

At this point, as you’re folding the chocolate, it should begin to thicken because crystals are forming. You’ve got to be really careful not to let it solidify on the sides, and to make sure you don’t get lumps. Stir and fold the chocolate, while consistently checking the temperature, until it reaches 76° F.

🌈The More You Know: When the temperature gets below 80° F, something magic begins to happen. Type four crystals begin to form. The fat in chocolate (cacao butter) can set in a polymorphic crystal structure, which basically means it can solidify in different ways. And when we temper, we create type five crystals, and that is super stable and allows our chocolate to be nice and shiny. It comes out of the mold easily, it snaps, and it keeps all the qualities that we want it to.

5. Raise the temperature of the chocolate

Once the chocolate reaches 76° F, move the bain-marie to a warm water bath. You don’t want the water to be too hot — around 100 to 120° F tops. 

Now, you just need to raise the chocolate to 86° F. If you go higher than that, especially after mixing mushroom powder in it, you’re likely to take it out of temper. 

6. Mix in mushroom powder

Now you’re going to mix in your mushroom powder, constantly stirring and keeping a close eye on the temperature. It’s very important that you don’t go over 88° F, because if you do, you will melt the crystals that you’ve made.

Make sure you incorporate all your mushroom powder really nicely and evenly by hand. 

7. Pour your chocolate into a mold

Remove the bain-marie from the water bath once the chocolate is 86° F and all the mushroom powder is mixed in evenly. Make sure to wipe the bottom of the bowl so the water does not drip into the mold. 

If you want to make beautiful chocolate bars, you’re going to need a mold. But if you don’t have one, you can also use Tupperware or baking dishes. If you want to be really precise, you can add the chocolate to a large syringe and add it to the mold that way.

If you don’t have a syringe, simply pour the chocolate into whatever molds or containers you have available, weighing the bars on your kitchen scale as you’re pouring them if you want to be precise.

As the chocolate is settling into the mold, make sure to tap it on the table to settle the bubbles. 

8. Put your chocolate in the fridge for 20 minutes

Set an alarm so you don’t forget to take it out!

9. Remove your chocolate from the fridge and let it sit at room temperature overnight

Chocolate should stay in the molds for 8-12 hours overnight, but not in the fridge — just at an ambient temperature of around 60 to 70° F. You don’t want to leave your chocolate in the fridge overnight because the crystals will get deformed. 

You’ll know the chocolate is ready when it falls out of the mold after a little wiggling on the sides. 

At this point, you will have beautiful tempered chocolate in the shape of whatever you put it in. Hooray!

How to Make Mushroom Chocolates: Low-Tech Method

Good news: you can make your own mushroom chocolate without a refiner! You can just buy some really good chocolate bars and the chocolate maker has already done the hard part for you.

IMPORTANT: Make sure you buy chocolate that is 80-90% cacao for this process. You need to be making chocolate that is 70% cacao or more. And we urge you to be super careful about where you buy your chocolate from. If you buy brands like Hershey’s or Nestle, you are likely supporting slavery and exploitation.

If you want really high-quality and ethical chocolate, we recommend the brand Corazon de Cacao, which is run by Paddy, the chocolatier who lent his expertise to this article – Etsy shop here. It’s all directly traded from Guatemala, ethically sourced, really well produced, and has a massive positive impact for the local communities growing the cacao.

PRO TIPS: You will need multiple chocolate bars to fill up a chocolate bar mold. Make sure you have plenty on hand! In this low-tech process, you do not need to add sugar because the chocolate bars you bought already contain sugar. 

Once you source your chocolate (skipping Steps 1 & 2 from the full instructions above) 👉Start at Step 3 of the process — melting your chocolate. 

Knowing Your Dose

Knowing the exact amount of mushroom powder in your chocolate is much easier if you use a chocolate bar mold, but it’s possible with any kind of mold.

Make sure to use a scale when you’re pouring your chocolate into the molds, so that you know exactly how much chocolate is in each bar, and therefore, how much mushroom powder it contains.

Following the recipe, the chocolate contains 10% mushroom powder. So if you have a 50g bar of chocolate, you will have 5g of mushroom powder in each bar. Depending on how many pieces of chocolate per bar are in your mold, each piece may be a microdose or a little more! 

Make sure to weigh and properly label your mushroom chocolate bars so you, and anyone you may be sharing them with, know exactly what’s in them. 

We hope you feel empowered to make your own chocolate. Let us know how it goes!

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