Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/07/white-chocolate-is-technically.html
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I don’t care. I find it tasty no matter what it is named.
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I often say that “White chocolate is what is left when you take all the chocolate out.”
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I’ve been pointing this out for years. If white chocolate is your favourite chocolate, then you don’t like chocolate. 
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I’m saying the same for most milk chocolates. Most of them contain 70% other stuff but chocolate. Especially the ones I had from the US were awful.
I don’t think that 99% cocoa content is for everyone, but anything below 50% is NotChocolate ™ in my reality.
That said, and having visited West Africa, and knowing about the massive problem of monocultures, etc. (I could go on and on): I think there is no possibility of enough good chocolate for everyone. Keep eating that NotChocolate ™, but if so, try at least do buy some with high social and environmental standards. (Which is difficult. And expensive.)
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Well my favorite chocolate is a cayenne truffle from a local place. Peppers and chocolate are a magic combination.
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Wait, there’s people that don’t know this?
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If it’s not Dark Chocolate
it’s a mere imitation…
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Yeah, me too. To make matters worse, much of the stuff that’s sold as or looks like so-called “white chocolate” doesn’t even have much or any cocoa butter in it - it’s just some random fat and sugar, basically.
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This claim is based on the fact that US regulations excluded white chocolate for labeling purposes.
And that is no longer the case.
Meanwhile in many places “Chocolate” made from Coco solids and palm kernel oil or hydrogenated vegetable oil, not Coco butter, is legally classified as chocolate. So the “but so and so’s law says” arguement is horse shit.
While many foods made from Coco solids only are considered chocolate casually. So the common understanding of chocolate does not rest on it containing all of the components of chocolate.
All that white chocolate is is chocolate with very few solids. Not zero solids, Coco butter, sugar, milk. And Coco butter is the portion of cacao solely responsible for chocolate’s texture and properties. It’s unique crystalline structure, and melting properties are the thing that makes chocolate, chocolate. But chocolate sauce, not technically chocolate.
More over most of the subtle, floral, and fruity flavors in chocolate. The things that often make good chocolate good. Only live in the Coco butter.
Most of the shit talking about white chocolate is based on shitty mass market versions that don’t even qualify to label themselves white chocolate where there’s a standard for that. White “confectioners coating” that’s basically sweetened hydrogenated fat and milk.
Good white chocolate is excellent. And as far as my mind, counts far more as chocolate than many things legally labeled or commonly considered to be chocolate. Since the fat structure of Coco butter is really something you can’t divorce from the concept.
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I thought BB had a zero tolerance policy on gatekeeping.
How about a browser plugin that deletes the phrase “technically not” from any sentence in which it appears?
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OK, so if I stipulate that white chocolate is still considered to be chocolate, can I still hate it because it’s overly sweet, because it isn’t balanced out with bitter cocoa solids? All the subtle floral and fruity flavors in the world won’t keep me from gagging on a cloying chunk of it.
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Okay, but the video claims that white chocolate is less healthy than dark chocolate.
So that means it has to be tastier, right?
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You’re certainly entitled to your personal preference.
But so is everyone else. And “I don’t like it” isn’t the same as “it’s objectively bad”.
You could pretty easily dismiss all chocolate with the exact same description, especially milk chocolate, based on the bulk of chocolate on the market. So I’m suspecting you haven’t tried much in the way of quality white chocolate.
I’ll admit it isn’t exactly as common as good darker chocolate. But if your base line is a white chocolate Twix, then you haven’t even been eating white chocolate.
There’s other things to balance the flavor than bitter, and a portion of the bitterness (tannins) in chocolate comes from the Coco butter, so white chocolate can still be pleasantly bitter.
I have a pastry chef friend who worked for Jaques Torez chocolates for a while. He gets pretty pissed when people go on about white chocolate being the worst. And I’ve watched him put a bowls of couveture disks at parties to counter the shit talking. All those “white chocolate is gross” types end up eating an entire bag.
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White chocolate is technically not chocolate
Is this news to anyone? I suppose a more accurate label is cocoa butter candy, but frankly i don’t care that it’s called white chocolate. We know what it is.
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mmmm, delicious, delicious cocoa butter.
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White chocolate is for when you want all the sugar and waxiness of really low-grade milk chocolate, but without any of that satisfying chocolate flavor.
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White chocolate has “technically” been chocolate in most countries forever. And was only “technically not chocolate” in the us until a few years back. It’s now “technically” chocolate pretty much everywhere. And in the how does chocolate work, geeky end of it its always been “technically” chocolate.
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Milk chocolate is heresy and white chocolate is an abomination.
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