How to Tell Real Chocolate From Compound Chocolate

Good chocolate costs more than regular compound chocolate but the difference is compensated with the quality of the product. The taste, texture, how much cocoa there is, and even the flavor define whether you will enjoy the product or feel something other than the pieces of it stuck to your teeth. You can hide a bad product behind caramel, nuts, and other things because there are ingredients you can’t imagine chocolate without.

5-Minute Crafts is going to teach you the main rules of how to choose good chocolate based on the ingredients and how it should taste.

Different compositions

The basic ingredient in chocolate is cocoa beans. When producing it, you can use just one kind or mix it with others to get the results you want. The beans should be peeled and fried at low temperatures to discover the flavor. After that, they are ground into cocoa mass.

Under high pressure, this paste yields 2 products: cocoa powder and cocoa butter. Or cocoa mass can be mixed with a lot of cocoa butter and sweetener to make chocolate. Basically, the first steps are about mixing and grinding raw products to make them into a paste.

The used ingredients depend on the type of chocolate that is made:

• For dark chocolate, you only need cocoa mass, cocoa butter, and sugar.
• If you add dry milk, you get milk chocolate.
• White chocolate is made with cocoa butter, sugar, and dry milk. Cocoa mass is not used. This is why some people don’t think it’s real chocolate.

❗️Vegetable fats, E numbers, artificial flavorings, soy lecithin, PGPR, vanillin, and emulsifiers are signs of generic chocolate. Cocoa butter is not used in this chocolate, it’s replaced with cheaper sources of fat, such as palm oil.

Why cocoa butter is so important

Cocoa butter is the key ingredient that makes chocolate so tasty. It melts at lower temperatures than the human body. As a result, you can feel the chocolate melt on your tongue as soon as it gets into your mouth.

Cocoa butter should be the second or the third ingredient (cocoa mass should be the first). The ingredients that are used most are the first on the list, and then those with less % in the product are listed.

Real chocolate can’t exist without cocoa butter that creates the right texture. It requires a special procedure during melting — called tempering. This is how chocolate gets the shine, the crunch, and the taste it should have.

⚠️ There might be white or gray spots on the chocolate. It happens because cocoa butter gets onto the surface over time.

The unique features of chocolate

According to experts, real chocolate wakes all of our 5 senses up: taste, smell, vision, hearing, and touch. This is probably why people say “Chocolate never lies.”

• True chocolate is smooth and shiny without any cracks or scratches.
• It can be broken into perfect pieces and you will hear a certain crunch.
• True chocolate doesn’t stick to the teeth or palate. It will melt easily if you keep it in your palm.
• The smell of cocoa is pretty bright and it also has an exotic taste.

So, compound chocolate won’t have this strong flavor and its taste will not be as rich. It will stick to the teeth because its melting temperature is higher than that of true chocolate.