Glossary

Sugars added during manufacture, as distinct from those naturally present in an ingredient.

In chocolate essentially all sugar is added, since cacao itself contributes almost none. The lactose in milk chocolate is the exception.

Explained in full: Sugar in chocolate

The requirement that named allergens be typographically distinguished within the ingredient list where they are used as ingredients.

A legal requirement with a defined list of allergens, and it is what makes milk, nuts, soya, sesame and gluten-containing cereals findable at a glance. It is entirely separate from a precautionary 'may contain' statement, which is voluntary and concerns equipment rather than recipe.

Commonly misused: Conflated with the may-contain warning, so a reader who sees neither concludes there is no risk. The emphasis rule covers ingredients only.

Explained in full: Chocolate allergen labels

See also: Cross-contamination, May contain

Milk fat with the water removed, added to chocolate to soften the set and slow fat bloom.

It appears in some dark chocolates as well as in milk, which is why a dark bar is not automatically dairy-free. It softens the product and lowers the tempering window, so a chocolate carrying more of it has less snap.

Commonly misused: Overlooked when checking a dark chocolate for dairy. It is listed, and it is easy to read past.

Explained in full: Milk ingredients in chocolate

See also: Fat bloom, Milk solids

Flavouring substances produced by chemical synthesis rather than obtained from natural source material. Frequently the identical molecule to one present in the food being imitated.

The older term NATURE-IDENTICAL described exactly that case — a synthesised molecule chemically indistinguishable from the natural one — and it has been retired in the EU, where the framework now recognises flavouring substances without that middle category. The concept remains useful for understanding what the distinction is actually about: the route, not the molecule. In chocolate the distinction is less consequential than in most foods, because chocolate aroma is several hundred compounds rather than one signature molecule. A synthetic reconstruction fails not by being synthetic but by being SHORT — a handful of high-impact compounds chosen for cost and stability, missing the long tail that a real aroma has.

Commonly misused: Assumed to mean a molecule that does not occur in nature. Usually it is exactly the molecule that does, made a different way.

Explained in full: Artificial chocolate flavour

See also: Natural flavouring

An undefined term generally describing a chocolatier working by hand from bought couverture.

Commonly misused: Used interchangeably with craft, which usually implies making chocolate from beans. The two describe different activities and neither is regulated.

Explained in full: Artisan chocolate

See also: Bean-to-bar

A production identifier that allows a specific run to be traced, printed on most chocolate.

On a craft bar it frequently corresponds to a single melangeur run, which is why two bars of the same product can differ slightly.

Explained in full: Micro-batch chocolate

A maker who controls production from imported dried beans through to the finished bar.

Commonly misused: Read as a quality certification. It is self-declared, unaudited, and describes scope of control rather than outcome — and it begins after fermentation, which is where most flavour is decided.

Explained in full: Bean-to-bar chocolate

See also: Lot separation

A quality date rather than a safety date, indicating when a food is expected to stop being at its best.

Commonly misused: Read as a use-by date. Chocolate past its best-before is not unsafe; dark chocolate in particular keeps for a long time and loses aroma rather than becoming harmful.

Explained in full: How long chocolate lasts

See also: Shelf life

Chocolate made from beans of more than one origin.

Either a cost-and-consistency decision at scale or a deliberate composition. The finest classical couvertures are blends, so the word is not a downgrade.

Commonly misused: Read as inferior to single-origin. Blending is a technique, and single-origin is a different goal rather than a higher grade.

Explained in full: Blended-origin vs single-origin chocolate

A family of polysaccharides extracted from red seaweed, used at very low concentrations in dairy drinks to stop suspended solids settling. It is the reason a carton of chocolate milk pours evenly to the last of it.

The type used in dairy — kappa carrageenan — interacts specifically with casein, the principal milk protein, forming a three-dimensional network at concentrations of a few hundredths of a per cent. That network is far too weak to be felt as thickness and quite strong enough to stop a cocoa particle falling through it. It is doing suspension work, not texture work. A frequent misunderstanding is that it makes a drink creamier; it does not, and the creaminess of a commercial chocolate milk comes from fat and from homogenisation. Consumer concern about carrageenan largely traces to conflation with POLIGEENAN, a chemically degraded form that is not a permitted food ingredient. Food-grade carrageenan is approved by the major food safety authorities — which is a statement about regulatory status and not a settlement of every open scientific question.

Commonly misused: Treated as a thickener or a creaminess additive. Its function is anti-settling, and at the concentrations used it contributes no perceptible body.

Explained in full: Chocolate milk explained

See also: Suspension

Marketing coinages used on products that cannot lawfully be described as chocolate. They have no definition in any food standard, which is the reason they exist.

Compositional standards protect the word CHOCOLATE and set minimums for cocoa solids, cocoa butter and — in most jurisdictions — limits on other vegetable fats. A product below those minimums must describe itself differently. "Chocolatey", "choc", "choc-style" and their relatives are what that requirement produces: constructions built to sit as close to the protected word as the rules allow while not being it. They are not deceptive in the legal sense — they are, quite precisely, the disclosure the rules demand. The practical reading is simple. Chocolate outsells chocolate-flavoured, so any product that could use the unqualified word does. A qualified one is telling you something, and the ingredient list will confirm it.

Commonly misused: Read as a casual synonym for chocolate. It is the opposite: a word chosen because chocolate was unavailable.

Explained in full: Chocolate-flavoured, and what it means

See also: Compound coating, Natural flavouring

A vegetable fat engineered to crystallise like cocoa butter, permitted in EU chocolate up to 5% with mandatory declaration.

CBEs are fractions of shea, illipe, sal or palm, chosen to match cocoa butter's melting behaviour closely enough to temper alongside it. They are distinct from the cocoa butter substitutes used in compound coating, which are incompatible with cocoa butter and do not temper.

Commonly misused: Treated as evidence a bar is not real chocolate. In the EU a bar containing up to 5% CBE remains legally chocolate and must declare the fat.

Explained in full: Cocoa butter equivalents

See also: Couverture

The 31% cocoa butter threshold an EU product must meet to be called couverture.

It is the whole reason the grade exists: that fat content is what lets chocolate film thinly over a dipped item. No technique substitutes for it.

Explained in full: Couverture

See also: Plastic viscosity

A concentrated extract of cocoa, used where a strong cocoa character is wanted without the colour, bitterness, fat or cost of cocoa solids.

It sits between cocoa powder and a flavouring: derived from cacao, which matters to how it may be labelled, and concentrated to a point where it behaves like a flavouring in a recipe. It is worth distinguishing from two adjacent things. COCOA EXTRACTS SOLD AS SUPPLEMENTS are standardised for flavanol content rather than for flavour, and are a different product with different specifications — most of the cocoa flavanol trial literature uses those, not the flavouring kind. And CHOCOLATE EXTRACT, in a home-baking context, is usually an alcoholic infusion of cocoa nibs, closer to vanilla extract in construction.

Explained in full: Chocolate-flavoured, and what it means

See also: Natural flavouring

The combined mass of everything derived from the cacao bean — cocoa solids and cocoa butter together — as a share of the finished product.

It does not state how the total divides between solids and butter, and two bars at the same percentage can differ by ten percentage points of cocoa butter. That split is much of what determines whether a bar reads as rich or as harsh. On white chocolate the figure refers to cocoa butter alone.

Commonly misused: A quality score. A higher percentage means less sugar and more cacao, which is a statement about proportion. Poorly fermented beans at 85% are simply more of a bad thing.

Explained in full: Dark chocolate

The proportion by weight of ingredients derived from the cacao bean, combining cocoa mass, cocoa butter and any added cocoa solids.

It does not distinguish solids from butter, which is the split that decides how a bar tastes and feels. Two 70% bars can differ substantially on that alone.

Commonly misused: Read as a quality score. It predicts sweetness and nothing else.

Explained in full: What the percentage hides

The residual cocoa butter left in cocoa powder after pressing, typically 10–12% for low-fat and 20–24% for high-fat.

Higher-fat powder gives a richer result and a more tender crumb. It is one of the few cocoa specifications actually printed on the tin.

See also: Cocoa cake

A chocolate-like product in which vegetable fat replaces some or all of the cocoa butter. In most jurisdictions it may not be called chocolate.

Commonly misused: Dismissed as a fake. It is a different product with a legitimate purpose — it sets hard without tempering and tolerates warm rooms, which makes it the correct choice for decorative work.

Explained in full: Compound chocolate

A polish applied to panned confectionery to give gloss and to stop pieces melting in the hand.

Shellac is an insect-derived resin, which is why panned chocolate-covered nuts may not be vegan even where the chocolate itself is. The gloss on a commercial dragée is generally this rather than well-tempered chocolate.

Commonly misused: The shine is read as evidence of good tempering. It is a coating applied afterwards.

Explained in full: Dragée

See also: Gloss

Chocolate with a high cocoa butter content, made to flow thinly when melted and set with a hard snap and high gloss.

Commonly misused: Read as meaning 'professional quality'. It means high cocoa butter. Excellent eating chocolate is frequently not couverture.

Explained in full: Couverture

The unintended transfer of an allergen between products sharing equipment, storage or handling — as distinct from an ingredient.

The correct term for what a precautionary statement is about. It is deliberately not called cross-contamination in allergen practice, because contamination implies a hygiene failure and this is a normal consequence of shared production.

Commonly misused: Called cross-contamination, which implies something went wrong. A line running milk chocolate and then dark chocolate is operating correctly and still presents cross-contact.

Explained in full: Milk allergy and chocolate labels

See also: Allergen emphasis, May contain

Unintended allergen transfer from shared equipment or production lines.

Shared lines are the norm in chocolate manufacturing, so precautionary labelling is genuine rather than defensive. A plain dark bar from a facility handling hazelnuts is not safe for a serious nut allergy.

Explained in full: Chocolate and allergy

See also: Dairy-free chocolate

Chocolate made without milk solids, whether plain dark or a plant-milk formulation.

Commonly misused: Dark chocolate is widely assumed to be dairy-free and frequently is not — many dark bars contain milk fat, and many more carry may-contain-milk labelling from shared lines.

Explained in full: Plant-milk chocolate

See also: Cross-contamination

Equipment used only for products excluding a given ingredient, which is the assurance a precautionary statement cannot give.

