Saturday 16 February 2008

How come White Chocolate is White?

I was watching TV when suddenly the question hit me, chocolate is made of cocoa and its dark brown, while white chocolate is so milkly and yummy but its white, how could manufacturers extract all the brown stuff and make it white and taste somehow better? and does it have cocoa anyhow? i went and googled the whole process and i got some interesting findings; white chocolate is not considered chocolate; in fact the ingredients of each are so different.

The story behind a delicious bite of Chocolate goes like this; there is the Cocoa Tree which is grown in equatorial areas of Africa, South America, and Asia, this tree produces a fruit that is similar in size to a pineapple and has large numbers of cocoa seeds that looks like ("ishta" fruit, white and seedy) , these seeds get their exterior removed and are sun dried for six days for fine chocolate production while artifically dried for shorter periods in mass production, afterwards it gets roasted to generate the flavour and grounded to produce a viscious liquid called the Chocolate liquor (not alcoholic). So, Chocolate liquor is pure, unsweetened chocolate. Eaten in this state, it's pretty nasty because it is bitter, You can do two different things with chocolate liquor, You can pour it into a mold and let it cool and solidify. This is unsweetened chocolate. Or you can press it in a hydraulic press to squeeze out the fat. When you do that, what you are left with is a dry cake of the ground cocoa bean solids and ((cocoa butter)), If you grind up the cake, you have cocoa powder. You can buy both unsweetened chocolate (baking chocolate) and pure cocoa powder at the grocery store. What you are buying is ground cocoa beans, either with or without the cocoa butter.
now, we get the mix for your taste part to actually start making chocolate! and this involves the following:
1- Ingredients: The chocolate that we eat contains sugar, other flavors (like vanilla) and often milk (in milk chocolate). The chocolate maker adds these ingredients according to his or her secret recipe
2- Conching: A special machine is used to massage the chocolate in order to blend the ingredients together and smooth it out. Conching can take anywhere from two to six days.
3-Tempering: A process where the chocolate is slowly heated, then slowly cooled, allowing the fat cocoa butter molecules to solidify in an orderly fashion. Without tempering, the chocolate does not harden properly or the cocoa butter separates out.
The most essential part to the previous three steps is the blend of cocoa beans and the percentage of cocoa butter and the level of roasting, where the art and guarded secrets of chocolate makers :)

so, i didnt tell you why White Chocolate is white yet? because white chocolate is purely made of cocoa butter, milk and sugar which i guess is a natural health disaster, you might buy a white chocolate bar and it tastes nasty, the reason is that manufacturers sometimes use vegetable fat instead of cocoa butter which tastes horrible, and if you wonder why the white chocolate or chocolate itself tastes so good, it is the cocoa butter!
  • Baking Chocolate is pure solid chocolate liquor without anything added
  • Cocoa Powder is Cocoa bean solids; cocoa liquor pressed to remove the cocoa butter
  • Milk Chocolate is Pure cocoa liquor with extra cocoa butter, sugar and milk solids; more milk than chocolate liquor
  • White Chocolate is Cocoa butter with sugar and milk; no cocoa bean solids



3 comments:

Maher said...

So i am trying not to eat because i am doing my Diet thingy..and your post didnt help at all! AT ALL!

i think i am gonna have some right now!

I love Chocolates!! waa333

PS : cool background!

Mimi Cooks said...

I love love love white chocolates...and i love real chocolate too! i could eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner and in between too! Thanks for the very informative post...well done!

Tala said...

Maher no no!! don't ruin your diet, all i wanted to say is watch for the ingredients when you buy chocolate, ya3ni, don't buy whites, go for plain dark and low fat milky ones, even its good to make your chocolate milk at home from cocoa powder, the more yumyumness means more cocoa butter, but i love white chocolate :/

thanks for noticing the background :) i got it from deviantart.com

Summer Thank you, im happy you found it informative =D, you are always welcomed here :) i always found this piece of info confusing and i didnt know the real distinction between, sweetened, semi sweetened and baking chocolate, white chocolate, in all shades its artful