What is bean to bar chocolate?
Bean to bar means, as it sounds, "bean to cake". When you talk about Bean to bar chocolate, you really mean artisanal chocolate where the entire process has been made by the same producer in one location from cocoa beans to finished chocolate. You have not bought ready-made chocolate or chocolate mass and melted it into a cake, which is the usual way of "making chocolate". Bean to bar chocolate is a complex and time-consuming craft and today there are only a few players in the Nordics who make chocolate from scratch. Svenska Kakao is one of the pioneers in the Nordics in bean to bar chocolate and what makes our chocolate unique is that we partly find and buy cocoa from producers that we have met and visited personally so that we have an insight into the entire process from the harvesting of the cocoa fruit to the chocolate in your hand. Our goal is also to bring out the natural taste of the cocoa bean with as few ingredients as possible. Much like wine and coffee, there are a variety of flavors that naturally occur in cacao and vary by variety, terroir, weather and process. We want each chocolate cake to be a unique taste experience.
What is dark chocolate and is 70% always best?
When you talk about dark chocolate, you usually refer to chocolate between 70%-100%. What does the percentage mean in a chocolate? Many people think that the darker the chocolate, the finer the chocolate, but that is actually an incorrect indication. It really only tells you how much of the chocolate consists of cocoa in relation to other ingredients. In a chocolate that has two ingredients (cocoa and sugar) and is 70% dark, 70% consists of cocoa and 30% of sugar. Quality is determined by the quality of the cocoa, which variety it is and how it was grown and processed. If you make a chocolate with 70% of poor quality cocoa, the chocolate will not be good, no matter how dark it is.
What is milk chocolate?
Milk chocolate is often confused with light chocolate. Milk chocolate is really just chocolate that contains milk. There are examples of dark milk chocolate around 50% or even darker where you exclude sugar completely and only make a chocolate with cocoa and milk.
What is white chocolate?
White chocolate is the cocoa fat with sugar and milk. You get the cocoa fat by pressing the cocoa mass (the finely ground cocoa beans), then you get a powder and a fat. The powder is what you are used to seeing in the trade as cocoa powder. You can use the fat to make white chocolate.