For a serious allergy this is the meaningful category, and it is a claim about a facility rather than about a recipe. It is also the mechanism behind the kosher distinction between parve by ingredient and parve made on dairy equipment.

Commonly misused: Assumed wherever no precautionary statement appears. The absence of a statement is not an assurance of a dedicated line; it may simply mean no statement was written.

Explained in full: Nut-free chocolate

See also: Cross-contact, Parve

A legal obligation on operators placing certain commodities on the EU market to establish that they are not associated with deforestation, including geolocating the plot of production.

Cocoa is a covered commodity. The obligation falls on the importer rather than on the consumer, which makes it a different kind of mechanism from a certification mark. Application timelines have been amended since adoption and are not stated here.

Commonly misused: Described as a sustainability certification. It is a market-access condition with legal force, and it sets no price and addresses no income question.

Explained in full: Cocoa regulation

See also: Cacao deforestation, Traceability

The E number for polyglycerol polyricinoleate, an emulsifier used alongside lecithin in chocolate.

Commonly misused: An E number on a label reads as artificial. PGPR is a processed castor oil derivative used at fractions of a percent to make thin moulded shells possible.

See also: Yield stress

A polyol less sweet than sugar, producing a distinct cooling sensation on the tongue.

The cooling effect is a physical property — it absorbs heat as it dissolves — and it is noticeable in chocolate, where it reads as a menthol-like coolness that some people find pleasant and others find wrong in a chocolate.

Explained in full: Alternative sweeteners

See also: Maltitol, Polyol

An EU designation permitting a lower cocoa solids minimum than milk chocolate, created to accommodate British and Irish formulations.

The category resolved a long dispute over whether UK milk chocolate, made to a lower cocoa content, could be sold as milk chocolate across the EU. It is the reason an otherwise unremarkable British bar carries an unfamiliar label.

Explained in full: Milk chocolate

See also: Crumb

The solvent a flavouring is dissolved in, frequently ethanol, present in the finished product in trace amounts.

Vanilla extract is the common example. Whether a carrier must be declared depends on the jurisdiction and on the quantity, and how it should be treated is one of the questions certifying bodies genuinely disagree about.

Commonly misused: Conflated with alcohol used as an ingredient. A liqueur filling and a flavouring carrier are different quantities doing different jobs, and only the first is what most people mean by alcohol in chocolate.

Explained in full: Halal chocolate

See also: Halal certification, Vanillin

A setting agent derived from animal collagen, absent from chocolate itself and present in some fillings.

Marshmallow centres, some aerated and chewy fillings and some mousse-textured products use it. It may be bovine, porcine or fish-derived and the ingredient list frequently does not say which, which is one of the questions certification exists to answer.

Commonly misused: Assumed absent from chocolate products because it is absent from chocolate. The distinction is between the chocolate and the centre, and it is the centre that matters.

Explained in full: Halal chocolate

See also: Halal certification, Kosher certification

A legal designation reserving a product name to goods from a defined place, granted and registrable by an authority. Distinct from a trade name that merely refers to a place, which anybody may use and nobody registers.

THE DISTINCTION IS WHETHER SOMEBODY OUTSIDE THE SUPPLY CHAIN CAN CHECK. A geographical indication is entered in a register by an authority, delimits an area, and can be enforced. A trade name derived from a place is a commercial habit. CACAO HAS ALMOST NONE OF THE FIRST AND A GREAT MANY OF THE SECOND, which is the single most useful thing to know about origin names on chocolate. Chuao, in Venezuela, holds a denomination of origin granted in 2000 and is the only Venezuelan cacao that does. Set against that: Carenero Superior is a trade grade named after an export point; Arriba names a direction up a river; Sanchez, Machala and Bahia Superior are all shipping-derived. Every one of them appears on wrappers in the same typeface and the same position as a designation, and only one is one. THE FORMS DIFFER BY JURISDICTION and the difference matters less than people assume. The EU distinguishes a protected designation of origin, where production and processing happen in the area, from a protected geographical indication, where only part of it need. Other systems use their own vocabulary. What is common to all of them is a register, a delimitation and an authority. AND A DESIGNATION IS NOT A QUALITY CLAIM. It says where something came from and what may bear the name. It does not say the product is good, and reading it as though it did is the error the whole category invites.

Commonly misused: Read into any origin name printed on a wrapper. Most cacao 'origins' in the trade are shipping points or commercial grades with no register behind them.

Explained in full: Carenero Superior

See also: Traceability

A mark asserting that a certifying body has audited a product's ingredients, supply chain and usually its production facility against that body's own standard.

Standards differ between certifying bodies, particularly on the treatment of ethanol used as a flavouring carrier and on the source of ambiguous emulsifiers. A product certified by one body is not automatically acceptable to somebody who follows another, which is why the informative question is which body certified it.

Commonly misused: Read as a property of the recipe. It is an assertion about an audited process, which is precisely why it can answer questions an ingredient list cannot.

Explained in full: Halal chocolate

See also: Emulsifier, Kosher certification

The year a bar's beans were harvested, printed by makers who buy separated single-harvest lots.

Genuinely informative in a way a country name often is not: rainfall, temperature and disease pressure vary annually, and a single farm's harvest cannot be blended to smooth it.

Explained in full: Cacao harvest seasons

See also: Micro-lot

A mark asserting supervision of a product's ingredients and production against a certifying authority's standard, usually alongside a dairy or parve classification.

Unlike most food certifications, the status of the equipment is part of the determination rather than a footnote to it: an identical recipe made on a dedicated line and on a shared one can be classified differently.

Commonly misused: Treated as interchangeable between authorities. Standards and the practices they permit differ, and the marking identifies which authority supervised.

Explained in full: Kosher chocolate

See also: Halal certification, Parve

The sugar naturally present in milk, and therefore in any chocolate carrying milk solids.

Its presence is why a no-added-sugar milk chocolate still contains sugar, and why white chocolate — which carries more milk solids than milk chocolate typically does — is not a low-sugar product.

Explained in full: Chocolate and lactose

See also: Milk solids, No added sugar

The polyol most commonly used to replace sugar in chocolate, close to sugar in sweetness and in bulk.

It occupies the physical space sugar would, which matters because sugar is a large fraction of a bar by weight. It is also the polyol most associated with digestive effects at quantity, which is why sugar-free confectionery frequently carries a laxative-effect statement.

Explained in full: Sugar-free chocolate

See also: Erythritol, Polyol

A voluntary warning that a product was made where an allergen is handled and cross-contamination is possible.

In chocolate this is usually about nuts and milk, and it is genuine rather than defensive — shared lines are the norm. A plain dark bar carrying a may-contain-nuts warning is not safe for someone with a severe nut allergy.

Commonly misused: Dismissed as legal boilerplate. For serious allergies it is the most important text on the packet.

The non-water components of milk — protein, lactose and minerals — used in milk and white chocolate.

EU minimums are 14% for both milk and white chocolate. Whether they arrive as powder or as crumb changes the flavour considerably.

Explained in full: How milk chocolate is made

Emulsifiers used in some fillings and coatings, which may be derived from plant or animal fats.

The ingredient name does not disclose the source, and the same declared ingredient can be either. That ambiguity is specific to this class: lecithin in chocolate is overwhelmingly soya or sunflower and is not in doubt.

Commonly misused: Assumed to be plant-derived by analogy with lecithin. Lecithin's source is effectively settled in chocolate and this one's is not.

Explained in full: Halal chocolate

See also: Emulsifier, Lecithin

Japanese for fresh or raw, used of chocolate to indicate a high fresh-cream content and a short refrigerated shelf life.

Commonly misused: Read as 'raw' in the sense of unroasted or unheated, which is a different and unrelated category. Nama chocolate is made from ordinary roasted chocolate; the freshness refers to the cream.

Explained in full: Nama chocolate

See also: Ganache, Raw chocolate

A defined regulatory category: flavouring substances obtained from plant, animal or microbiological source material by physical, enzymatic or microbiological processes. It is a statement about origin and method, not about which food the flavour tastes of.

The commonest misreading is that a natural chocolate flavouring came from cacao. It need not have. Jurisdictions differ in the detail, and several — the EU among them — draw a further distinction: a flavouring may be described as being OF a named food only when it is obtained essentially entirely from that food. That is the difference between "natural vanilla flavouring" and "natural flavouring" on two packs, and it is legally load-bearing. The word is also not a claim about safety, quality or intensity. A natural flavouring and its synthetic equivalent are frequently the identical molecule with identical properties; the legal distinction is about the route it took. What it does tell you reliably is that the manufacturer is not using enough of the actual food to say so.

Commonly misused: Read as meaning the flavour was extracted from the food it tastes of, and as an assurance of quality. It is neither.

Explained in full: Chocolate-flavoured, and what it means

See also: Flavouring carrier, Vanillin

A manufacturer's calculation subtracting fibre and polyols from total carbohydrate, used in low-carbohydrate marketing.

A convention rather than a measurement, and not a regulated calculation in the EU, where nutrition labelling declares carbohydrate and of which sugars. The subtraction assumes polyols are metabolised alike, and they are not.

Commonly misused: Read as a measured value on the same footing as the declared carbohydrate figure. It is derived, and derived under an assumption.

Explained in full: Keto chocolate

See also: No added sugar, Polyol

A claim that no sugars were added as an ingredient, which permits sugars occurring naturally in the other ingredients.

The gap between this and sugar-free opens where milk solids are present, because lactose is a naturally occurring sugar. A no-added-sugar milk chocolate contains sugar it did not add.

Commonly misused: Read as sugar-free, and read as a claim about energy content. It is neither.

Explained in full: Sugar-free chocolate

See also: Added sugars, Polyol

Any statement on packaging about where the beans came from, at any level of precision.

Unregulated everywhere. Judge it by specificity: farm beats region beats country, and a harvest year signals a maker who separates lots.

Explained in full: Single-origin explained

A kosher classification for a product containing neither dairy nor meat, and therefore usable with either.

For chocolate the classification turns on the same question the dairy-free guide answers: milk solids in milk and white chocolate, and added milk fat in a great deal of mass-market dark chocolate.

Commonly misused: Read as equivalent to vegan or to dairy-free. It is a religious classification with its own criteria, it addresses meat as well as dairy, and it does not consider honey or insect-derived glazes the way a vegan claim does.

