Know your ingredients: Chocolate

This is the first of a planned series of posts about common ingredients.

Chocolate is, with the possible exception of sugar, the hardest ingredient in a bakery to use. Cooking sugar involves a zen-like focus on the thermometer, watching for a one degree rise. Sugar is finicky. One wrong crystal, creeping down the side of the pan, can ruin half an hour's work. But in the end, sugar is sugar. The same cannot be said for chocolate. Chocolate is an unmistakable taste, but not an unmistakable ingredient. Even more frustrating than the variety of products crowding under the umbrella term "chocolate" is that each has a use. If I could satisfy my chocolate curiosities with "use this one, not any of those," I could rest easy. But I couldn't. So to any of you who've ever puzzled over why your ganache didn't turn out, why one brand's bittersweet taste's sweeter than another brand's semisweet, or what exactly a "melty" is, I present my annotated (yes, really) research on chocolate.

A few facts on chocolate

Photo by Hawaiian Vintage Chocolate

• Chocolate, as you probably knew, comes from the cacao bean. As you may have guessed from the colorful pods, cacao beans are grown on trees in tropical climates.  Oddly enough, the pods grow directly on the trunk and main branches, and all the way to the ground. Where most fruits grow high up in the branches, so as not to be eaten by every passing ground-walker, cacao pods are in no such danger due to a tough leathery skin.
• When harvested, the pods are split open, revealing a cavity filled with fresh cacao beans and a white, mucus like substance commonly known as pulp. The beans are then sandwiched between banana leaves on the forest floor and fermented. After this fermentation (a component, I'm coming to realize, of all the great foods), the beans are dried in the sun and shipped to chocolate companies.
• On arrival, chocolate makers roast the beans and crack them open, finally getting a product some of you may have seen: the cocoa nib.

Varieties of Chocolate

Not cocoa nibs

• Cocoa nibs: A cocoa nib is as pure of chocolate as most of us can get (and they can be hard to find). If you've never tasted one, they're very bitter and earthy. Some people do snack on them, or use them in place of chocolate chips in cookies, but it seems cocoa nibs are something of an acquired taste. During the next part of the chocolate making process, cocoa nibs are ground into a paste called either chocolate mass or chocolate liquor (alas, non-alcoholic).
• Chocolate mass: Chocolate mass consists of cocoa solids and cocoa butter. It is doubtful that most of us will ever see or use it in this form, but the taste is very bitter.
• Cocoa butter: Cocoa butter, which makes up 53% of a sample of chocolate mass, is what gives chocolate its melt-in-your-mouth feeling. It's what coats the mouth when a piece of chocolate melts and what gives chocolate its fluidity. It is, like other butters, a fat.
• Cocoa powder: Finally, a form we all recognize. Cocoa powder is chocolate mass with all of the cocoa butter removed. Originally a by-product of chocolate making, it sees widespread use today. Most of you have probably seen a recipe which calls specifically for Dutch-processed cocoa powder. Dutch-processed cocoa powder is more mild in flavor, darker, and doesn't lump as easily because it has been chemically treated to neutralize cocoa's acidity.
• Unsweetened chocolate: Pure hardened chocolate mass. You'll probably see it as "baking chocolate" on recipes. Recipes calling for unsweetened chocolate usually have a pretty intense flavor, so if you're going to substitute a different type of chocolate for it, be sure to decrease the amount of sugar in your recipe.
• Bitter/Semi-sweet/Dark: These are chocolate mass (at least 35%) plus added cocoa butter, sugar, flavorings, and often emulsifiers. Supposedly a bittersweet chocolate contains more chocolate mass than a semisweet (usually by 10% or so), and a dark more than a bittersweet. The problem is, the lines are blurred at best. Bitterness varies vastly by brand and especially by country of origin. A good rule of thumb is to look for a percentage cocoa over a label like "bittersweet." If a recipe calls for semisweet (~65%) or bittersweet(~70%), use whichever you prefer (or whatever you have). It is your kitchen, after all.
• Couverture: Couverture is shiny, fluid chocolate which is great for covering things. It is usually very high quality, and contains at least 32% cocoa butter. Often couverture has only three ingredients (cocoa solids, sugar, and cocoa butter) but it may also contain flavorings and emulsifiers. Couverture comes in all different cocoa percentage ranges.
• Sweet chocolate: This is one I personally have never run across in a recipe. Sweet chocolate is at least 15% chocolate mass, and contains a sweeter, less bitter flavor than semisweet, but ideally contains no milk solids. It is also called German chocolate.
• Milk chocolate: Many people favor milk chocolate for eating. Sometimes I'm one of them. The problem is, it doesn't substitute in place of other baking chocolates well because the milk solids (the only distinguishing factor of milk chocolate) burn easily. It can certainly be melted and substituted in non-baked applications, however.
• Chocolate chips: The main difference in chocolate chips is that they have less cocoa butter, so that the chips retain their shape and give you something hard to bite into in a cookie. Many chocolate chips also contain a lot of added flavors, fats, and emulsifiers, making them unsuitable for chocolate making. Keep in mind as well that in order to melt chocolate chips, you need to add some sort of fat. Cocoa butter would be ideal, but I've yet to meet someone whose pantry staples include cocoa butter. My next choice is butter. Be careful not to add too much, though. You want to keep fat percentage below 40, if you can find what percentage of fat is in your chocolate chips.
• White chocolate: Some people deny white chocolate status in the chocolate family, since the only part of the cacao bean it contains is cocoa butter (in addition to sugar, flavoring, and milk solids). Does it taste like chocolate? No. But it does have a pleasant taste which need not be compared. When substituting it in baked goods, keep in mind that it melts at a lower temperature and burns more easily than dark chocolate.
• Coating chocolate: Coating chocolate is also called compound chocolate, chocolaty coating, and any number of other, trademarked names containing the word "melt." Coating chocolate is used because it is much less expensive that real chocolate, has a higher melting point, and doesn't require tempering. There is a reason, however, that it cannot legally be called chocolate. High in sugar, very low in any part of a cacao bean, and full of hydrogenated oils instead of cocoa butter, you'll know when you bite into it. Coating chocolate has a waxy mouth feel.

Now that we know about all of these types of chocolate, we can talk about tempering. Tempering, in short, is a specific way of melting and cooling chocolate so that the fat crystals all line up in a pleasing arrangement. Tempering is what gives chocolate its shine and its snap. When chocolate has undergone this process, giving it the characteristics we prize in chocolate, it is said to be in temper. This can be hard, but there is an easy solution for most of you. The best way to "temper" chocolate is not to have to temper it at all. When chocolate is made, it's tempered. So when you go to use it, it's still in temper. The easiest thing to do, then, is to melt it without it getting out of temper. Milk and white chocolates go out of temper at about 87 degrees F(dark is closer to 90). To do this, we need to heat the chocolate very slowly. The perfect tool to do this is probably already in your kitchen: the microwave. The idea is to blast the chocolate on medium power in your microwave for about 10 seconds at a time, stirring after each blast. When the chocolate is almost fully melted, stop microwaving and stir until the last pieces dissolve. Then your chocolate is ready to use for any application.

And that, for now, is all I have to say about chocolate. The information mostly comes from the book "On Baking" by Sarah Labensky and company. 

Are there any questions I missed?

What're your chocolate horror stories?

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