Why we sweeten chocolate with unrefined maple crystals
One ingredient, from one tree: what maple crystals are and why every Uplift bar uses them.
Pick up almost any chocolate bar and the second ingredient is sugar. Usually it’s refined cane or beet sugar: white, neutral, and there to do one job, which is to make the chocolate sweet. We wanted the sweetener to do more than that. So every Uplift bar is sweetened with unrefined maple crystals instead.
What maple crystals are
Maple crystals are maple syrup with the water taken out. The sap is tapped from maple trees, boiled down into syrup, and then dried until it turns into fine golden crystals. Nothing is bleached, nothing is added. What’s left is the maple itself, in a form we can blend into chocolate the way other makers blend in sugar.
That’s the whole recipe for the sweetener: one ingredient, from one tree.
Why it tastes different
Refined sugar is designed to taste like nothing but sweet. Maple crystals carry their own flavor: a warm, caramel note that you’d recognize from good maple syrup. In a dark bar it sits underneath the cacao, so the chocolate tastes rounder and less sharp. In our dairy-free milk and white bars it adds the kind of warmth you’d normally get from caramelized milk.
The flavor is also a little less sweet, bite for bite, than white sugar. We think that’s a good thing. It lets the cacao do the talking.
Why we chose it
We started Uplift with a simple idea: a chocolate bar should be made from ingredients you’d be happy to read out loud. Organic cacao. Cacao butter. Nuts, coconut, spices. And a sweetener that’s a real food rather than a refined one.
Maple crystals are less processed than refined sugar, and they bring the maple’s own character along with them. They let us make a bar with no refined sugar at all, which matters to a lot of the people who buy from us, including those following a paleo way of eating.
They also happen to be delicious.
How we use them
Every one of our eight bars uses the same sweetener, from the 72% cacao Original Dark to the Matcha Latte white chocolate. You’ll see “organic unrefined maple crystals” near the top of every ingredient list. There’s no refined sugar, no corn syrup, and no artificial sweetener anywhere in the range.
If you’ve never tasted maple-sweetened chocolate, start with the Original Dark. It’s the plainest bar we make: organic cacao, maple crystals and cacao butter, and nothing else. Then try the Almond Pink Salt, where the maple plays off the salt. By then you’ll know whether you’re a maple person. Most people are.