Explained in full: Kosher chocolate

See also: Anhydrous milk fat, Dairy-free chocolate, Kosher certification

A bulk sweetener used in place of sugar in sugar-free chocolate, most commonly maltitol or erythritol.

Polyols are incompletely absorbed and produce a laxative effect at quantity — EU labelling requires a statement to that effect above 10% added polyols. Erythritol is generally better tolerated than maltitol.

Commonly misused: Sugar-free is read as low calorie. Polyols occupy the same volume as sugar and cocoa butter still supplies most of the energy.

Explained in full: Chocolate intolerance and digestive effects

See also: Shelf life

A filled chocolate: a moulded or enrobed shell of tempered chocolate containing a softer centre.

This is what the word means in Belgium and in much of continental European retail, and it is a finished confection rather than an ingredient. It is unrelated to the French praline — caramelised almonds and the paste made from them — and to the American praline, a pecan and cream sweet. Three products, one word, no context that distinguishes them.

Commonly misused: Assumed to mean the same thing everywhere. A recipe calling for praline means the French one; a Brussels shop selling pralines means the Belgian one; neither says so.

Explained in full: The Belgian praline

See also: Bonbon, Praliné

Chocolate marketed as having been produced without heating above a stated temperature.

There is no regulated definition, no agreed threshold temperature, and no audit. Cacao beans are also routinely fermented and sun-dried at origin, and fermentation heaps reach around 50°C — so beans described as raw have usually been through a process well above the temperatures the term implies.

Commonly misused: Read as a nutritional guarantee. The claim is not verified, the threshold is not defined, and the fermentation step it does not account for is where much of the heat comes from.

How long a chocolate product stays acceptable — from a year or more for dark, to a week or two for a fresh cream ganache.

Determined by water activity and by fat oxidation. Dark chocolate has almost no water and keeps; milk fat goes rancid; a cream ganache contains water and dairy and does not keep at all.

See also: Best before, Water activity

A claim that the beans came from one stated place.

The size of that place is unspecified and ranges from an entire country to one estate. The term is not regulated.

Commonly misused: Read as a quality guarantee. It is a traceability claim of unstated precision, and a well-made blend can be better chocolate.

Explained in full: Single-origin chocolate

A US regulatory definition setting what a food must contain to be sold under a given name.

US standards of identity for chocolate differ from the EU directive, notably on milk chocolate minimums. This is why the same formulation can be milk chocolate in one market and not in the other, and why comparing legal minimums across jurisdictions requires naming the jurisdiction.

See also: Family milk chocolate

US food regulations defining what a product must contain to be sold under a given name.

21 CFR Part 163 covers cacao products, defining sweet, semisweet, bittersweet, milk and white chocolate. The minimums differ substantially from the EU instrument, which is why the same words describe different products either side of the Atlantic.

Intensely sweet compounds extracted from the stevia plant, used in tiny quantities and contributing no bulk.

Because they contribute no bulk, they cannot replace sugar in chocolate on their own — something has to occupy the volume. They are used alongside a polyol or a fibre for that reason, which is why a stevia-sweetened bar's ingredient list is usually longer rather than shorter.

Commonly misused: Marketed as 'natural sugar' or as sugar. It is a high-intensity sweetener and it is not sugar.

Explained in full: Alternative sweeteners

See also: Added sugars, Polyol

The legal measure combining cocoa butter and non-fat cocoa solids, used in compositional minimums.

The EU requires at least 35% for chocolate and 25% for milk chocolate. Distinct from dry non-fat cocoa solids, which excludes the butter.

Explained in full: Chocolate legal definitions

A maker who grows the cacao as well as manufacturing the chocolate, controlling fermentation as well as roasting and refining.

Commonly misused: Used interchangeably with bean-to-bar. Bean-to-bar makers buy beans; tree-to-bar makers grow them, which means they can change the fermentation protocol — something almost nobody else can do.

Explained in full: Tree-to-bar chocolate

The single dominant aroma compound in vanilla, used in chocolate either extracted from vanilla or produced synthetically.

The natural and synthetic molecules are identical. The difference between vanillin and vanilla is complexity rather than purity: vanilla contains dozens of aroma compounds and vanillin is one of them. Whether that difference is audible depends on how much of a lead role the vanilla is playing.

Commonly misused: Read as an adulterant or a fake. It is a defined flavouring whose molecule is the same either way; the argument against it is about complexity, not authenticity.

Explained in full: Vanilla in chocolate

See also: Inclusion

The EU requirement to declare specified vegetable fats other than cocoa butter where they are permitted in chocolate.

The instrument permits a limited quantity of named vegetable fats and requires the product to say so. Beyond that limit the product may not be called chocolate at all, which is the boundary between chocolate and compound coating.

Commonly misused: Taken as evidence of adulteration. It is a disclosure requirement, and its presence means the rule is working rather than being evaded.

Explained in full: Compound chocolate

A dried milk fraction used in some chocolate as a partial substitute for milk powder.

It is dairy-derived and carries lactose, so it matters for anyone reading a label for milk. It is also cheaper than whole milk powder, which is why it appears more often at the lower price tiers.

Commonly misused: Not recognised as dairy when scanning an ingredient list for the word milk.

Explained in full: Dairy-free chocolate

See also: Anhydrous milk fat, Milk solids

The acid produced during the third phase of cacao fermentation, and the compound whose survival into the bar reads as sourness.

Volatile, so it drives off during slow drying and long dry conching. Where either was cut short, it remains and the chocolate tastes sharp.

Explained in full: Dry conching

The third stage of cacao fermentation, in which acetic acid bacteria oxidise ethanol and drive the mass to 45–50°C.

The heat and acid of this phase kill the bean, which is the event the whole process turns on — a living bean keeps its enzymes and substrates separated, and only when cell walls break down do flavour precursors form.

Explained in full: Fermentation

See also: Lactic phase, Yeast phase

A process that deliberately builds powder particles into larger, porous clusters so that they wet quickly and collapse on contact with liquid. It is what makes an instant cocoa mix disperse where pure cocoa powder clumps.

The apparent paradox is that clumping is the problem and agglomeration is the solution, and the difference is structure. A natural clump of cocoa is dense: liquid wets its outside, the wet layer seals, and the interior stays dry. An agglomerated particle is engineered to be open and porous, so liquid is drawn into it by capillary action and it falls apart rather than sealing. The process typically involves rewetting the powder with steam in a fluidised bed and redrying it. Lecithin is frequently added at the same stage to lower surface tension, which helps liquid penetrate rather than bead off the fat on the particle surfaces. This is genuine process engineering rather than a shortcut, and it is why a supermarket instant mix behaves better in a mug than a superior cocoa powder does.

Explained in full: Why cocoa does not dissolve

See also: Slaking, Suspension

Growing cacao under a canopy of other trees rather than in full sun, as it grows naturally.

Shade buffers temperature, supports biodiversity and reduces some disease pressure, at the cost of lower yield per hectare. Full-sun cacao yields more and is more vulnerable to drought and heat.

Commonly misused: Presented as straightforwardly better. It is a genuine trade-off — the yield cost is real and falls on the farmer.

See also: Cabruca

Treating cocoa with an alkali to raise its pH, deepening colour, smoothing flavour and improving dispersibility.

It also removes the acidity that baking soda needs to react, and degrades a substantial share of the flavanols present.

Commonly misused: Treated as interchangeable with natural cocoa in baking. Swapping them requires changing the leavening.

Explained in full: Alkalisation

See also: Polyphenols

The local population of yeasts and bacteria that drives spontaneous cacao fermentation.

Because fermentation is spontaneous rather than inoculated, these populations genuinely differ by valley — which is one of the few real routes by which place affects flavour.

Explained in full: Fermentation

See also: Starter culture, Terroir

The water remaining in dried cacao, targeted at roughly 6–7% for safe storage.

Above about 8% mould becomes likely in transit; below about 5% beans turn brittle and shatter in handling. It is a narrow target reached over one to two weeks.

Explained in full: Drying

A Phytophthora fungal disease that blackens and rots cacao pods, and the largest single cause of global crop loss.

Losses rise with humidity and rainfall, which is why it is most severe in the wettest producing regions and why climate projections for West Africa are followed closely.

See also: Swollen shoot

A Brazilian system of thinning Atlantic forest understorey and planting cacao beneath the retained canopy.

Gives lower yields than full-sun planting and preserves substantial forest structure and habitat. Originally an economic choice rather than an environmental one, and now one of the best-documented cases of a commodity crop coexisting with forest cover.

Explained in full: Brazil

The Bahian practice of planting cacao beneath thinned Atlantic forest, retaining much of the original canopy.

Cabruca plantings are among the more biodiverse agricultural systems in Brazil, and their survival is partly why fragments of Atlantic forest remain in the cacao belt.

Explained in full: Bahia

See also: Agroforestry

Drying a bean's exterior faster than moisture can migrate out from the centre, sealing acid inside.

The result is chocolate that tastes sharply sour or vinegary regardless of how well the beans were fermented. It is the most common defect from artificial drying and the reason slow drying matters.

Explained in full: Artificial drying

Ground cocoa nibs in fluid form, produced when grinding releases the beans' cocoa butter. Nothing is added.

Commonly misused: Assumed to contain alcohol. It does not — 'liquor' is used in its older sense of a liquid. The American standards of identity use the term, which is why it appears on US packaging.

Explained in full: Grinding

The fat pressed from cacao nibs, making up around half the weight of the bean. It is what makes chocolate melt at body temperature.

Cocoa butter is polymorphic — it can crystallise in six forms — and only one of them gives the snap, gloss and clean melt chocolate needs. That is the entire reason tempering exists.

Commonly misused: As a synonym for chocolate fat generally. Compound chocolate contains vegetable fat instead, and the substitution is why compound behaves so differently.

Explained in full: Tempering

The compressed solid left after cocoa butter is pressed out of cocoa mass, milled to make cocoa powder.

How hard the cake was pressed determines the residual fat, which is how 10–12% and 20–24% cocoa powders are made from the same starting material.

Explained in full: Pressing

See also: Cocoa powder fat content

The shell removed from the bean during winnowing, produced in very large volumes and sold on for animal feed, horticulture and infusions.

