Is white chocolate made from the same cocoa beans as dark chocolate?
Yes, white chocolate is made from the same cocoa beans that are used to make dark chocolate. With one simple yet big difference. White chocolate is made solely from the fat of the seed.
Cocoa Butter Was Born Via Cocoa Powder
Cocoa powder was invented by the Dutch in 1828 as a way to make it easier to mix drinking chocolate.
In order to make cocoa powder, the beans (or nibs, which are the kernels of the beans) have to be pressed to release most of the fat. Cocoa beans are naturally about 50% fat. Pressing them removes most (not all) of this fat. What is left over is called a cocoa press cake, which is everything in the nib minus most of the fat. This hard dense “cake” is then ground into powder to create cocoa powder.
In the 19th C cocoa butter was just a waste product of making cocoa powder. There wasn’t much use for it until the English used it to create the worlds first solid eating chocolate. Prior to this chocolate was taken as a drink like coffee or tea. So what to do with this cocoa butter? Make white chocolate!
What is white chocolate then?
We use cocoa butter to make white chocolate. White chocolate is made by blending that cocoa butter with milk powder and sugar together in a chocolate refiner. Vanilla is often added as well. It comes out smooth and with the same properties as dark chocolate, but with a different flavour and colour obviously.
But the cocoa butter, the fat, is what makes white chocolate so similar to dark chocolate. It’s the properties of the cocoa butter that make any chocolate so unique in the way it feels, holds, and melts.
White chocolate is like an egg-white omelet. It’s still an egg omelet, but without the yolks. White chocolate is still chocolate, but without the cocoa solids.
White chocolate is a type of flavoured cocoa butter chocolate.
White chocolate isn’t really the third type of chocolate. There are many chocolates made today that are made exactly like white chocolate, but without the milk powder.
This can include a raspberry bar (cocoa butter, sugar, raspberry powder), a mango bar (cocoa butter, sugar, mango powder), almond bar (cocoa butter, sugar, almond butter), a matcha bar (cocoa butter, sugar, milk powder, matcha powder), and the list goes on.
White Chocolate Impersonators
There are white chocolate products, either labelled white chocolate or misleading you to think they are white chocolate. These are often made with other vegetable fats such as palm kernel oil. They replace the cocoa butter with these fats and go on to add milk powder, sugar, and vanilla. This is not chocolate. No ingredient from cocoa beans are contained within this. It’s a candy, a confection, but not chocolate.
Real white chocolate should contain cocoa butter as it’s base.
White Chocolate Quality
There are grades of quality for white chocolate as well. A higher quality will have more cocoa butter and less sugar. A low quality white chocolate will be very thick when you try and temper it, due to the lower cocoa butter content. It will also taste a lot more sweet.
As well, the health benefits one obtains from eating high percentage dark chocolate are absent in white chocolate. Those benefits stem from the polyphenols and minerals found in the cocoa solids (brown part) of the cocoa bean. Since white chocolate contains no cocoa solids, just the fats, one does not receive the same benefits as one does from dark chocolate.