Dark chocolate
Cocoa solids and cocoa butter with sugar, where the percentage on the label is the total of the first two and tells you less than people think.
Also called plain chocolate (UK); bittersweet chocolate (US); semisweet chocolate (US) — Conventionally sweeter than bittersweet, but neither term has a fixed composition.; couverture (TRADE) — Chocolate with a higher cocoa butter content, made to flow thinly. Not simply better chocolate.
Dark chocolate is cocoa solids, cocoa butter and sugar, usually with a little lecithin. The percentage on the front is the combined weight of solids and butter, and the rest is essentially sugar — so a 70% bar is about 30% sugar and a 55% bar about 45%.
What that number does not say is how the 70% divides. Two bars at the same percentage can carry quite different amounts of cocoa butter, and in anything where the chocolate is the structure — a ganache, a mousse, a set filling — the cocoa butter is what sets it. This is why a ganache recipe written for one chocolate can be soup or a brick with another at the same stated percentage.
In a cake or a biscuit, chocolate is behaving as a fat and a sugar as well as a flavour. Melted into a batter it adds both, which is why swapping cocoa powder for melted chocolate is not a flavour substitution but a formulation change.
Composition and specification
What the percentage means
The combined proportion of cocoa solids and cocoa butter. It does not state the split between them, and the split is what governs how firmly the chocolate sets.
A statement of what the labelling convention means rather than a measured property of any bar.
RecordedTrue by definition rather than by measurement
What changes if it is left out
Cocoa powder gives the flavour and almost none of the fat or sugar, so it is a substitution that changes the formulation rather than the taste alone. Milk and white chocolate carry more milk solids and, in white chocolate's case, no cocoa solids at all — they are not interchangeable with dark at the same weight in anything that has to set.
Follows from the composition account above and from BakeHQ's cocoa powder record.
RecordedFollows from evidence recorded elsewhere on BakeHQ
Storage and deterioration
Cool, dry, sealed and away from strong smells. The pale bloom that appears on chocolate stored warm or damp is cocoa butter or sugar that has migrated to the surface; it looks wrong, tastes fine, and disappears entirely once the chocolate is melted.
Storage practice. That bloom is migrated fat or sugar rather than spoilage is the standard confectionery account and is recorded here without a measurement behind it.
RecordedEstablished practice, not a measured result
Related
Used in
Its cocoa butter is what sets the ganache, which is why two bars at the same stated percentage can give quite different results.
Commonly confused with
Substituting one for the other is a formulation change rather than a flavour change: chocolate brings fat and sugar with it and cocoa powder brings almost neither.
What it does
Flavour contribution
The obvious job, and the reason the other two go unnoticed: it is also supplying a substantial quantity of fat and sugar.
Keep reading
Cocoa powder
Substituting one for the other is a formulation change rather than a flavour change: chocolate brings fat and sugar with it and cocoa powder brings almost neither.
Every ingredient, by what it does
Grouped by function rather than by shelf, so a substitution question has somewhere to start.