On the eve of the holidays, reminders of important things when choosing goodies, especially chocolate, are very relevant, therefore...
First of all, the packaging should be intact, without damage, and the foil should not stick to the chocolate or the outer paper shell.
Proper chocolate is made from only four ingredients: cocoa mass, cocoa butter, milk (if it is milk chocolate) and sugar. Complex and incomprehensible names of ingredients and their large number should alert.
The composition of chocolate should not include cocoa powder, but cocoa mass. You can grind anything into powder!
The less sugar in chocolate, the higher its quality, because sugar simply "kills" our taste buds. Therefore, sugar will not be in the first place in the composition of good chocolate.
Vanillin is a budget substitute for natural vanilla. If "vanilla" is indicated on the packaging, this means that the manufacturer considers his product to be a premium product. The price of such a bar cannot be lower than 50 hryvnias.
Do not take chocolates with jams and other fillings, which contain a lot of sugar, starch and vegetable fat. Although the chocolate itself may be of high quality, the filling will spoil everything. A good filling is whole nuts, berries and fruits.
The bar itself has a smooth shiny surface of an even color, and when broken, the dullness is clearly visible.
When breaking the bar, you can hear a characteristic dry crunch.
Real chocolate should not crumble. If the bar crumbles, sticks to your teeth, this is a sure sign that the chocolate mixture was made on the basis of coconut or palm oil. By the way, the shelf life of such a product is short, so manufacturers add a lot of preservatives to the composition.
Any unnatural taste - soapy, plasticine, "greasy", synthetic and any unpleasant aftertaste also indicates an excess of vegetable fats. The taste and aroma of chocolate directly depend on cocoa butter, and if the manufacturer has added sunflower, soybean, cotton or palm oil to the product, then the chocolate becomes simply tasteless.
As I have already said, in the "correct" chocolate there must be cocoa butter, cocoa mass, sugar, and the taste depends on their ratio: the more cocoa mass, the darker and more bitter the chocolate will be. If you add powdered milk to these three ingredients, you will get milk chocolate, if there is no cocoa mass in the composition - white chocolate.
Many people consider white chocolate to be "wrong", and this is due to numerous falsifications. In modern confectionery production, various products are used that resemble white chocolate in appearance, but in reality consist only of vegetable fats without the addition of cocoa products.
