Why does white chocolate taste as it does and what is it made from?
John Clayton, Cambridge
- White chocolate is coagulated cocoa butter. Cocoa butter is the vegetable oil that comes from cocoa beans. White chocolate has no cocoa powder in it, which is why it tastes the way it does, and why it is white instead of brown like chocolate is.
Daniel Morgan, Boston USA
- Funnily enough, white chocolate is made from the cocoa bean. If you open up a fresh cocoa bean, the flesh is white. This is where the flavour comes from. However, because the bean isn't roasted, which is what gives 'milk' or 'dark' chocolate its flavour, white chocolate is 'white'.
Nick, London UK
- The flesh of a cocoa bean is certainly NOT white, nor is it fleshy. The centre of a cocoa bean is called "nib", and is hard and brown. I know this because the factory in which I am senior process engineer processes about 50,000 tonnes of cocoa beans a year. The first answer was closer, in that white chocolate is a combination of pressed, filtered and refined cocoa butter, milk, sugar and other vegetable fats. It contains no "cocoa solids" at all.
Simon Blake, England
- Black chocolate is made of a mixture of cocoa powder, sugar and cocoa fat, plus some minor ingredients as emulsifiers (usually lecithin) and vanilla aroma.The resulting flavour is a combination of the cocoa fat, the sugar, the cocoa powder and the vanilla. And the color comes from the cocoa powder.White chocolate is made in the same way as black, but without the cocoa powder and with a little bit of skimmed milk powder. That is why it is not dark and the flavour is different.
Santiago, Herentals Belgium