The guy I mentioned above in the thread, the owner of a small European food import company whose very small warehouse was in Oakland, CA told me that the sign of a quality chocolate bar was how it breaks. If it breaks cleanly leaving a very smooth surface at the break that signifies quality. Cheaper chocolate will not break cleanly and smoothly like that.
I have never considered trying to make chocolate from cocoa beans. What I have done is make some pretty fine English toffee, for which you need some good chocolate, have also made some very nice chocolate mousse. I have bought quite a variety of quality cocoa powders, principally to make hot cocoa. My favorite remains Droste.
So there's a few different kind of chocolate products available on the market. In theory, everything comes from the bean of the cacao pod. From there, you have
true chocolate & you have
compound chocolate. Most of the American products available are compound chocolate, which removes/reduces the cocoa fat & replace it with vegetable fat (cheaper) & some type of sweetener:
You know your cacao from your cocoa but do you know what sets compound chocolate apart and what it can be used for? Dark,…
www.hotelchocolat.com
With true chocolate, you typically have the cocoa mass (bean mush, which is later flattened into liquid using a melanger), cocoa fat, sugar, and maybe like milk powder. It goes through several crystallization stages (sort of like water, steam, and ice) in a process called tempering. Properly-tempered chocolate has several characteristics, including the signature "snap" that you mentioned. I actually use my sous-vide wand to do my tempering at home:
Tempering chocolate is a technique that requires a good deal of precision, but some methods for doing it are easier than others. Read on to discover how to temper chocolate using both traditional and updated techniques, including with a sous vide circulator or with a food processor and hair...
www.seriouseats.com
The reason European chocolates are so much better has to do with the laws regarding chocolate. In America, chocolate is only required to be 10% cocoa. In Europe, the minimum is 20%. If you've ever had a European Cadbury bar, those are 23% cocoa, whereas a Hershey's bar is only 11% cocoa:
There is great debate on European versus American chocolates: is one better than the other? However there is no debate. Neither European nor American chocolate can be considered better, it’s really just a matter of taste preference. To distinguish between American and European chocolates...
www.gourmetboutique.net
Then there's even more watered-down products, like Almond Bark (a brand name used for inexpensive melting chocolate, aka Candiquik), which is great for doing stuff like dipping Oreos or cake pops with, as it's very easy to work with & holds up well. There's also couveture chocolate, which is true chocolate, but has a higher percentage of cocoa butter (31% minimum), so that it's easy to melt. The difference is that couveture still needs to be melted, whereas Almond Bark type of products simply need to be melted, making the cheap stuff a lot easier to work with:
Learn the difference between couverture chocolate and compound chocolate in terms of ingredients, taste, price etc. Get more info on couverture vs compound chocolate at Theobroma now!
theobroma.in
I'm not a chocolate snob; there are different products & reasons why you would use different types of chocolate, including the "cheap stuff". I got into bean-to-bar because my juicer (Champion-brand masticating) is capable of doing 2 tasks:
1. Splitting beans
2. Creating cocoa mass
So basically, I can roast the beans in my APO, then split the beans from the husk/shell in the Champion, the take the resulting broken beans (nibs, can optionally roast the nibs at this point too for a different flavor) & grind those into cocoa mass (also called cacao liquor, baking chocolate, etc.), throw those into the melanger to liquify, add sugar, milk powder, lecithin etc., then make my chocolate from there, so that I get full control over the final product. It's amazing to me that human beings were inspired to take nasty-taking beans, go through this whole crazy process, and make wonderful chocolate out of it lol. So the owner you mentioned was correct: true chocolate has a signature snap to it, which compound chocolate doesn't have. It's not better or worse, it just depends on what you like. I love Snickers & Kit-Kat bars, probably because I grew up with them & have nostalgia for them, but I also appreciate real chocolate bars. If you can find Milkboy Swiss Chocolates locally (like at World Market), their Alpine Milk chocolate is one of my favorite ones available state-side:
Milkboy Milk Chocolate bars feature the finest alpine milk in order to create creamy, milky, and silky smooth chocolate that melts in your mouth and delights your tastebuds. We combine such high-quality Swiss Alpine milk together with the finest quality cocoa beans from the world’s best and...
milkboy.com
The process to make chocolate is a bit tedious & particular, and requires some special tools, but it's not hard, especially because you can split it up over time. I'm still refining my process to get what I'm looking for, as there are some very specific milk & dark chocolate flavors I'm going after. There's a lot of factors that go into flavoring true chocolate, including:
1. The beans themselves: the type of beans, the environment (location), the drying process on-location, etc.
2. The processing of the beans, including the bean-roasting process & optionally the nib-roasting process
3. What's added to the liquified beans (cacao silk, milk powder, sugar, etc.)
The nice thing is, you can jump into making custom chocolates at a variety of levels! Full bean-to-bar is a pretty serious setup, requiring time, precision procedures, and expensive equipment. Fortunately a lot of the prices have gone down (ex.$600 APO, >$400 Champion juicer, >$500 melangers, etc.), but you can also just buy quality chocolate & do sous-vide tempering with a vac-seal bag, or even do basic procedures like the seeding method. For compound chocolate, you can simply microwave it or use a double broiler to melt it down, no tempering required, so if you want to make basic chocolates, chocolate bars, candy bars, chocolate truffles, and chocolate desserts, it's not a huge pain in the neck! You can even use chocolate chips to make some pretty good treats!
And that's the fun of it...there's multiple levels & depths available, different flavors of cocoa powder & chocolate, there's hot chocolate & mole sauce & chocolate bars & chocolate ganache & chocolate syrup, there's South American beans & African beans, all kinds of stuff to dive into! It's been a fun rabbit hole getting into the whole process of chocolateering. One of my IT clients owns a specialty chocolate shop (100% vegan & organic, $32/pound, SUPER successful despite the cost!) so I've gotten to see a lot of the processes hands-on, which is really cool! I'm currently assembling a coating attachment for my Kitchenaid like this one, which will be fun for chocolate-coated stuff like nuts, raisins, cereal pieces, etc.:
Most of my preferences lie in commercial candy (Reese's PB cups etc.). Lindt & others have good bars, and if you can find a quality chocolate shop in your area, that's a great place to check out different styles of hand-made chocolates. Personally, 60% is kind of my stopping point for pure bars, although I use 72% in a lot of my cookies & other projects, like sous-vide pot de cremes. What's crazy is the access to have to tools & ingredients at home...I can do a sous-vide pot de creme with fancy chocolate & have it come out better than a $20 dessert at a local high-end restaurant, which is super awesome haha!