What Makes a Great Baking Chocolate?
No baker’s cupboard is complete without a few bars of baking chocolate. Whether sweetened, unsweetened or white, its versatility can make baking chocolate a welcome addition to a variety of recipes. Some use coarsely chopped chocolate chunks as a substitute to traditional morsels in their cookies. For others, it’s a staple ingredient for homemade frosting or pans of brownies. Because semisweet and white baking chocolate are meant to be enjoyed as an ingredient, they are judged both in an unbaked state as well as baked into other dishes in application. While some qualities of semisweet and white baking chocolates can actually be detected from their uncooked bars, the overwhelming bitterness of unsweetened chocolate requires it to be judged in application only. In both sweetened and unsweetened chocolate, there must be a significant chocolate aroma that also carries subtle notes of tobacco, leather, earthy notes and perhaps floral tones. In semisweet chocolate, sweetness will lead the ta
