It is hard to find many people who don’t like chocolate. The cocoa product is a delicious treat that is enjoyed in many different forms all over the world. However, chocolates have not always been treated like the sweet dessert the way it is now. In fact, in the earlier days, the cocoa fruit was used to make alcohol and was known as a bitter beverage.
Nowadays, chocolate is available in many different varieties which are made from different ratios of sugar, milk, and other ingredients. Chef Ido Fishman has collected information about some of the major types of chocolate because listing all the available forms of chocolate will be an impossible task. So, if you are curious to learn more about the delicious treat that you enjoy so often, then continue reading this article.
Main Types of Chocolate
Milk Chocolate
Milk chocolate is the most commonly available form of chocolate. The chocolate bars that you enjoy eating are mostly made from milk chocolate. Milk chocolate is produced with different ratios of milk, sugar, and cocoa. The cocoa percentage is much lower than the milk percentage in milk chocolates. The milk can be added during production in milk, powder, or condensed form. Milk chocolates have a light to medium brown appearance and are widely available as candy bars in different varieties such as with nuts, crunch, dry fruit, etc.
White Chocolate
White chocolate contains more amount of milk than any other type of chocolate. This makes it similar to milk chocolate however it differs in that it doesn’t have any solid cocoa compounds in it. This is why this chocolate has a white appearance. It has additives such as vanilla added to it to enhance the overall flavor. While white chocolate has the least amount of cocoa butter added to it, it still has near 20% of cocoa butter because that is the least percentage of cocoa butter that a product needs to have to be considered a type of chocolate.
Dark Chocolate
This type of chocolate is the closest form of cocoa. Dark chocolate doesn’t have many additives added to it for enhancing the flavor and for this reason it is often called plain chocolate in many regions. Dark chocolate does not have any milk component in it. Typically, you will find two different forms of dark chocolate in the market. These are sweet and semi-sweet forms. Moreover,Ido Fishman explains that there’s a special kind of dark chocolate, known as the coverture dark chocolate which is used by professional bakers.
Ruby Chocolate
This is the newest type of chocolate that has been discovered. The company that created this form of chocolate had been working on producing it in high quality since 2004 and finally managed to produce it in 2018. The ruby chocolate is made with a special variant of the cocoa plant which is known as the ruby cocoa bean. This ruby cocoa bean is a rare variety of the typical cocoa bean which is why it took such a long time to produce a bar of ideal ruby chocolate.
Ruby chocolate has a ruby color which sometimes comes across as a pink hue. Some people say that this chocolate type has a hint of raspberries in it however the manufacturing company denies the use of raspberries in its production. The new type of chocolate still tastes like chocolate but it has a very different flavor than the other forms of chocolate.
The Bottom Line
In this food blog, Ido Fishman shared the four main categories into which all chocolates can be divided into. Different forms of chocolate are used for different purposes. By just changing the ratio of the ingredients used to make them can create a completely different flavor. So, now that you have learned how to categorize chocolates into four main types, you can easily distinguish which type is used in a sweet dish or ice cream.