Who doesn’t like chocolates? Chocolates are everyone’s favorite! They are widely consumed around the world. From children to teens and adults everyone loves chocolate. Apart from giving a treat to your taste buds, they also contain many health benefits such as lowering blood pressure, keeping heart diseases at bay, and also act as mood enhancers. The global consumption of chocolate is nearly 1 kg per capita every year. That’s a lot of chocolate consumption!
Real and high-quality chocolate contains only a short list of ingredients. The difference in chocolate flavors is the type of cocoa bean, fermentation, and terroir, as well as the proportion and type of ingredients used in the chocolate formula. The love for chocolate has made everyone curious about the ingredients used in it. Let’s review them one by one.
Dark chocolate flavor ingredients
1. Cocoa or Cacao
Cacao (also known as cocoa) is the main ingredient used in making chocolate. Chocolate must contain a minimum amount of cocoa to be qualified as chocolate. In UK and EU, milk chocolate must contain at least 35% of cocoa solids to be legally qualified as chocolate. In the US it must contain at least 10% cocoa solids.
Cacao is derived from the fruit of the Theobroma cacao tree which contains seeds. These seeds are collected, fermented, dried, roasted, and eventually ground into chocolate liquor.
2. Cocoa Butter
Cocoa butter is used in the process to make chocolate to improve the texture and helps fortify it with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.
3. Sugar
Sugar is one of the popular ingredients used in making chocolate. It turns the naturally bitter-tasting flavors into an edible and delicious treat. The amount of sugar varies in every kind of chocolate. Dark chocolate can contain between 20% to 40% sugar and milk or white chocolate, can contain 40% percent or even more.
4. Milk (or milk) Solids
Milk solids are also referred to as milk powder. These are one of the main ingredients in white and milk chocolate. As cow’s milk is high in sugar it adds a creamy and sweet taste to the product.
5. Lecithin
Lecithin is a food additive used in chocolate as an emulsifier. Although it’s not an essential ingredient it helps to bind sugar, cocoa solids, and milk to the cocoa butter.
6. Vanilla
Vanilla extracts have been a popular addition to chocolate for the centuries. Vanilla extract is added to the chocolate to enhance the flavor of chocolate and give it a creamy, balancing sweetness, and counters acidity and bitterness.
7.Flavoring, Inclusion, And Coloring
From raspberry to whisky added flavors, are just a few popular ways of spicing up a bar of chocolate. Flavorings are added in many ways but commonly drops of oil are used because they don’t change the texture of chocolate and only require a small amount.
Conclusion
If you are a food manufacturing company looking for high-quality food ingredients for your chocolate industry, consider sourcing them from Excesa.
Excesa is the leading food ingredient directory where you can find everything you could ever want or need. We have listed all kinds of food ingredients, and food product suppliers in our directory to help you make your sourcing easy.