Chocolate batons
Extruded sticks of bake-stable chocolate, made to survive a hot oven inside a laminated pastry.
What it is
Batons are extruded rectangular sticks of chocolate formulated to hold their shape through baking. They are what sits inside a pain au chocolat, and their whole design brief is to still be a distinct piece after twenty minutes at 200°C.
That requires reduced cocoa butter and often added stabilisers, which is the same trade-off chips make. They are not suitable for melting, coating or eating as chocolate — which is fine, because nobody buys them for that.
- Category kind
- A manufacturing grade — this describes how it behaves, not what it is
- Legal status
- Industry convention, not a legal definition
- Typical range on shelves
- 40–55%
- Also called
- baking sticks, pain au chocolat sticks
- Texture
- brittle
What the percentage means here
Whatever it means for the underlying composition. The defining property — reduced cocoa butter — is not on the label.
Working with it
Bake-stable by design. Do not use for melting or tempering; the reduced cocoa butter that keeps their shape is what makes them useless for both.
Related
Commonly confused with
- Bake-stable chocolateBatons are one bake-stable format among several. The shared property — reduced cocoa butter so the piece survives the oven — is what makes both useless for melting.
Defined by
- EnrobingExtruded to a fixed rectangular section on industrial equipment, which is why they are a bakery supply rather than a retail product.
Sources
- ChocolateHQ editorial synthesis — ChocolateHQ(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
- The Science of Chocolate — Royal Society of Chemistry(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)