From the Pantry: Chocolate

Chocolate needs little introduction. The word will immediately call to mind melted, velvety textures, complex and bittersweet flavors, and rich aromas. First, a little on how this ingredient goes from bean to bar. The journey begins on cacao-harvesting plantations, the largest of which are found in Ivory Coast and Ghana. After the cacao beans and pulp are removed from their shells, they’re fermented for two to eight days and then dried completely. From there, the beans are shipped to the chocolate- and cocoa- producing factories, where they’ll be roasted, broken into nibs, and then ground and refined to create chocolate liquor. Chocolate liquor is a thick liquid, the result of pulverized cacao nibs releasing their precious, fatty cocoa butter and mixing with fine cocoa granules. This chocolate liquor then meets a fork in the road: it can be pressed into a cocoa cake, removing all cocoa butter, to become powdered cocoa, or it can begin the refinement process to be turned into chocolate.

To make chocolate, chocolate liquor, milk solids, and sugar go through the process of conching—a refining step where a machine called a conche rubs and grinds the ingredients together until they become smooth and homogenous. What goes into the conche decides what kind of chocolate will be created. For example, milk chocolate receives lactose, butterfat, and milk proteins. By the end of conching, which can take up to 36 hours, all that’s left is for the newly formed chocolate to cool down and solidify.

Unsweetened chocolate is often sold in blocks and sometimes called “baker’s chocolate,” a crumbly, extremely bitter chocolate made to be melted down and added to batters or transformed into a ganache you’ll sweeten yourself. As a general rule, semisweet will contain 60% cacao, bittersweet will be in the low 70% range, and dark will lurk in the 70% and up tiers. Milk chocolate is all about a lower-percentage-cacao chocolate getting the creamy blessing of lactose and milk solids during the conching process. It is smoother and sweeter than any other type of chocolate, and if a recipe calls for it specifically, it’s best you not stray from directions.

Then there’s the white chocolate elephant in the room. For many years, white chocolate has been considered a misnomer, considering that it has only cocoa butter. This would qualify it as a confection rather than a chocolate. But the term is regulated, just like regular chocolate: it has to contain at least 20% cocoa butter and 14% milk solids to be called white chocolate.

Beyond the types of chocolate, you need to know how chocolate behaves in baking, as opposed to cocoa powder. In cake batter, melted chocolate stirred into the batter will make a very different cake than a cocoa powder-based cake. Cakes with melted chocolate in the batter will be more temperature-sensitive, with the cocoa solids hardening up in the refrigerator and creating a drier-crumbed cake. Cocoa brownies will have a chewy crumb, whereas brownies made with melted chocolate will be densely fudgy. It all has to do with the cocoa butter in chocolate, which acts much like regular butter does in baking. Like any fat, cocoa butter makes the texture smoother and creamier. Meanwhile, cocoa powder can create very dry baked goods because it absorbs moisture and has no cocoa butter.

But for today’s bakers, perhaps no chocolate is more preferred than the wafer or féves. Larger in size than the chip or chunk and with fewer chemical stabilizers, féves (“little trinkets” in French) are oval chocolate pieces, preferred by the likes of Jacques Torres for his perfect chocolate chip cookie. Valrhona is the most famous purveyor of féves, creating a whole line that runs from blond to dark chocolate. In the same realm are chocolate wafers, which are slightly larger than chips and spread out in a flatter disk shape because of an extra boost of cocoa butter. 

Chocolate can make or break your frosting—literally. You’ll need to properly melt your chocolate before transforming it into whipped chocolate buttercream or silky ganache. Melted chocolate, when introduced to water or heated too much and/or too quickly, can seize up. When melting it on the stove, it’s best to use the double boiler method, in which chocolate is melted over a pot of simmering water and not exposed to direct heat. Also, chop or break up your chocolate before melting so it receives heat evenly. When you do add your melted chocolate to your next ingredient, make sure the ingredient is room temperature. Cold ingredients will cause the chocolate to clump up.

Baking with chocolate can be a finnicky, frustrating, and—for a lack of a better word— temperamental business. But after one bite of that still-warm-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookie, you’ll know it’s worth it.