When chocolate liquor, the paste you get when you grind roasted cacao nibs, is placed in a hydraulic press and squeezed, two products result: cocoa butter and cocoa powder. However it’s important to note that the process doesn’t entirely separate the two. Some cocoa butter remains in the cocoa powder, which is designated as either low, medium or high fat, the fattiest being 24% cocoa butter and the leanest being 10% cocoa butter. The rest is all cocoa solids.
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Cocoa butter is a very unusual fat. Granted, in its refined form it doesn’t look like much. It’s white, flavorless, odorless and soap-like in its firmness. However it doesn’t take too much fiddling with it to understand how unique it is. First there’s the low melt point. Cocoa butter is comprised of 21 different fats, all of which melt between 55 and 114 degrees Fahrenheit. The average melting temperature of those fats is 87 degrees Fahrenheit. Which means that cocoa butter melts easily in the mouth — even on the skin, which is why cocoa butter is in such high demand in the cosmetic industry.
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Couverture (fine “covering” chocolate) is at once rare and pervasive. Home bakers seldom see chocolate that’s actually labeled “couverture” and so have trouble finding it when they want to glaze a torte or batch of truffles. On the other hand many of the more expensive chocolate bars in specialty shops are technically couvertures, which means the stuff is in reality not very hard to get.
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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.
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This is not “couverture” chocolate (which means “coating” or “covering” in French), I’ll create a separate post on that subject. This is sort of couverture’s opposite, at least from a quality standpoint. Many people wouldn’t actually call this particular product “chocolate” since it has no cocoa butter in it. Rather it contains one or more so-called “cocoa butter equivalents” (CBE’s), fats like palm oil which perform similarly to cocoa butter but really aren’t the same. They don’t have cocoa butter’s silky and subtle mouthfeel, but on the other hand don’t have its rigidity (nor high price tag). CBE’s aside, these chocolates are almost identical to milk chocolate: high in sugar, low in chocolate liquor, and contain about 15% milk solids.
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Milk chocolate is the lightest and smoothest of all the major chocolate varieties, containing only about 10-20% chocolate liquor. It is the only type of chocolate that contains milk (or cream) solids, those take up roughly 15% of its volume. Milk chocolate is usually 50% sugar and the very smoothest varieties — you know, those very expensive Swiss bars — can be up to 30% cocoa butter. It all makes for a silky and delightful eating experience, if a decidedly less “chocolate-y” one. It’s for that reason that you don’t find terribly much milk chocolate in the pastry kitchen, as that small amount of chocolate liquor is easily lost when it’s used as a glaze or
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Semi-sweet chocolate also goes by the name of “dark” chocolate, at least when it’s in candy bar form, though interestingly it contains more sugar than even most milk chocolate. Semi-sweet chocolate is about 60% sugar by weight. The rest of its volume is made up of cocoa solids (about 15%) and cocoa butter (27-32%). Like bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate it has no milk solids in it, which I suppose is what makes it “dark” by some standards. Semi-sweet has fewer uses than bittersweet in my opinion, which I think is why you don’t see terribly much of it except as an inclusion in chocolate chip cookies, muffins, ice cream, that sort of thing. A lot of people just like to eat it, and really, who can blame them?
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Bittersweet (often simply called “dark”) chocolate is probably the most useful type of chocolate in the pastry kitchen, which is why I always have a little on-hand in one form or another. It’s also the most variable in its composition. Chocolates in the bittersweet family can contain as little as 35% cocoa solids or as much as 70%. Similarly, cocoa butter content can be anywhere from 25-38%, sugar content 30-50%. Bittersweet chocolates contain a small amount of lecithin and no milk solids.
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Unsweetened chocolate is nothing more than tempered chocolate liquor. Not too pleasant to taste for all but the most die-hard chocaholics, it is little more than ground cocoa bean, though the degree of grinding and processing varies from maker to maker. Most unsweetened chocolate weighs in at about 47% chocolate solids and 52% cocoa butter (which means it melts very nicely), the final 1% is usually a stabilizer like lecithin which keeps the chocolate emulsion from breaking.
READ ONBefore we start talking about chocolate I should make clear that I draw a distinction between the sort of chocolate you find in candy shops and the kind you find in bakeries or pastry shops. The former is a confection meant to be consumed on its own. The latter is a component meant to be consumed in concert with other components: flour, butter, eggs, sugar, caramel, vanilla…you get the idea. So don’t blame me (as many do) for taking a utilitarian approach to the stuff. For I look at chocolate no differently than I do any other ingredient in baking, which means that just like everything else in my kitchen chocolate is subject to Joe’s Inverse Law of Ingredient Dynamics which goes like this: as the number of ingredients in a given recipe goes down, the quality of those ingredients must go up. That means if, say, you’re making a flourless chocolate cake — where chocolate is clearly the star — you should use very good chocolate. Conversely it means that if you’re using it as a drizzle for your caramel macadamia nut tart, a chocolate of middling quality is fine. In fact it’s probably more than enough, as the delicate flavors and aromas of a rare and expensive chocolate will get lost in an ensemble.
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