mix, mix… stir, stir

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie baking adventure continues with more cookies. I wasn’t sure how these cookies would stay together with chunks of bittersweet chocolate, semisweet chocolate, and white chocolate, in addition to peanuts, and only a third cup of flour, even less cocoa powder and a couple of eggs acting as a structural binder. Impossible. The ingredient list just didn’t look structurally sound. It is deliciously confounding, and maybe I shall have another to further analyze the situation.

Not only are these cookies structurally sound, they are so delicious. They taste like the cookie version of a Dairy Queen Peanut Buster Parfait. Sandwich a couple of them around some vanilla ice cream and you might have to pay a flavor royalty fee to DQ! The recipe also called for raisins, but I omitted them out of respect for David’s aversion to raisins, and no harm was done to the end result. I used honey roasted peanuts that I raided from David’s personal snack supply, which he wasn’t too happy with initially but seems to be enjoying his peanuts in the cookies just fine.

These powerfully chocolaty cookies deserve to be made with really good chocolate. With so many varieties of chocolate involved it is important to incorporate the full spectrum of chocolate flavors or the end result might border on sickly sweet. What I mean by the full spectrum is chocolates that are distinctly different from one another based on how sweet they are. If you are interested in the differences and learning how to decipher chocolate labels, read on… but first you need to know you can find this fantastic recipe in Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours and I would like to thank Claudia of Fool for Food for selecting such a winner of a recipe for this week.

Deciphering Chocolate Labels
The common terms used in describing different types of chocolate are cocoa powder, unsweetened, bittersweet, semisweet, milk, and white. It seems reasonable enough that these terms alone would sort out the different types of chocolate on the market, and in some situations that’s the case, but too often there are big differences between two chocolates that are both labeled “semisweet” for example. In a few instances the labels are pretty clear; with unsweetened chocolate you know it’s going to be bitter chocolate with no added sugar, but beyond that it can be a bit of a mystery.  The way to determine the difference between one bar and the next is to decipher the formula of cocoa solids, sugar, and total fat in the chocolate.

This has become easier with the increasing variety of specialty chocolates available on the market these days. More information is available on the chocolate packaging as manufacturers work to distinguish their product from all the others on the shelf and we consumers benefit from this additional information because it gives us some data to work with that is consistent across the board rather than relying on terminology that is open to interpretation. The data I am referring to are the numbers such as 58%, 61% 70% that are very common on chocolate packages anymore. You might also see a series of three numbers like this, 60/40/38. This is the key to knowing what you are buying. One company’s bittersweet might be another company’s semisweet, but when you are dealing with the numbers, the terminology doesn’t really matter.

The three ingredients in chocolate are cocoa solids (also called cocoa mass or cocao liquer), sugar and fat. Cocoa solids are simply cocoa beans ground into a fine paste. The numbers indicate the composition of the chocolate with regard to the percent cocoa solids, percent sugar and percent fat. A bar labeled 70% indicates that 70% of the weight of the chocolate is cocoa solids and fat, therefore 30% is sugar. A 62% chocolate will have more sugar and taste less bitter. When the numbers are shown as a series of three, such as 60/40/38, the first number is the percent cocoa solids, then the percent sugar, and the third indicates the percent fat. Knowing the percent fat is important when melting chocolate to dip candies or coat molds because the greater the amount of cocoa butter the better the melted chocolate will flow.

Referring to the percentage of cocoa solids in a chocolate is a more accurate indication of the sweetness of a chocolate than relying on a term. However, it does not determine the flavor because like coffee beans or wine grapes, cocoa beans are very complex and the flavor is influenced by where the beans grow, how they are fermented, roasted and processed in to chocolate. The best way to determine what kind of chocolate you like to eat is to taste a lot of it!

Milk chocolate is milder because it has added milk and a high percentage of sugar. Because of the added milk and large amount of sugar, the ratio of cocoa solids and cocoa butter are lower. This makes milk chocolate softer so it won’t have the crisp snap that a 70% dark chocolate has.

White chocolate doesn’t actually contain any cocoa solids at all, which is why it doesn’t taste like chocolate. It is made from purified cocoa butter, milk solids, and sugar. It has as soft creamy texture rather than the crisp snappy texture of dark chocolate.

Cocoa powder is made from the left over cocoa bean once the cocoa butter has been extracted. It is really a by-product of cocoa butter. It is this left over part of the cocoa bean that has all the flavor and color, so it provides a very intense chocolate flavor when added to foods. Cocoa powder is naturally very acidic so some cocoa powders are treated with the alkaline agent, potassium carbonate, to neutralize the pH. This is referred to as “Dutched” cocoa powder because the inventor of the process was Dutch. Dutched cocoa powder has a milder flavor and a darker color.

I hope this helps you sort out your chocolate choices the next time you are standing in front of a dizzying selection of chocolates trying to decide what to buy.

Tags: Chocolate, Tuesdays with Dorie

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