The Styles of Chocolate
Dark Chocolate: Semisweet and Bittersweet Contains at least 35% cacao (aka chocolate liquor or ground cacao nibs) and no milk. If labeled 60% cacao, it contains 40% other ingredients, mainly sugar. The terms are not standardized, so semisweet and bittersweet can be...
Chocolate Ingredients
Only two raw materials go into making plain (dark) chocolate: cocoa beans (including additional cocoa butter from the beans) and sugar. In general, as cacao content goes up, sugar goes down, and usually the quality of the chocolate goes up as well, since that is what...
How Chocolate is Made (cacao to confection)
The cacao tree grows only in tropical rainforests 20 degrees north and south of the equator. The fruits are pods shaped like a shriveled football and sprout directly off the trunk of the trees, which grow 20-50 feet tall. Inside the pod is a sweet…
The Chocolate-Love Connection
From long before Montezuma’s 50-cup-a-day habit in the 16th century to today’s obsession with varietal dark chocolate at any price, it’s obvious there’s something compelling and perhaps addictive about chocolate. Chocolate contains hundreds of chemical components,...
