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Background

I've been reading Pierre Hermé's Macaron cookbook, and his recipe for bitter chocolate macarons calls for "cacao pâte (or dark chocolate 100% cocoa)". I (naiively) thought that the only thing which was 100% cocoa was cocoa powder, so this was quite confusing to me. I told my friend about the recipe, and she told me to substitute the chocolate with cocoa powder, which seems like it might end badly!

Question

What is the difference between cocoa, cacao pâte, and 100% dark chocolate?

Research I've done

I've been reading about this for the past couple of hours, without finding any resources describing how they are different, though I've found many sites which describe each thing, though often using the exact same language, frustratingly!

At the moment, my guess is it's related to the amount of the different cocoa bean derivatives in each thing (from this comment on another question), but I'd like to be able to grok it, understand more deeply how they are different (especially if it goes beyond the proportions to the way they are processed or cooked for example). Any help you could provide in this would be greatly appreciated!

Mark
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2 Answers2

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First, let's get the English terms straight. What Pierre Hermé meant is chocolate liquor, and the translator should have researched the term, instead of simply using a French word where an unambguous term exists in English.

From there, it's simply a matter of knowing how chocolate is made. First, the cocoa nibs are fermented. Then, they're ground into a paste. This paste is the cocoa liquor, an intermediate step in the production of chocolate. It can be alkalinized or left as-is.

From there, the producer can decide to produce either chocolate, or cocoa powder and cocoa butter. For producing cocoa powder, the fat (cocoa butter) is separated out of the liquor, leaving a dry-ish mass. This dryish mass is ground into powder, creating the cocoa powder you can buy in the baking aisle.

For chocolate, some cocoa butter and other ingredients are added to the cocoa liquor. Then the mass undergoes different steps (conching, tempering) until it's poured into flat shapes, packaged and sold. If no products other than chocolate liquor and cocoa butter are used, this is sold as 100% chocolate. Typically you only get up to 99%, because they also add vanilla and other minor additives. If sugar is added, you get dark chocolate. If there is both sugar and milk solids, it's milk chocolate. If no chocolate liquor is used, but only cocoa butter, sugar and milk solids, that's white chocolate.

So, they are simply three different products created from cocoa beans. They have different taste, and different applications in the kitchen. They all were created without adding anything to the beans, but the processing steps are different, so the product itself is different.

sleske
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rumtscho
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Cocoa beans are processed into two different products. Cocoa powder and cocoa butter. As the names suggest, the first is a powder and the second one has a consistency similar to regular cow milk butter.

A 100% dark chocolate is a mixture of these two, proportions calibrated so that you actually get a solid bar. If you look at the ingredient list, it may give you the proportions.

I'm not sure whether cocoa pâte refers to pure cocoa butter or is also a mixture of cocoa butter and cocoa powder. As the recipe suggests replacing it with 100% chocoloate I would guess for a mixture. Either way, in your recipe you can't replace it with pure cocoa powder. That will fail. If you can't get cocoa pâte or 100% dark chocolate a high percentage dark chocolate should also work. It will additionally contain some sugar which shouldn't be a problem for macarons and could also be compensated if you want.

quarague
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