It retains theobromine, which makes two things true at once: cocoa shell garden mulch is a hazard to pets that chew it, and cocoa by-products in a feed mill can contaminate other feed. Both are documented and both surprise people, because the material does not look like chocolate.

Commonly misused: Treated as inert waste. It carries theobromine, and the mulch form is a recognised veterinary hazard.

Explained in full: Cocoa shell

See also: Shell ratio, Theobromine, Winnowing

Ground nibs — a fluid suspension of cocoa solids in the bean's own cocoa butter, containing no alcohol despite the name liquor.

Commonly misused: The US term chocolate liquor is routinely read as alcoholic. It is not, and the word refers to its fluid state.

Explained in full: Chocolate liquor

See also: Cocoa solids, Nib

The hydraulic press that separates cocoa butter from cocoa mass, leaving a cake.

Van Houten's press, developed in the 1820s, is what made cocoa powder and therefore the modern chocolate bar possible.

Explained in full: Pressing

The non-fat part of the cacao bean — the material that carries colour, bitterness and most of the chocolate flavour.

Commonly misused: Used interchangeably with 'cocoa percentage', which also includes the butter. Legal minimums frequently specify both a total and a non-fat solids floor precisely because they are different things.

See also: Cocoa butter, Cocoa percentage

How long chocolate is worked in a conche, from a few hours to several days.

Commonly misused: Quoted as a quality metric, longer being better. Longer conching gives smoother and blander chocolate — the volatiles that carry harshness also carry character.

Explained in full: Conching explained

See also: Dry conch

The machine, and the process, that works liquid chocolate under shear to drive off harsh volatiles and coat particles in fat.

Named for the shell shape of Lindt's original design. Long conching gives smoother and blander chocolate — the volatiles that carry harshness also carry character.

Explained in full: Conching

See also: Melangeur, Viscosity

How long chocolate is agitated during conching, ranging from a few hours to several days.

Commonly misused: Treated as a quality gradient where longer is better. Conching is subtractive — it drives off volatiles — so extended conching progressively removes the origin character along with the harshness.

Explained in full: Conching

See also: Conching

Prolonged agitation of warm chocolate that drives off harsh volatile compounds and coats every solid particle in cocoa butter.

Commonly misused: Treated as the step that makes chocolate smooth. Smoothness comes largely from refining; conching's main flavour job is removing volatile acids. The two are confused because a melangeur does both at once.

Explained in full: Conching

See also: Refining

The controlled-temperature conveyor through which moulded chocolate passes to set on a production line.

Its temperature gradient matters: cooling too fast causes cracking and cooling too slowly leaves pieces that do not release.

Explained in full: Moulding

A dried intermediate of milk, sugar and cocoa mass, ground into milk chocolate — the basis of the British style.

Cooking the three together in the presence of water drives Maillard reactions much further than adding milk powder does, producing a cooked caramel character. It is the main reason British and Swiss milk chocolate taste different.

Explained in full: Milk crumb chocolate

See also: Family milk chocolate, Maillard reaction

Cutting a sample of beans lengthways and counting how many are fully fermented, partly fermented, slaty, mouldy or germinated.

It is the closest thing the trade has to an objective quality measure before roasting, and it determines the price a lot fetches.

Explained in full: Bean grading

See also: Purple, Slaty

Cocoa butter that has been steam-treated to remove its aroma, so it adds fat without adding flavour.

Used where extra cocoa butter is wanted without shifting the flavour — in white chocolate and in cocoa butter for colouring work. Natural cocoa butter carries a distinct cocoa aroma.

Explained in full: Cocoa butter

The machine that meters chocolate or filling into moulds by volume on a production line.

Its accuracy determines shell thickness consistency, which is the industrial equivalent of how long a hand-caster waits before inverting a mould.

Explained in full: Shell moulding

The first conching phase, worked as a thick paste, which drives off acetic acid and develops flavour.

Extending it changes flavour; extending the later liquid phase changes texture. They are separate levers and are frequently described as one operation.

Explained in full: Dry conching

See also: Conch duration

The common name for alkalisation, after Coenraad van Houten, who developed the process in the Netherlands in the 1820s.

Commonly misused: Sometimes read as a quality grade. It is a process choice that changes colour, flavour, solubility and leavening behaviour, and reduces flavanol content.

Explained in full: Dutch-process cocoa

See also: Nib alkalisation

A compound that lets fat and water-attracting surfaces coexist, used in chocolate to reduce viscosity.

Lecithin and PGPR are the two used in chocolate, and they act on different flow properties, which is why they are used together rather than as alternatives.

Explained in full: Lecithin in chocolate

The machine that coats centres by passing them under a curtain of tempered chocolate on a belt.

Produces a thinner, more even coat than hand dipping and requires centres that hold their own shape.

Explained in full: Enrobing

The microbial process applied to cacao beans in their pulp within days of harvest, which creates the precursors that roasting later converts into chocolate flavour.

Commonly misused: Assumed to be a factory step, or a preservation step. It happens on the farm and it is where chocolate flavour originates.

Explained in full: Fermentation

An audible cracking as moisture escapes during roasting, borrowed from coffee terminology.

Less reliable in cacao than in coffee because bean size and moisture vary more within a lot. Useful as a rough marker rather than as a control point.

Explained in full: Roasting

The industrial machine that reduces chocolate particle size by passing it through progressively closer steel rollers.

Reaches target particle size in a single pass, which is why industrial production separates refining from conching where small-batch production combines them.

Explained in full: Roll refining

The one crystal form of cocoa butter, out of six, that gives chocolate snap, gloss, contraction and a melt just below body temperature.

Every word written about tempering is ultimately about ensuring a batch sets in this form. Untempered chocolate sets in unstable forms that convert over days to form VI, which is what fat bloom is.

Explained in full: Tempering

See also: Bloom, Tempering

Joining a cutting from a selected tree onto established rootstock, so the new growth is genetically identical to the parent.

Cacao grown from seed does not breed true, so a farmer who wants a specific variety must graft or take cuttings. This is why a claim that a plantation is a named variety implies grafted or cloned material.

See also: Clone

Readily absorbing moisture from the air.

Sugar is hygroscopic, which is why chocolate stored in a humid place develops sugar bloom and why a sealed wrapper does real work.

Explained in full: Preventing bloom

The enzyme that splits sucrose into reducing sugars during fermentation.

The other half of the precursor story. Reducing sugars plus free amino acids are exactly what Maillard chemistry consumes during roasting.

Explained in full: Fermentation

An acid produced during the middle phase of fermentation, far less volatile than acetic acid.

Because it does not evaporate readily, excess lactic acid persists through drying and conching and gives a flat, slightly sour character that cannot be processed out.

Explained in full: Fermentation

The middle stage of fermentation, in which lactic acid bacteria dominate as oxygen enters the mass.

Excessive lactic acid is associated with a flat, slightly sour character in the finished chocolate, because lactic acid is far less volatile than acetic and does not drive off during drying.

Explained in full: Fermentation

See also: Acetic phase, Yeast phase

A phospholipid emulsifier used at 0.3–0.5% to reduce chocolate's viscosity, replacing several times its weight in cocoa butter.

Commonly misused: Read as a cheapening additive or a sign of low quality. At those quantities it is a processing aid, and above about 0.5% it stops helping.

See also: PGPR, Viscosity

The reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars under heat that produces most of chocolate's roasted aroma.

Fermentation creates both reactants; roasting supplies the heat. This is the chemical link between the two stages, and it is why a bean that was never properly fermented cannot be rescued by roasting.

Explained in full: Roasting

See also: Crumb, Pyrazines

A granite wheel-and-bed grinder that reduces particle size over 24 to 72 hours while also doing much of the work of conching.

It is the defining piece of small-batch equipment. Because it combines grinding and conching, a melangeur-only maker may not conch separately at all.

Explained in full: Melangeur grinding

See also: Conche

A sloped stone slab on which cacao is ground by hand with a stone roller, producing the characteristic coarse texture of Mexican drinking chocolate.

The grain a metate produces is above the particle size at which the tongue stops detecting individual particles, and that is the point rather than a limitation. Conching it out gives a different product.

Commonly misused: Treated as a primitive precursor to the melanger. It produces a texture the tradition wants, and measuring it against a European smoothness standard misses what it is for.

Explained in full: Mexican drinking chocolate

See also: Molinillo, Particle size

A process in which milk, sugar and cocoa mass are cooked together and dried before being refined into chocolate.

The cooking generates Maillard products and a slight lactic tang that chocolate made with plain milk powder does not have. It is why several long-established British and American milk chocolates taste distinctly of cooked milk.

Explained in full: Milk chocolate

Making milk chocolate by blending dried milk powder into the chocolate, as distinct from the milk-crumb process.

Produces a cleaner dairy character without the cooked, slightly lactic tang that crumb-process chocolate has. Neither is better; they are recognisably different products and the difference is deliberate.

See also: Milk crumb

The sweet white pulp surrounding the beans inside a cacao pod, and the fuel the fermentation runs on.

Commonly misused: Assumed to be waste that gets washed off. Washing it away destroys the fermentation before it starts — the sugars in it are what the yeasts and bacteria consume.

Explained in full: Cacao pulp

The cracked, roasted cacao bean with its shell removed — the part that becomes chocolate. Around half cocoa butter by weight.

Explained in full: Winnowing

Alkalising at the nib stage rather than after pressing, which produces a different colour and flavour result from cake alkalisation.

Where in the process the alkali is applied is a formulation choice that manufacturers treat as proprietary, and it is one reason two Dutch-process cocoas can differ noticeably.

Explained in full: Alkalisation

See also: Dutching

The size of the solid particles suspended in chocolate's fat, measured in microns and reduced by refining.

Human perception of grittiness begins somewhere around 25 to 30 microns. Refining exists to get every particle below that threshold, which is the whole objective — there is no flavour compensation for a coarse refine.

Explained in full: Refining

See also: Refining

The spread of particle sizes in a chocolate, rather than a single average figure.

Two chocolates with the same mean particle size can feel quite different if one has a wider distribution. It is measured rather than estimated in industrial production.

Explained in full: Particle size control

An emulsifier that reduces chocolate's yield stress, used alongside lecithin where thin moulded shells are needed.

It works on a different rheological property than lecithin does, which is why the two are complementary rather than alternatives.

