Nell

January 10, 2014 at 9:53am

Sigh... My problem is that I'm in Europe where I can get two kinds of cocoa: some that's very dark (not black). The package says nothing about the process by which it is made, only claiming that it is dark, aromatic, and irreplaceable for drinks and baking. The fat content is given at 10-12%. If I make it into cocoa to drink, it looks greyish-reddish-brown - not an attractive color, though it is what I usually put into something I'm baking because there it seems to have a stronger flavor than my other option. Since I don't have any idea if it's 'dutched' and I didn't know anything about the information above, I've never paid attention to how it behaves with leaveners. It's definitely not black, but it's darker than any of the others above. In color, I'd place it between A and D or E. In taste... milder, perhaps, but similar, I think, to the Hershey's (which I haven't tasted in 20 years, so who knows?). The other option looks more like B above, only a shade darker (the same kind of brown as B). Perhaps because it 'looks' more like I think of milk chocolate looking, it's my go-to for hot cocoa, but I never feel like it's as chocolatey as the darker stuff in baked goods (maybe that's just tasting with my eyes, though). This calls itself 'fat reduced' cocoa, but then the ingredients label puts the fat content at 11%, so it doesn't seem to be substantially lower-fat than the other. Now that I bother to taste them one after another, I find that the darker one tastes smoother and almost 'nutty' compared to the lighter one, which tastes almost bitter on the tip of my tongue. That's all the concrete information the labels offer me. Do you have any guess what I may be working with here, and why one is labelled 'extra dark' and the other is not? Is one 'dutched' and the other not? And what's the point, by the way, of taking the fat out? Does the fat change the flavor? Or would the fat just go off and turn the powder rancid? I saw a 'natural' cocoa in a health-food store (on the same shelf with full cocoa beans and crushed cocoa beans) and if I remember it had a fat content of something like 20%. What would one do with that, and why would it be worth getting?
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