The Complete Handbook of Baking Chocolate

Chapter 1: Understanding Baking Chocolate

Baking chocolate is not a single thing. At the most basic material level, it is a solid dispersion of finely ground cocoa solids, cocoa butter, sugar, and often an emulsifier like soy lecithin. That is it. But the way those components interact under heat and shear is the difference between a ganache that sets smooth and one that splits, or a cookie that spreads properly and one that holds a hard, cracked dome. Before you can choose a chocolate, you need to know what you are actually handling on a physical and chemical level. Flavor matters, of course, but flavor is the last variable to consider when the product fails structurally.

Let's start with the two primary solids. Cocoa liquor, also called cocoa mass, is what you get when you grind roasted, shelled cocoa beans into a paste. That paste contains roughly 50-60% cocoa butter and the rest cocoa solids. Cocoa butter is a fat that is solid at room temperature but melts sharply near body temperature, around 32-35°C. Cocoa solids are the non-fat particles that carry most of the flavor and the brown color. When a label says a chocolate is 70% cacao, that number includes both the cocoa liquor and any extra cocoa butter added into the formulation. The sugar percentage is simply the remainder. So a 70% dark chocolate contains 70% combined cocoa solids and cocoa butter, and 30% sugar. A 54% semi-sweet bar contains 46% sugar. That sugar is not just