The Difference Quality Ingredients Make in Handmade Chocolates
You’ll often find that when you pick up a bar of standard supermarket milk chocolate and read the back, sugar is often the first ingredient. This means that there's more sugar than anything else in the bar. Further down you’ll often see vegetable fats, whey powder and flavourings.
They’re cheaper for these companies to use and they keep the price down. They also mean less cocoa, less flavour and a waxier melt. We’ve been handcrafting chocolate treats using high quality chocolate since 2014 and this is what we look for in our ingredients and what you can look for when you buy.
Why Cocoa Quality Matters in Handmade Chocolate
We handcraft our chocolate treats using only the best chocolate. We source the chocolate from makers who roast their own beans so the biggest flavour decisions happen before it reaches us. Choosing the right chocolate is the most important quality call we make.
Beans vary a lot, this comes down to where they’re grown, which variety of tree they come from and how long they’re fermented. All of these things impact the taste. Beans that are under-fermented or badly dried taste flat, so mass market chocolate often roasts them hard and adds more sugar to cover it. Our 80% Uganda single origin hot chocolate is made from beans grown in one country and it tastes noticeably different from a blended cocoa.
The fat matters as much as the beans. Proper chocolate gets its fat from cocoa butter. Cheaper products swap some of it for palm oil or shea, which costs less and copes better in a hot lorry. UK rules allow up to 5% of these vegetable fats in anything called chocolate. Above that, it has to be sold as something else, which is why some biscuits say ‘chocolate flavoured coating’ on the packet.
Cocoa Percentage and Flavour Intensity
The percentage on a chocolate bar tells you how much of it comes from the cocoa bean, including the cocoa butter. The rest of the chocolate bar is usually sugar plus milk (in milk chocolate and white chocolate).
Across our range that runs from 30% in our crunchy blonde chocolate bar to 70% in our dark chocolate bar, with our milk chocolate bar at 34%. Each step up means more cocoa and less sugar.
Percentage tells you how strong a chocolate will be. It doesn’t tell you how good it is. A cheap 70% bar made from poor beans still tastes harsh, and a well made 34% milk chocolate bar can carry more real cocoa flavour. Read the percentage for intensity and the ingredients list for quality.
How Ingredient Quality Affects The Taste of Chocolate
Chocolate truffles or dessert bars are only as good as the weakest ingredient. Real or freeze dried fruit is sharp and a little tart, while flavourings tend to taste like sweets. In our strawberries and white chocolate slab, the strawberry is there to cut through the sweetness of the white chocolate, and a flavouring can't do that.
Filling is where a lot of supermarket chocolate brands cut corners. This is why we make our fillings fresh, such as our ganache made with cream. A long life filling might use vegetable fat, glucose syrup and flavouring instead and tends to taste sweet first and of very little after.
In our banoffee pie dessert bars, the caramel has to taste like caramel and the banana like banana, or it’s just a sweet bar with a pudding’s name on it.
Better ingredients also mean less sugar. When the chocolate and filling already taste good, sugar doesn't have to carry the flavour.
How Ingredient Quality affects The Texture of Chocolate
Cocoa butter melts at around 34 degrees celsius, a few degrees under body temperature. That’s why good chocolate stays solid in the box and melts on your tongue within seconds (or when we get very hot weather in the UK). Palm oil and other vegetable fats melt at different points.
Why Fresh Ingredients Matter in Small Batch Chocolate
We make everything in small batches at our production kitchen in Chester and send it out directly from there. Nothing we sell has spent months in a distribution centre because our chocolates are made fresh by us.
Because of this we are able to use ingredients that don’t usually survive in long supply chains. This not only means we can deliver the highest quality chocolate to you, but we can also use a larger variety of ingredients as we don’t have to worry about preserving the chocolate for months on end.
Fresh Ingredients vs Long Shelf Life Alternatives
A mass produced chocolate bar can have a best before date 12 to 18 months away. A fresh filled truffle usually has a few weeks to a month.
To stretch shelf life, large manufacturers often use a range of preservatives in their products to stop them from spoiling sooner. However, this often dulls the flavours and often changes the texture.
How to Spot High Quality Chocolate When Buying
Start with the ingredients. Good chocolate uses cocoa butter and nothing else. Palm oil or ‘vegetable fats’ on the label mean some of the cocoa butter has been swapped for a cheaper alternative, which is why a bar might feel waxy instead of melting cleanly.
Next, check the best before date. If a filled chocolate lasts a year, preservatives are what’s helping it last so long. Then it’s time to look at it and taste it. Good dark chocolate is glossy and snaps cleanly, whilst milk and white chocolate snaps more softly because of the milk contents. When you taste it, let it melt on your tongue. It should melt smoothly with no waxiness, and the flavour should carry when it’s gone.
The quickest way to see the difference is to compare. Buy a bar from the supermarket and one from our shop and you’ll be able to taste and see the difference in quality. If you’d like to try a few fillings and flavours in one go, our mixed truffles and chocolates selection is a good place to start. If you’re looking for a few options, we have free standard delivery on orders over £50.