When baking or cooking with chocolate, be sure you're using the right type. Your recipe's success depends on it.
Unsweetened chocolate (also called baking or bitter chocolate):
This is pure chocolate liquor, or the meat of the cocoa bean with no sugar added. The flavor is intense, partially because of the concentration of chocolate solids (42 percent to 50 percent). The rest of the flavor and fluidity comes from cocoa butter -- by U.S. standards it must be at least 50 percent to 58 percent of the total. Unsweetened chocolate cannot be substituted for sweetened chocolate by adding sugar.
Semisweet, bittersweet and dark chocolate:
Most sweetened dark chocolates fall into this category. The range is from very dark and slightly bitter (usually called bittersweet) to moderately dark and fairly sweet (semisweet). These chocolates are blends of chocolate solids, cocoa butter, sugar, lecithin (an emulsifier) and flavorings.
Proportions of sugar and added cocoa butter vary from brand to brand, but all must contain at least 35 percent chocolate liquor. Many of the darker varieties contain more than 50 percent. (Note: the dark chocolate we used in the accompanying recipe had 73 percent cocoa liquor.)
If you are selecting among European chocolates, you may come across chocolates simply labeled "dark chocolate" with no information on degree of sweetness. As a rule, dark chocolates are comparable to American bittersweet, although some may actually be as sweet as American semisweet.
In America there are no legal definitions of the terms bittersweet and semisweet. What one company sells as bittersweet may be judged semisweet by another. In most recipes, various dark sweetened chocolates can be used interchangeably. (My own rule of thumb has been to use Callebaut Bittersweet when recipes call for chocolate other than unsweetened.)
Milk chocolate:
Milk chocolate must contain milk, specifically about 12 percent milk solids and 3.5 percent butterfat. Milk chocolate is generally considered an eating rather than cooking chocolate but must contain 10 percent chocolate liquor.
White chocolate:
In the United States, white chocolate cannot be labeled as such, because it contains only cocoa butter and no chocolate solids. This can lead to customer confusion, as manufacturers must describe their white chocolate without using the word chocolate, for example: white confectionery bar or morsels, white baking bar. The best white chocolates, most of which are European, will include cocoa butter and no other fats.
Real white chocolates are ivory-colored (as cocoa butter is) and have a delicate, faintly chocolatey aroma and taste. Imitation white confectionery coatings are often whitish and have a cloying, overly sweet taste and smell.
Source: "The International Chocolate Cookbook" by Nancy Baggett
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