Chocolate tablet
The European term for a moulded bar, and in Mesoamerican usage something quite different — a pressed disc of ground cacao for drinking.
What it is
In French and Spanish usage a tablette or tableta is simply a moulded bar of chocolate, and the word is used interchangeably with bar.
The complication is that in Mexico and the Philippines, tablets mean something else: pressed discs or balls of coarsely ground cacao, unsweetened or lightly sweetened, made to be dissolved into hot liquid rather than eaten. Mexican tablets and Filipino tablea are the same idea. A recipe calling for chocolate tablets means one or the other depending entirely on where it came from.
- Category kind
- A product format — this describes how it is sold
- Legal status
- Industry convention, not a legal definition
- Also called
- tablette, tableta
What the percentage means here
Whatever it means for the chocolate inside. Mesoamerican drinking tablets are effectively 100% cacao where unsweetened.
Commonly misunderstood
That the word means the same thing everywhere. A European tablette is an eating bar; a Mexican tablet is a drinking preparation.
Related
Commonly confused with
- Drinking chocolateA European tablette is a moulded eating bar; a Mexican or Filipino tablet is a pressed disc of ground cacao for dissolving. The same word, two unrelated products.
Techniques that work with this
- Setting up a chocolate tastingWorth knowing which sense of the word is on the wrapper before building a flight around it — a drinking tablet will not compare against eating bars.
Sources
- ChocolateHQ editorial synthesis — ChocolateHQ(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)