See also: Lecithin, Viscosity

How readily melted chocolate flows once it is already moving.

Governed mainly by cocoa butter content and lecithin. Together with yield stress it describes chocolate's flow behaviour, which is not captured by a single thickness figure.

See also: Yield stress

The browning reaction during fermentation that reduces astringency and turns the cotyledon from purple to brown.

This is why a fully fermented bean is brown inside and an unfermented one is purple, and why the cut test works as a quality measure at all.

Explained in full: Bean grading

The enzymatic breakdown of storage proteins into peptides and free amino acids inside the dying cacao bean.

One half of what fermentation actually produces. The amino acids it liberates are the reactants roasting needs; without proteolysis there is nothing for the Maillard reaction to work on.

Explained in full: Fermentation

Storing pods before breaking, or draining pulp before fermentation, to alter the starting conditions of the ferment.

Pod storage raises pulp sugar and reduces acidity in the finished bean. Pre-draining reduces the volume of pulp and shortens the acetic phase. Both are among the few deliberate levers available before fermentation begins.

Explained in full: Pod storage

See also: Pulp

A partly fermented bean, purple inside but beginning to fissure — between slaty and fully brown.

Graders count slaty, purple and brown separately because the proportions describe how well a lot fermented. A high purple count means the ferment was cut short rather than never started.

See also: Cut test, Slaty

Reducing the size of the solid particles in chocolate below the threshold at which the tongue detects them, roughly 20 to 30 microns.

Explained in full: Refining

See also: Conching

The full curve of temperature against time during roasting, rather than a single peak temperature.

Two roasts reaching the same peak by different paths produce noticeably different chocolate, which is why makers talk about profiles rather than temperatures.

Explained in full: Roast profiling

The proportion of a dried bean's weight that is shell rather than nib, typically around 12%.

Shell is fibrous, low in fat and harsh-tasting, and regulatory limits exist on how much may remain in finished chocolate. A poor shell ratio reduces yield and raises the risk of grit that refining cannot fix.

Explained in full: Winnowing

See also: Bean count

A bean whose cut surface is solid grey-purple and unfissured, indicating that fermentation did not happen or did not take.

Slaty beans are counted in the cut test and are the clearest single indicator of under-fermentation. Chocolate made from them is astringent and flat, and roasting does not fix it.

Explained in full: Bean grading

See also: Cut test, Purple

A defined microbial inoculum added to a cacao ferment to control the succession, in place of relying on ambient populations.

Used experimentally and in some commercial operations to improve consistency. It trades some of the regional character that spontaneous fermentation produces for predictability.

See also: Ambient microflora

A granite wheel-and-bed grinder used in small-batch chocolate making, running for 24 to 72 hours.

Because prolonged shear does much of the work conching would otherwise do, a stone-grinder maker may not conch separately at all.

Explained in full: Melangeur grinding

A mealybug-transmitted virus causing swelling, dieback and eventual tree death, endemic in West Africa.

No treatment exists once a tree is infected; control means removing it. This is one of the current pressures on West African supply, alongside ageing tree stock and weather disruption.

See also: Black pod

An instrument that measures the crystallisation curve of a chocolate sample and reports whether it is in temper.

Used in industrial production where a test strip is too slow. It measures the same property a strip does, faster and numerically.

Explained in full: Machine tempering

Mixing a fermenting mass of cacao to admit oxygen and even out temperature, typically every 24 to 48 hours.

Under-turned lots stall in the acetic phase and read as flat and astringent in the bar. Over-turning cools the mass and can stall it for the opposite reason.

Explained in full: Turning the fermentation

See also: Acetic phase

Heat treatment to around 135°C for a few seconds, followed by aseptic packing, producing a milk-based drink that keeps unrefrigerated for months.

That temperature drives Maillard reactions between milk sugars and milk proteins, producing the cooked, faintly caramelised note characteristic of long-life milk. In plain milk many palates read that note as a defect. In CHOCOLATE milk it is much less noticeable, because cocoa's own roast-derived aromas sit in the same families and mask it — which is a real reason chocolate milk is sold in ambient formats far more often than plain milk is. UHT products generally need more stabiliser than fresh ones, because the heat treatment changes how the casein behaves and the suspension has to survive months rather than days.

Explained in full: Chocolate milk explained

See also: Carrageenan

How readily melted chocolate flows, governed mainly by its cocoa butter content and by lecithin.

Low viscosity is what lets couverture film thinly over a centre and release cleanly from a mould. It is the property couverture is sold on, and it is rarely stated on consumer packaging.

Commonly misused: Confused with thickness caused by over-crystallisation. Chocolate that has thickened in the bowl during tempering has a temperature problem, not a viscosity one.

Explained in full: Couverture

The availability of water in a food to support microbial growth, which is what actually determines shelf stability.

Chocolate's very low water activity is why it keeps almost indefinitely. It is also why filled chocolates are formulated with caramel and praliné rather than fresh cream when a long shelf life is needed.

See also: Shelf life

The measure of available water in a food, which determines microbial stability rather than total water content.

Chocolate's very low water activity is why it keeps almost indefinitely, and why filled chocolates are formulated around caramel and praliné when shelf life is needed.

Explained in full: How long chocolate lasts

The machine that separates cracked cacao shell from nib using airflow.

Its absence is what stops most people making chocolate from beans at home. Improvised airflow works for a few hundred grams and stops being tolerable well before a kilogram.

Explained in full: Winnowing

Separating the light shell from the denser nib using airflow after the beans are cracked.

Explained in full: Winnowing

The first stage of fermentation, in which yeasts convert pulp sugars to ethanol in near-anaerobic conditions.

It also breaks down the pulp so it drains away, which admits the air the later phases need. A ferment that never drains stalls.

Explained in full: Fermentation

See also: Acetic phase, Lactic phase

The force required to make melted chocolate begin to flow, distinct from how easily it flows once moving.

It is why PGPR and lecithin are not interchangeable: lecithin mainly reduces plastic viscosity, PGPR mainly reduces yield stress, and thin moulded shells need the second.

See also: E476, Plastic viscosity

Clear plastic film used for transfer sheets, for collars around cakes and for setting chocolate with a glossy face.

Chocolate set against acetate takes on its surface, which is the cheapest way to get gloss without a mould.

Explained in full: Using transfer sheets

A bowl set over hot water, used to melt chocolate without direct heat.

Its advantage is that scorching is nearly impossible; its risk is that steam from its own equipment is the commonest cause of seizing.

Explained in full: Melting in a double boiler

A plant milk reformulated with added fat, buffering salts and stabilisers so that it foams, resists curdling in acidic or hot drinks, and behaves more like dairy.

The additions are not marketing. Plain plant milks lack the fat that carries aroma and gives body, lack the protein that stabilises foam and emulsion, and are held in suspension by a pH that acidity can disturb — which is why a plain oat or soy milk flecks when it meets espresso. A barista formulation adds a small quantity of oil, a buffering salt such as dipotassium phosphate to resist pH shift, and gellan or a similar stabiliser. In a hot chocolate this matters less than in a mocha, because there is no acid shock, but the extra fat still improves both texture and flavour delivery noticeably.

Explained in full: Hot chocolate with plant milk

See also: Emulsion

A Turinese drink of espresso, drinking chocolate and milk or cream layered in a small glass and deliberately not stirred.

Explained in full: Cioccolata calda

See also: Cioccolata calda

A pale film or streaking on chocolate. Fat bloom is cocoa butter migrated to the surface; sugar bloom is sugar recrystallised after moisture exposure.

Commonly misused: Taken for mould. Neither kind is mould and neither is unsafe. Both indicate poor tempering or poor storage, which is a texture problem rather than a spoilage one.

See also: Tempering

Three unrelated things in chocolate writing: fat bloom, sugar bloom, and blooming cocoa in a batter.

Fat bloom is crystal migration and looks greasy. Sugar bloom is moisture damage and feels sandy. Blooming cocoa is a baking technique. Only the first two are defects, and neither is spoilage.

Commonly misused: All three are routinely conflated, and readers are told to 'avoid blooming' in contexts where blooming is the instruction.

See also: Blooming cocoa

Whisking cocoa powder into hot liquid before adding it to a batter, to deepen the flavour.

Commonly misused: Confused with chocolate bloom, which is an unrelated storage defect. The two words share nothing but spelling.

Explained in full: Baking with cocoa powder

See also: Bloom

Whisking cocoa powder into hot liquid before adding it to a batter, to deepen the flavour.

Unrelated to chocolate bloom despite the shared word. It disperses the particles and releases aromatics that stay locked up when the powder is sifted in dry.

Commonly misused: Confused with the storage defect of the same name, sometimes in the same recipe.

Explained in full: Baking with cocoa powder

A single filled chocolate, whether moulded or enrobed.

In Belgian usage the same product is called a praline, which collides confusingly with the French praliné — a caramelised nut paste — and with the American praline, a pecan candy.

Commonly misused: Used interchangeably with truffle. A truffle is specifically a ganache-centred piece; a bonbon may contain anything.

Explained in full: Bonbon

See also: Shell moulding

A ganache whose fat has separated out of suspension, leaving grainy solids and free oil.

Recoverable in nearly all cases: a spoonful of warm liquid stirred from the centre outward, or a stick blender. It is a different failure from seizing, which happens where there is no water phase at all.

Explained in full: Why ganache splits

See also: Ganache ratio

A protease found in fresh pineapple. It digests protein, which is why fresh pineapple breaks a dairy ganache and prevents gelatine setting.

This is a mechanism rather than a matter of taste, and it catches people who have done nothing wrong. Fresh or freshly juiced pineapple added to a ganache attacks the milk proteins holding the emulsion, producing a thin and sometimes bitter result; added to a mousse or a jelly layer, it prevents the gelatine setting at all. Heat denatures it. Cooked, canned, roasted or grilled pineapple is safe in every preparation — and grilling has the additional benefit of caramelising the fruit's sugars into something that sits much closer to chocolate's own roast character. Kiwi, papaya, fig and mango carry comparable enzymes and cause the same problem to varying degrees.

Explained in full: Pineapple

See also: Broken emulsion, Emulsion

Couverture supplied as small uniform discs, so it melts evenly and can be measured by weight for seeding.

Commonly misused: Confused with chocolate buttons, which are a similar shape and usually a sweet confection with far less cocoa butter.

