I love chocolate, you probably love chocolate, dogs probably shouldn’t love chocolate. You should know what chocolate is or why else would you have clicked on this article?.
I was going to give a short adjective filled description of it like dark, sweet and bitter goodness, but I realized that that just doesn’t actually work for chocolate. Not every chocolate is dark, sweet, or bitter.
Trying to make a description of chocolate is like trying to guess every time you’re going to win big at PlayCroco Online Casino. It’s just not really possible.
Maybe You Can Say Chocolate is Chocolatey?
You might honestly disagree with what I’ve just said. You think you have some perfect description of chocolate that I could use. But then you probably don’t know just how many chocolates there are out there. Spoiler alert; there’s a lot.
But before we can get to all that we need to figure out
What Makes Chocolate Chocolatey?
The one universal ingredient among all chocolates is of course the cocoa bean. Although it’s also sometimes called the cacao bean. They are the same thing, just different names.
This comes around from the fact that cocoa is not an English word, but one transliterated from other languages.
Specifically the language Nahuatl, but even more specifically Nahuatl gets the word from the reconstructed language Proto Mije-Sokean and the word kakawa.
The first type of chocolate is Chocolate Liquor. It’s also sometimes called unsweetened chocolate. Unlike the name suggests it contains no actual alcohol in it. It’s one hundred percent chocolate.
It’s made by just taking the cacao nibs, which are what they call the part of the bean that’s inside the hard outer shell (like the inside of a walnut), and grinding them into a thick brown paste.
This can then be heated and melted into a bar or chips or other chocolate things like hot cocoa. It’s one hundred percent cacao and quite bitter.
Most of the chocolate that you probably eat nowadays is not made that way. It’s got lots of different stuff added to enhance the flavor and the bean itself is processed much differently.
The bean is separated into two different things that wildly change the flavor of chocolate depending on how much is added. These parts are the cocoa solids and cocoa butter.
Cocoa Butter
Cocoa Butter isn’t just some cocoa powder mixed with butter, it’s actually one of the most vital parts of chocolate making. Cocoa butter is kind of like the liquids of the cocoa beans, they are separated out using high pressure on the beans.
The cocoa butter is where almost all the fats from the bean are. Interestingly cocoa butter is actually not brown at all, it’s white. All of the brown colorings are in the cocoa solids.
Cocoa Solids
Cocoa Solids is a lot closer to what you probably think of as cocoa powder. It’s the solids leftover from separating the two parts of the cocoa bean. It’s where a lot of the bitter, chocolatey flavor is. It lacks almost any of the fats that are all in cocoa butter which is what makes the creamier flavor of some chocolate.
Almost all chocolate is made from a mixture of these two parts. Along with usually sugar, milk, and other added flavorings like sometimes vanilla.
The Different Types Of Chocolate
White chocolate is the first type of chocolate we’ll talk about. It’s a type of chocolate made out of only cocoa butter and no cocoa solids. It’s made by combining sugar, cocoa butter, vanilla, and milk along with one other ingredient.
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