Chocolate · 2.1

What the percentage on the bar means

It counts cocoa solids and cocoa butter together, and the difference between those two is larger than the difference between seventy and eighty.

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The number on the front of a bar is the proportion of it that came from the cacao bean, by weight. Everything else is sugar, plus whatever milk solids and flavouring the maker added.

That sounds precise and it hides the thing you actually want to know.

What the number does not divide

What comes from the bean arrives in two forms: cocoa solids, which carry the bitterness, the acidity and almost all the flavour, and cocoa butter, which is fat and carries almost none. The percentage counts them together.

So two bars both labelled seventy can be very different. One with more solids is bitter, drier and more intense; one with more butter is rounder, softer and milder. Nothing on the label distinguishes them, and the difference is larger than the difference between seventy and eighty.

What to read instead

The ingredient list, in order. Cacao or cocoa mass first, then sugar, then possibly added cocoa butter, then possibly lecithin and vanilla. A bar with added cocoa butter high in the list is on the softer side of its percentage.

Short lists tend to be the more distinctive bars, not because short is virtuous but because the additions are mostly there to smooth out differences.

Why milk chocolate percentages are not comparable

A milk chocolate at forty per cent has sixty per cent that is sugar and milk solids together, and how that splits changes it completely. The number tells you even less here than it does on a dark bar.

White chocolate has no cocoa solids at all: it is cocoa butter, sugar and milk. Whether that counts as chocolate is a question of regulation rather than of taste, and the rules differ between countries.

What this means at a tasting table

Ask the maker where their bar sits between the two extremes. It is a question they can answer immediately and it is more useful than the number, and it tells you at once which wine on the next table it wants: more solids wants more sweetness in the glass, more butter can take more tannin.

The entry on the three variables explains why. This is that argument applied to the one thing you can see on a wrapper.

What the number is not

Not a measure of quality. Not a measure of bitterness on its own. Not comparable across a dark bar and a milk bar. And not a claim about anything nutritional, whatever the packaging around it suggests.

Why the number exists at all

It is a regulatory minimum before it is a description. Rules in several jurisdictions set a floor for how much must come from the bean before something may be called dark chocolate, and the percentage on the front started as a way of showing that a bar cleared the bar by a distance.

It became a marketing number afterwards, and the assumption that a higher figure means a better bar came with it. Higher means less sugar. Whether that is better depends on the bean and on what you are eating it with.

Where the interesting range is

For pairing with wine, most of the useful territory is between about sixty and eighty per cent. Below sixty the sugar takes over and the sugar rule starts to bind. Above eighty there is very little sugar and often very little butter, and the bar becomes astringent enough to fight almost anything tannic.

That is a narrower range than the shelf suggests, and the reason tasting tables cluster in it.

A better question than the number

Where did the beans come from and how were they fermented. A maker who knows the answer usually has a bar worth eating, and one who does not is buying finished chocolate and moulding it, which is a legitimate business and a different one.

The words on the ingredient list

Cocoa mass, cocoa liquor and cacao all mean the same thing: ground nib, roughly half fat and half solids. Cocoa butter listed separately means fat was added on top of what the bean supplied.

Lecithin is an emulsifier that lets a maker use less cocoa butter for the same texture, in quantities well under one per cent. Vanilla rounds off sharpness. Neither is a mark against a bar and both tell you the maker was smoothing something.

Tasting a bar properly

Break a piece, smell it, then let it melt rather than chewing. Chewing skips the melt, and the melt is where the flavour is released in order: the volatile top notes first, then the body, then whatever persists.

It takes about a minute and it is the difference between tasting a bar and eating one.

The comparison people make and should not

Setting a seventy per cent bar beside an eighty-five and concluding that the second is more serious. What has actually changed between them is mostly the sugar, and possibly the butter, and the beans may be worse. The number moved and the quality did not necessarily follow it.

The one line to carry away

The percentage tells you how much sugar is not in the bar. Everything else you want to know is in the ingredient list and in the answer to one question asked of whoever made it.

Also in this part

• 1.1

  Why a dry red and a sweet chocolate fight

  The wine must be at least as sweet as the food. Everything else in this entry is a qualification of that sentence.

  Read it →
• 1.2

  Tannin and fat: what happens in the mouth

  Astringency is not a flavour. You are noticing the absence of lubrication that was there a moment ago.

  Read it →

For further context, see US cocoa-product standards.