White Chocolate
Chocolate purists like Mrs. Pastry will protest the presence of this substance in the chocolate section as it really isn’t a chocolate at all. The only reason it’s called “white chocolate” is because it contains cocoa butter — and you can tell if the white chocolate is reasonably high quality as it delivers that inimitable unctuous cocoa butter mouthfeel. White chocolate is among the sweetest of the chocolate confections at 55% sugar (though that’s a maximum by law in America). The rest is made up of cocoa butter (up to 30%), milk solids (15%) plus lecithin as an emulsifier. Lower quality white chocolates make use of cocoa butter equivalents (CBE’s) like palm oil, and as with low quality milk chocolates you can really taste the difference.
I’m with your Mrs. This stuff is to chocolate what lite beer is to beer. The name is the only thing that puts it in the category. I am looking forward to trying the caramelized thing as I expect that will have an interesting flavor. If all I wanted to eat was fat I think beef tallow would be as good.
But I do appreciate your thoroughness, we can always count on you covering every legitimate piece of a topic. That is really very nice of you.
You do me great credit, Frankly! I appreciate it. Thank you.
– Joe
I had to go and buy some white chocolate to try this caramelisation thing. Then I had to have a little bite of it because I hadn’t eaten white chocolate in decades. Our local Whittakers is actually rather nice, it has a slightly caramelly flavour straight off the bar. Looked up ingredients to compare with yours and it seems much more milk and less sugar: 30% minimum milk powder and 28% cocoa butter, which leaves 42% for the sugar and anything else. Still seems a lot of sugar though.
Wow…30% milk powder! But then what else would I expect from a nation that’s one of the world’s top dairy producers? I’ll have to try to find some New Zealand white chocolate some time.
Cheers,
– Joe