Explained in full: Callets and pistoles

See also: Seeding, Viscosity

Sealing a filled chocolate shell with a final layer of tempered chocolate before demoulding.

The filling must have formed a skin and be near 30°C. Too warm and it melts through the cap; too cold and an air gap forms beneath it.

Explained in full: Making filled chocolates

See also: Shell thickness

Spanish drinking chocolate thickened with starch to a spoon-coating consistency, made to be dipped into.

Tablets sold under this name have the starch already in them, which is why they behave differently from cocoa powder and why a recipe using them does not add more.

Explained in full: Spanish drinking chocolate

See also: Cioccolata calda, Slaking

Italian thickened drinking chocolate, served in small volumes and usually set with a little starch.

Commonly misused: Translated as 'hot chocolate' on English menus, which sets an expectation of a large milky drink. It is concentrated and served small.

Explained in full: Italian hot chocolate

See also: Slaking

A toothed scraper drawn through spreading chocolate to leave a ridged pattern.

Turns a plain sheet of set chocolate into patterned shards for essentially no extra effort.

Explained in full: Making chocolate shards

The shrinkage of chocolate as Form V crystals form, which is what releases a moulded piece.

Visible as a faint gap at the edge of each mould cavity. A piece that will not release did not contract, which means it was not in temper.

Explained in full: Why chocolate will not release

A cone rolled from baking paper, used as a disposable fine piping bag for chocolate decoration.

The tip is snipped to size after filling, which gives finer control than any nozzle. It is the standard tool for filigree and writing.

Explained in full: Chocolate decorations

See also: Filigree

A cone rolled from baking paper and used as a disposable fine piping bag.

The tip is snipped after filling, which gives finer control than any nozzle and is the standard tool for filigree and lettering.

Explained in full: Piping chocolate

Introducing existing Form V crystals from solid tempered chocolate to template a melt.

The most reliable home tempering method. The seed must itself be in temper — bloomed or previously melted chocolate carries the wrong forms.

Explained in full: Tempering by seeding

Setting a ganache in a slab, cutting it into squares and enrobing each piece.

The efficient alternative to rolling truffles, and it produces the square filled chocolates sold in most chocolatier boxes.

Explained in full: Enrobing by hand

A two- or three-tined tool used to lift a centre out of tempered chocolate and shed the excess.

How many times the fork is tapped against the bowl rim determines coating thickness. Too few taps leaves a thick foot around the base.

Explained in full: Enrobing by hand

See also: Footing

Cocoa powder treated with an alkalising agent, raising its pH to roughly neutral, darkening its colour and smoothing its flavour.

Commonly misused: Substituted for natural cocoa without adjusting the leavening. Dutch-process does not react with bicarbonate of soda, so the substitution produces a flat bake or an unreacted soapy taste.

See also: Natural cocoa

A stable dispersion of fat and water, which is what a ganache is and what a split ganache has stopped being.

A broken emulsion can usually be rebuilt by adding a little warm liquid and stirring from the centre outward, or by blending. This is the opposite situation to seizing, where the chocolate never had a water phase to begin with.

Explained in full: Making ganache

See also: Seizing

Coating a prepared centre by passing it under a curtain of tempered chocolate, or by dipping.

Commonly misused: Used interchangeably with moulding. They are the two different ways to build a filled piece, and the base gives it away — an enrobed piece sits in a small foot of chocolate.

Explained in full: Enrobed chocolate

Fine piped chocolate decoration, set on paper and peeled off once firm.

Pipe thicker than seems necessary — thin filigree snaps when peeled — and set at room temperature rather than in the fridge, which makes it brittle.

See also: Cornet

The ridge of excess chocolate that pools around the base of a dipped piece as it sets.

Prevented by tapping the fork thoroughly and drawing it across the bowl rim to scrape the base before setting the piece down.

See also: Dipping fork

Fruit with the water removed by sublimation, used in chocolate because it carries fruit flavour without free water.

The reason fruit chocolate is made this way and not with fruit. Free water seizes chocolate, so anything wet has to go into a filling behind a shell rather than into the chocolate itself.

Explained in full: Flavourings and inclusions

See also: Inclusion, Seizing, Water activity

An emulsion of chocolate and a liquid, usually cream — fat droplets suspended in water rather than chocolate diluted with liquid.

The emulsion framing is what explains splitting: a ganache that has gone greasy and grainy has broken, not merely thinned.

Explained in full: Making ganache

The weight of chocolate to cream in a ganache — roughly 2:1 dark, 3:1 milk, 4:1 white for a firm set.

Commonly misused: Quoted as a single number regardless of chocolate type. That is the most common cause of a ganache that never sets, and chilling cannot fix it.

Explained in full: Making ganache

See also: Broken emulsion

Anything mixed into or scattered onto chocolate — nuts, dried fruit, salt, nibs, biscuit.

Inclusions must be dry. Anything containing water will mark the chocolate and shorten its life, which is why dried fruit appears in bars and fresh fruit does not.

Explained in full: Inclusion bar

See also: Water activity

Very fine shredded pastry strands used across Middle Eastern and Balkan confectionery, and toasted crisp as a chocolate filling component.

The pastry used in knafeh, and the crunch inside a Dubai-style filled bar. It has to be toasted fully dry and cooled completely before meeting a moist filling, or it steams and goes soft.

Explained in full: Dubai-style filled chocolate

See also: Inclusion

A Levantine dessert of shredded or semolina pastry with a cheese or cream filling, soaked in sugar syrup.

Named here because it is the tradition a recent chocolate trend borrowed from. The dessert long predates chocolate in the region and is not a chocolate product; the borrowing is of the pastry texture and the pistachio finish.

Commonly misused: Used as a flavour descriptor on chocolate packaging as though knafeh were a flavour. It is a construction with a texture, and what the chocolate products borrow is the toasted pastry rather than a taste.

Explained in full: Middle Eastern chocolate and the sweets tradition

See also: Kadayif

Dried malted barley extract with wheat flour and milk solids. Added to chocolate drinks and shakes for a toasted, caramel, faintly savoury character.

Malting germinates barley and halts it, converting starch into maltose and other reducing sugars while mobilising amino acids. Drying the extract runs Maillard reactions between the two, generating pyrazines, furans and Strecker aldehydes. Those are the same aroma families roasting generates in cacao. Malt and cocoa are therefore not two flavours that happen to suit each other — they are two outcomes of closely related browning chemistry, which is why the combination reads as a single flavour rather than as a pairing. Malt aroma is volatile, so boiling a malted drink drives off a noticeable amount of it and leaves the drink flatter and sweeter.

Explained in full: Malted chocolate drinks

A cool stone surface used for tabling chocolate, and for cooling caramel and sugar work.

Its usefulness is thermal mass rather than the material as such — granite works equally well. A slab taken from a warm kitchen cools chocolate too slowly to matter.

Explained in full: Tempering by tabling

See also: Tabling

A family of complex Mexican sauces, some of which contain a small quantity of cacao among many other ingredients.

Not all moles contain cacao, and in those that do it is one contributor of bitterness, colour and body alongside several kinds of chilli, seeds, nuts, spices and aromatics. The right product is normally unsweetened cacao rather than an eating bar.

Commonly misused: Described in English food writing as 'chocolate sauce', which misstates both the proportion and the function. A mole that tastes of chocolate has too much in it.

Explained in full: Cacao in Mexican cuisine

See also: Cocoa mass

A turned wooden whisk, rolled between the palms to raise foam on drinking chocolate.

The foam is the prized element in the Mesoamerican drink and its descendants. Before the molinillo, foam was raised by pouring the liquid repeatedly between vessels from a height.

Explained in full: Mexican drinking chocolate

See also: Metate

Untreated cocoa powder, which is acidic and reacts with bicarbonate of soda to produce leavening.

See also: Dutch-process cocoa

Too much crystal in a tempered batch, which thickens the chocolate even at the correct temperature.

Caused by over-seeding, over-tabling, or letting a batch sit too long. Warming to the top of the working range dissolves the excess without losing the temper.

Commonly misused: Frequently diagnosed as the chocolate being too cool. The distinction matters because the remedy is the same but the prevention is not.

See also: Working temperature

Ground pistachio with sugar and fat, used as a filling or spread — closer to a sweetened nut butter than to a pure nut paste.

Pure pistachio paste is ground nut and nothing else. Commercial pistachio cream varies enormously in how much pistachio it actually contains, and the ingredient order on the jar is the only reliable indicator. A bright uniform green usually means added colouring; real pistachio paste is a duller, browner green.

Commonly misused: Read as pure pistachio. Many commercial creams are predominantly sugar and vegetable fat with a modest pistachio fraction.

Explained in full: Pistachio

See also: Praliné

The rigid clear mould used for professional chocolate work, whose polished surface produces the gloss.

Cleaned with dry cotton wool and never with detergent or in a dishwasher, either of which destroys the finish permanently in one use.

Explained in full: Cleaning chocolate equipment

A French paste of caramelised nuts ground with sugar, used as a filling.

Commonly misused: Confused with a Belgian praline, which is a filled chocolate, and with an American praline, which is a pecan sugar confection with no chocolate in it. A Belgian praline may be filled with French praliné, which is where readers usually give up.

Explained in full: Praline

A bought-in empty chocolate shell, industrially moulded, sold for a kitchen to fill and cap.

A component rather than a confection. It removes the hardest equipment-dependent stage of filled chocolate work and removes none of the filling, capping or shelf-life problem, which is where the skill and all of the food safety sit.

Commonly misused: Treated as disqualifying a product from being hand-made. It means the moulding was industrial and the confection is not.

Explained in full: Ready-made chocolate shells

See also: Capping, Shell moulding, Shell thickness

The heat remaining in a bowl and in already-melted chocolate, which continues melting after the heat source is removed.

Why chocolate should come off the heat while pieces remain visible. Chocolate removed at 45°C will continue to rise for a minute afterwards.

Explained in full: Avoiding overheating

The irreversible caramelisation and burning that occurs above roughly 50°C for dark and 45°C for milk and white.

The only common chocolate failure with no recovery at all. It is a chemical change rather than a physical one, which is why seizing can be redirected and this cannot.

Explained in full: Why chocolate overheats

Solid tempered chocolate stirred into a melt to introduce Form V crystals.

