50 Bar Recipes - Chocolate Chocolate and More! (2024)

FAQs

What percent dark chocolate is best for chocolate chip cookies? ›

Balance Is Best

"At home, I like to use anything that's at least 66 percent and higher. Since the dough itself is sweet, darker chocolate balances it out beautifully," she says.

Unsweetened chocolate is 100% cacao chocolate, with no added sugar. Folks like to use unsweetened chocolate in baking because it can give baked goods a very intense chocolatey flavor.

What does triple chocolate mean? Triple chocolate refers to the use of three different kinds of chocolate in a recipe. Usually the bake itself is chocolate flavoured and then two other kinds of chocolate are added to create the “triple chocolate”.

Health benefits of 100% dark chocolate include the following: Combats the presence of free radicals, which cause chronic illness and disease. Improves the function of the vascular endothelium (the cells that line the insides of your blood vessels) Reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease.

Cacao powder is packed with flavonoids, which have been shown to help lower blood pressure, improve blood flow to your brain and heart, and help prevent blood clots. The antioxidants in cacao and cocoa may affect how your body responds to insulin, which could lower your chances of diabetes.

The Bottom Line. Use of “cacao” versus “cocoa” on chocolate products is inconsistent. Generally, raw cacao products — made from fermented, dried, unroasted cacao beans — are less processed and healthier. Still, standard dark chocolate with at least 70% cocoa is a good source of beneficial antioxidants and minerals.

Bittersweet chocolate is a great option for most baked goods (one of our favorite recipes is our Chocolate Chunk Brownies). It has just the right balance of sweetness and a rich cocoa flavor, which is why this chocolate is the most popular among our culinary customers.

So, in turn, a product that is labeled cacao is the raw bean and is often packaged as vegan chocolate that has been minimally processed with no additives. Cocoa, on the other hand, is a processed chocolate product, such as chocolate bars and powder.

Criollo Cacao currently makes up just 0.01% of all the cacao grown in the world. Criollo is a very rare and precious variety of cacao that was at risk of extinction for many years. It is the cacao of the Mayas and the Aztecs, the cultivation of which has been progressively abandoned owing to its low yield.

“Chocolate” is a term to decribe the level of darkness of an African American's skin tone. It is a medium brown as apposed to a dark brown.

What is 100% dark chocolate good for? ›

Dark chocolate has several times more antioxidants than green tea or red wine. And it contains substances that may help lower your blood pressure, improve your cholesterol levels and brain function, and help your body deal with insulin. But some dark chocolate also has high levels of refined sugar and additives.

If no products other than chocolate liquor and cocoa butter are used, this is sold as 100% chocolate. Typically you only get up to 99%, because they also add vanilla and other minor additives. If sugar is added, you get dark chocolate. If there is both sugar and milk solids, it's milk chocolate.

Finally such dark 90% bars are perfect to use in chocolate cakes and other baked goods where you need to add chocolate, and the high cacao content will give your more control over exactly how much sugar ends up in the final product. This lets you create extra sumptuous dark chocolate desserts!

A bar of 100% dark chocolate is made with zero sweetener, and often no ingredient other than cacao beans. Some companies use additional cocoa butter or a small amount of plant lecithin to smooth out the chocolate in the refiner, but must maintain that chocolate at a minimum of 99.75% cacao by volume.