Bill Collins - How to Make Chocolate Candies: Dipped, Rolled, and Filled Chocolates, Barks, Fruits, Fudge, and More. A Storey BASICS® Title

Cocoa pod, open, showing beans inside

Dark chocolate. For many people, dark chocolate is the standard for great taste and elegance. It can range from being a bit sweet to having almost no sweetness at all. The higher the cacao percentage listed on the label, the less sweet the chocolate.

Milk chocolate. Unlike dark chocolate, milk chocolate contains milk or milk solids. Its lighter in color, and it usually has more sugar, which makes it sweeter than dark chocolate.

White chocolate. To some people, this technically isnt even chocolate, as it contains no cocoa powder. It has a different taste and texture from the other chocolates but is still quite popular for many treats and is often used as a decoration and design enhancement for other chocolate candies.

Semisweet and bittersweet chocolate. Usually sold as chocolate chips, this type of chocolate can be used for making fudge and ganache. Semisweet is slightly sweeter than bittersweet, although the sweetness varies from brand to brand. They can usually be used interchangeably.

Unsweetened or bakers chocolate. This type of chocolate contains 100 percent cacao, meaning that it has no sweetness at all. Unsweetened chocolate is almost always used in baking and rarely used in candy making.

Cocoa powder. Unsweetened chocolate in its dry form, cocoa powder is usually used in baking or for hot chocolate. It also has its place in candy making as a popular finishing touch to roll truffles in cocoa powder. The unsweetened powder is a nice counterpoint to the very sweet truffle, as well as having a pleasant mouthfeel.

Couverture. This very high-quality chocolate is used mostly for making molded candies and for coating ganache to make two of the truffle styles. It has more cocoa butter than other chocolates, which gives it a smoother and slightly thinner texture for pouring and molding. This means your candies will have more shine and snap than any other chocolates. It comes in dark, milk, and white chocolate. The name, couverture, is French for cover.

Compound coatings. A number of companies sell chocolate wafers and other products that are made to melt easily and look good, no matter what you do to them. While these usually do contain real chocolate, its best to avoid them because they also contain other ingredients, including oils, to ensure that theyll turn out candies with shine and snap. The problem is that compound coatings do not have the flavor of real chocolate, and that will be evident when you taste your chocolate candies.

At this point, youve decided to make chocolate candy. You might already know what you want to make. How do you decide what kind of chocolate to use?

Recipes, catalogs, and websites often refer to buying, using, and eating good-quality chocolate. The most important thing involved in choosing good-quality chocolate is simply to find one that you like. This is one of the many fun parts of making chocolate candy. You can use one of many high-quality chocolates, including Callebaut, Valrhona, Ghirardelli, Scharffen Berger, L. A. Burdick, Merckens, Trader Joes Belgian, Guittard, and so many others. Any of these will give you terrific results. If you have the time before you make the chocolates, this would be a great opportunity to do a taste test. Or better yet, you can become even more popular with your friends and family by inviting them over for a blind taste-testing party. If they didnt love you before, they certainly will now.

Deciding on a favorite can take years of experimentation, if not a lifetime. Like me, you may find that your favorite changes from year to year or maybe from week to week. Or even from bite to bite. And it might not be just a solid piece of chocolate. It might be an orange-scented truffle or a piece of dark bark with perfectly toasted almonds. Thats the beauty of chocolate. You can love it all.