Any unopened bar with a good snap will serve. The seed must itself be in temper — bloomed or previously melted chocolate carries the wrong crystal forms.

Explained in full: Tempering by seeding

See also: Tempering curve

Tempering by stirring finely chopped, already-tempered chocolate into fully melted chocolate as a source of stable crystals.

The most practical domestic method, because it needs no marble slab. The seed must itself be in temper — use a bar that snaps rather than bends.

Explained in full: Tempering chocolate

See also: Tempering

Melted chocolate turning stiff and grainy when a small amount of water reaches it.

Water dissolves the surfaces of sugar particles, which then glue together. The counterintuitive fix is more liquid — about a tablespoon of boiling liquid per 100g turns it into a smooth sauce, though never back into melted chocolate.

Explained in full: Chocolate has seized

See also: Emulsion

Melted chocolate turning stiff and grainy when a trace of water wets the sugar particles.

The fix is more liquid rather than less: a tablespoon of boiling liquid per 100g dissolves the sugar fully and gives a sauce. It will not be melted chocolate again.

Explained in full: Why chocolate seizes

The ambient temperature at which tempered chocolate is left to solidify, ideally 15–18°C.

A correctly tempered batch in a 26°C room will not set. This is the constraint people check last and should check first.

Explained in full: Chocolate work in hot climates

Casting a hollow chocolate shell in a mould, filling it, and capping it with more tempered chocolate.

The only route for fluid centres. The high gloss on a moulded bonbon comes from the polished polycarbonate mould rather than from the chocolate, which is why a scratched mould guarantees a dull result.

Explained in full: Shell moulding

See also: Enrobing, Transfer sheet

How thick the cast chocolate wall of a moulded bonbon is, controlled by how long the mould is left full before inverting.

Too thick and the piece is unbalanced against its filling; too thin and it leaks. A few seconds either way is the whole adjustment.

Explained in full: Making filled chocolates

See also: Capping

A flexible mould that releases by bending rather than by contraction.

Far more forgiving of imperfect temper, and incapable of producing a mirror finish because its surface is not glossy. A good beginner's trade.

Explained in full: Making chocolate cups

Dispersing a starch or powder into cold liquid before adding it to hot liquid, to prevent lumps.

Essential for the traditional thick drinking chocolates, which are thickened with cornflour rather than with more chocolate. Cornflour added dry to hot milk lumps instantly and will not disperse.

Explained in full: Traditional drinking chocolate

Dispersing a powder into cold liquid before adding it to hot, so it does not lump.

Essential for cornflour in traditional drinking chocolate and for cocoa in a hot drink. Added dry to hot liquid, both lump immediately.

Explained in full: Traditional drinking chocolate

The unwanted graining of a caramel when sugar recrystallises during cooking.

Prevented by brushing the pan sides with water and by not stirring once the syrup is boiling. Once grained, a caramel cannot be smoothed.

Explained in full: Making chocolate caramel

Solid particles distributed through a liquid without dissolving in it. Cocoa in milk is a suspension: the particles are held up temporarily and gravity eventually wins.

The distinction from a SOLUTION is the one that explains most of what a cocoa drink does. Dissolved sugar is distributed at molecular scale and never separates; suspended cocoa is distributed as particles and always will, given time. Everything a manufacturer or a cook does to a chocolate drink — milling finer, thickening, emulsifying, adding a stabiliser — is an attempt to slow that settling down. It is also why 'dissolve the cocoa' is a phrase that appears in almost every recipe and describes something that cannot happen.

Explained in full: Why cocoa does not dissolve

See also: Carrageenan, Emulsion, Slaking

Tempering by pouring most of the melted chocolate onto a cool stone slab and working it until it thickens, then returning it to the warm remainder.

Explained in full: Tempering

See also: Seeding

Working two thirds of a melt on a cool slab until it thickens, then recombining it with the warm remainder.

Faster than seeding at volume and no more effective. At home it needs a stone surface and produces considerable mess for no advantage.

Explained in full: Tempering by tabling

See also: Marble slab

Setting a small sample on paper at cool room temperature to check for gloss and a clean break before committing a batch.

Three to five minutes. Testing in the fridge tells you nothing, because cold sets untempered chocolate too.

Explained in full: Testing the temper

See also: Seed

Controlling the crystallisation of cocoa butter so that chocolate sets in the single stable form that gives snap, gloss, contraction and a clean melt.

Commonly misused: Believed to affect flavour. It does not. It affects appearance, texture, snap, mould release and shelf stability, and nothing else.

Explained in full: Tempering

See also: Bloom

The three-stage temperature path — full melt, cool to crystallise, rewarm to working temperature — that produces Form V.

Each chocolate type has its own curve, and the differences are one to two degrees at each stage. Applying dark chocolate's numbers to white chocolate is above its window and gives a soft streaky set.

Explained in full: Tempering

See also: Form V, Working temperature

A printed acetate sheet carrying a pattern in coloured cocoa butter, which transfers onto chocolate as it sets.

The cheapest route to a professional-looking finish. The chocolate must be in temper — an untempered piece will not release cleanly and the pattern smears.

Explained in full: Chocolate decorations

See also: Shell moulding

The narrow band at which tempered chocolate is used — around 31–32°C for dark, 30–31°C milk, 29–30°C white.

Above the band the Form V crystals melt and the temper is lost. Below it the chocolate thickens and coats heavily. The window is about two degrees wide, which is why a thermometer is not optional.

Explained in full: Holding temper while working

See also: Tempering curve

The two-degree band at which tempered chocolate is used, differing by type.

31–32°C dark, 30–31°C milk, 29–30°C white. Above it the temper is lost; below it the chocolate thickens and coats heavily.

Explained in full: Temperature control

Brightness from fruit acids formed during fermentation — citric, malic and lactic.

Valued when integrated and lifting the fruit. Distinguished from sourness, which is sharp, separate and usually acetic acid that never drove off.

Explained in full: Acidity vs sourness

What remains once the chocolate has melted away, and for how long.

Distinct from finish only by emphasis: finish describes duration, aftertaste describes character. A bar can have a long finish and an unpleasant aftertaste.

See also: Body

A sharp, urine-like off-note from over-fermentation.

The far end of the same process that produces desirable savoury depth. A meaty note with accompanying dried fruit is complexity; an ammoniacal note without it is a fault.

Explained in full: Fermentation defects

A tactile drying and puckering sensation caused by polyphenols binding salivary proteins. Not a taste.

Commonly misused: Used interchangeably with bitterness. They are different sensations with different causes — bitterness is largely inherent to the bean and the percentage, while marked astringency generally indicates under-fermentation.

Explained in full: Bitter

The first impression a chocolate gives, before the melt develops.

Acidity and fruit usually arrive first; roast and bitterness arrive later. A bar described as having a bright attack and an earthy finish is describing that sequence rather than a contradiction.

See also: Finish

Whether any single element — acidity, bitterness, sweetness, roast — dominates the others.

Easier for a group to agree on than specific flavour notes, which makes it useful vocabulary at a tasting.

Explained in full: Tasting scorecard

A taste detected on the tongue, produced in chocolate mainly by theobromine, caffeine and some polyphenols.

Normal and expected at high cocoa content. It fades as the chocolate clears the palate, which is the reliable way to distinguish it from astringency.

Commonly misused: Conflated with astringency. One is tasted and fades; the other is felt and builds.

Explained in full: Bitter

The weight and substance a chocolate has in the mouth, independent of its flavour.

A bar can be intensely flavoured and light-bodied, or mild and heavy. Body is largely a function of fat content and particle size, and it is one of the easier things for a group to agree on.

See also: Aftertaste, Melt

A short-chain fatty acid with a low odour threshold and a sour, cheesy character. Released from milk fat by controlled lipolysis, and the reason some American milk chocolate tastes tangy to palates that did not grow up with it.

It is what parmesan smells of, and — notoriously — vomit, which is why the reaction to it is so much stronger than the reaction to an unfamiliar sweetness level. The process that produces it was originally a way of stabilising milk against rancidity before refrigeration was universal, and the flavour it produced became the taste of chocolate to generations of American consumers, who like it for the ordinary reason that it is what chocolate tastes like to them. It is worth being precise about two things. Not all American chocolate contains it — it is a characteristic of some manufacturers rather than a national requirement. And it is a FLAVOUR difference rather than a sweetness one, which is why the sugar argument about American chocolate misses what people are actually reacting to.

Explained in full: Is American chocolate sweeter?

See also: Milk crumb

The Maillard-derived aromatic core common to essentially all roasted cacao.

A bar tasting only of cocoa has usually been roasted hard or made from undistinguished beans — not a fault, but a description of something with nothing distinctive left.

Explained in full: Cocoa

How many distinguishable characteristics a chocolate presents, and how they develop across the tasting.

A useful word only when it names what the characteristics are. Complexity as a bare compliment says nothing checkable.

Explained in full: Chocolate tasting vocabulary

A specific named flavour note, as distinct from a broad flavour family.

Families — fruity, nutty, earthy — are where a taster should start. Descriptors such as blackcurrant or tobacco come from repetition, and a taster who can reliably identify a family is further along than one who guesses a descriptor and is wrong.

See also: Flavour wheel

A grey-white surface film caused by unstable cocoa butter crystals converting to more stable forms and migrating outward.

Distinct from sugar bloom, which is rough and gritty and caused by moisture. Neither is mould and neither makes chocolate unsafe.

Commonly misused: Read as mould or spoilage. Bloomed chocolate melts and bakes perfectly well.

See also: Form V, Sugar bloom

How long flavour persists after the chocolate has melted away.

A long finish is generally valued and is easier to agree on than specific flavour notes, which makes it useful vocabulary for a group tasting. A short finish is not a fault; it is a characteristic.

See also: Attack, Retronasal aroma

A radial diagram grouping tasting descriptors from broad families at the centre to specific notes at the rim.

Commonly misused: Used as a starting point, which inverts its usefulness. Reading a wheel before tasting supplies expectations; reading one afterwards supplies vocabulary for something already perceived.

See also: Descriptor

The reflective surface produced by dense uniform Form V crystals, or by a polished mould.

For a moulded piece the gloss is a cast of the mould surface, so a dull moulded bonbon may be perfectly tempered and made in a scratched mould.

