What comes to mind when people think chocolate is usually the creamy, sweet, melts-in-your-mouth milk chocolate that you see coating most candy bars and other delicious chocolate treats. Well, there’s cocoa in that too, but chocolate can come in many other forms as well.
Chocolate in its purest, least processed form is raw and that has the most nutritional value. Powdered cocoa, cocoa nibs, and chocolate liquor are all forms of pure chocolate. It’s chalked full of antioxidants and the purer you eat this stuff, the more nutrients you’ll get from it.
Unsweetened chocolate is a combination of cocoa solids and cocoa butter. Still fairly pure, this is the least processed form of chocolate aside from raw cocoa.
The next level of chocolate processing is bittersweet chocolate. Chocolate liquor with some sugar, a little more cocoa butter, and some vanilla are the basics to the bittersweet variety of chocolate. Semisweet is a little sweeter, but both of these types would be used for mostly baking purpose as they’re very