Explained in full: Why chocolate is dull

A cured-meat character, arising either from smoke taint or from over-fermentation.

The two causes are told apart by what accompanies it: smoke arrives with a campfire edge from drying, over-fermentation with an ammoniacal one.

Explained in full: Smoke vs burnt

Shade-grown Japanese green tea ground to a fine powder, used in chocolate almost exclusively on a white base.

The white base is a technical choice: cocoa solids would bury matcha's vegetal, marine, faintly bitter character, and cocoa butter carries it. Quality varies along one axis, which is the matcha — a dull khaki colour and a flat bitterness usually indicate culinary-grade powder used in quantity.

Explained in full: Matcha

See also: Astringency

How a chocolate softens and releases in the mouth — sharp and clean, or slow and waxy.

Cocoa butter's unusually narrow melting range is what produces a clean melt. A waxy or slow melt usually indicates a fat that is not cocoa butter.

Explained in full: Cocoa butter

See also: Body

The physical sensation of chocolate in the mouth — smoothness, melt rate, body and any grit or wax.

Determined by particle size, cocoa butter content and the fat's melting profile. A waxy mouthfeel usually signals a fat that is not cocoa butter; grit signals under-refining or sugar bloom.

See also: Particle size, Viscosity

A flavour that indicates a processing failure rather than an origin characteristic.

The distinction is not always obvious: a savoury note can be complexity or over-fermentation, and smoke can be a regional signature or a drying defect. What separates them is usually intensity and what accompanies them.

Explained in full: Fermentation defects

See also: Taint

Something neutral eaten between samples to reset the palate — plain bread, apple or water.

Bread and apple work better than water alone because they physically clear residual fat from the tongue. Anything flavoured defeats the purpose.

See also: Palate fatigue

The loss of discrimination that follows tasting several intense samples in succession.

It is why four or five bars is the practical maximum for a tasting, and why a very high-percentage bar early in a flight makes everything after it taste flat. It is a physiological limit rather than a lack of skill.

Explained in full: Setting up a chocolate tasting

See also: Palate cleanser

A family of Maillard-derived aroma compounds responsible for the roasted, nutty, cocoa character of chocolate.

They are common to essentially all roasted cacao regardless of origin, which is why a heavily roasted bar from anywhere tastes of cocoa and little else.

Explained in full: Cocoa

See also: Maillard reaction

Aroma reaching the olfactory receptors from the back of the mouth rather than through the nostrils.

Most of what people call the taste of chocolate is retronasal aroma. It is why letting a piece melt slowly reveals far more than chewing, and why a blocked nose flattens chocolate to sweet and bitter alone.

See also: Finish

A group of assessors trained to a shared vocabulary and calibrated against reference standards, whose scores can be treated as data. It is what separates a measured flavour finding from an expert's opinion.

THIS IS THE CONCEPT BEHIND A SENTENCE THAT APPEARS ALL OVER THIS SITE: 'no panel study is available to this catalogue'. It is worth explaining what is being declined. A TRAINED PANEL IS NOT A GROUP OF ENTHUSIASTS. Assessors are screened for discriminative ability, trained against physical reference standards so that everyone means the same thing by 'astringent' or 'fruity', calibrated repeatedly, and scored for consistency. Samples are presented blind, in randomised order, under controlled lighting and temperature. The output is numbers with a variance, which can be tested. WHAT THAT BUYS is reproducibility. A panel finding can be repeated by a different panel; an expert's description cannot be repeated by anybody, including the expert. WHY IT MATTERS IN THIS SUBJECT MORE THAN MOST. Almost all published flavour description of cacao comes from people who buy, sell or make chocolate from it. Those descriptions are consistent, they are made by experienced palates, and they are not independent. A trader describing the cacao they market is reporting a commercial position as well as a sensation, and there is usually no panel study to set beside it. SO THE CATALOGUE REPORTS SUCH DESCRIPTIONS, ATTRIBUTED, at a confidence that says what they are. That is not scepticism about the tasters. It is the difference between an observation and a measurement, and the difference is the whole reason this term exists.

Explained in full: Chocolate tasting vocabulary

See also: Flavour wheel, Mouthfeel

An irreversible ham or campfire off-note absorbed from wood-fired dryers venting through the beans.

No later stage removes it. It is the defining historic quality problem of several Asian and Pacific origins, and it is an equipment problem rather than an agronomic one — indirect heating eliminates it.

Commonly misused: Attributed to over-roasting. Smoke comes from drying and is hammy; burnt comes from roasting and is ashy.

Explained in full: Smoke

See also: Case hardening

The clean break of correctly tempered chocolate at room temperature, and the quickest available test of whether a bar was tempered properly.

See also: Tempering

The clean break of well-tempered chocolate at room temperature.

A soft or crumbly break means poor temper, warm storage or a high milk fat content. It is the fastest non-destructive check on how a bar was made and kept.

Explained in full: Tempering

A rough, gritty white surface caused by moisture dissolving surface sugar, which then recrystallises.

The classic cause is condensation on chocolate taken from a fridge into a warm room. Unlike fat bloom it cannot be reversed by re-tempering, because the sugar has physically moved.

See also: Fat bloom

A flavour absorbed from outside the bean — smoke, fuel, jute, or whatever was stored nearby.

Cocoa butter absorbs odours readily, which is why storage and transport are a real quality risk and why chocolate must be kept away from strong smells at every stage from fermentary to cupboard.

Explained in full: Smoke

See also: Off-flavour

A polyphenol that binds salivary proteins and produces the drying, roughening sensation called astringency.

Reduced during fermentation by oxidation and polymerisation. Marked tannin in a finished bar usually means the fermentation was cut short.

Explained in full: Astringent

The claim that soil, climate and place leave a legible signature in a finished agricultural product.

Commonly misused: Borrowed from wine and applied to cacao more confidently than the evidence supports. Fermentation and roast overwrite much of what growing conditions contribute, so most of what is attributed to terroir in chocolate is processing.

Explained in full: Terroir in chocolate

See also: Ambient microflora

A compound present in cacao in very small quantities, frequently cited in popular writing about chocolate and mood.

Present, and present at levels far below what a central effect would require. It is a good example of a compound being real and the conclusion drawn from it not following.

Commonly misused: Cited as evidence that chocolate produces a drug-like effect. Presence is not the same as a delivered dose.

Explained in full: Chocolate and mood

Cut shoot material carrying buds, taken from a chosen tree and grafted onto a rootstock so that the new plant is genetically that tree.

Whether the budwood came from a vertical shoot or a fan branch decides the shape of the resulting tree, because cacao growth habit travels with the material. The quality of a replanting programme is largely the quality and health of its budwood supply.

Explained in full: How new cacao trees are made

See also: Clonal garden, Fan branch, Rootstock

The sequenced genome of Theobroma cacao, first published in 2011, and the foundation of the genetic work that displaced the old three-name classification of cacao.

Its practical consequence is that a tree's ancestry can be read directly rather than guessed from pod shape and bean colour. That is what allowed the trade's Criollo, Forastero and Trinitario account to be shown as a commercial vocabulary rather than a genetic one.

Commonly misused: Cited as though sequencing settled which cacao tastes best. It settled a classification question. Flavour remains overwhelmingly a matter of fermentation and post-harvest handling, and no amount of sequence changes that.

Explained in full: Cacao varieties explained

See also: Fine or flavour cacao

The tiny biting midge, of the family that includes Forcipomyia, that does most of cacao's pollination. It is roughly the size of a pinhead.

The cacao flower is small, complicated and structurally hostile to bees; the midge is one of very few insects that can work it. The midges breed in damp rotting matter — leaf litter, decomposing pod husks, the debris of a shaded plantation floor — which quietly connects pollination to how tidy and how shaded a farm is kept.

Commonly misused: Assumed to be a bee, or assumed not to matter. The pollinator is the reason a clean, bare, full-sun plantation floor is not straightforwardly an improvement.

Explained in full: How a cacao pod forms

See also: Cherelle wilt, Self-incompatibility

A heavy metal taken up from soil by cacao trees, present at higher levels in some Latin American origins.

EU regulation sets maximum levels for cocoa and chocolate products, varying by cocoa content. It is a genuine consideration and one where the regulatory position is the useful source.

Explained in full: Cadmium and heavy metals in cacao

Flowering and fruiting directly from the trunk and main branches.

Cacao's cauliflory has a direct practical consequence: pods cannot be shaken loose or machine-harvested without damaging the flower cushions that will bear next season's crop. It is one of the reasons harvesting remains hand work.

Explained in full: How a cacao tree grows

See also: Flower cushion, Theobroma cacao

A high-yielding, disease-tolerant Ecuadorian clone that now accounts for a large share of that country's production.

Its yield can be several times that of Nacional, which is why farmers plant it. Its flavour is robust and acidic rather than aromatic, and its spread is the main reason fine-flavour Ecuadorian material has become scarcer.

Commonly misused: Treated as simply bad. Well-fermented CCN-51 is considerably better than its reputation, and criticising it without acknowledging the yield economics ignores what drives the planting.

Explained in full: CCN-51

See also: Clone, Nacional

The natural withering of a large proportion of immature cacao pods, by which the tree sheds more fruit than it can carry.

It is a physiological thinning rather than a disease, and it can affect the majority of set fruit. Farmers new to cacao frequently mistake it for an infection.

See also: Pod

A vertical shoot on a cacao tree. The seedling's original stem is one, and the tree throws more of them from the trunk and base throughout its life.

Vertical shoots grow upward and produce more vertical shoots; they are not the growth that bears pods. Most pruning decisions on a mature cacao tree are decisions about which chupons to remove and, occasionally, which one to keep as a replacement trunk.

Commonly misused: Treated as a sucker to be removed on sight. A chupon is how the tree renews itself — a deliberately retained one is the standard way of rebuilding a tree whose canopy has failed, so the blanket rule loses the mechanism.

Explained in full: How a cacao tree grows

See also: Fan branch, Jorquette

A planting maintained to produce budwood rather than beans — the verified source of the material a nursery grafts from.

It is the least visible and most decisive part of a replanting programme. If the clonal garden is mislabelled or diseased, every tree grafted from it inherits the problem, and the error is discovered several years later when the trees should be bearing.

Explained in full: Planting material and nurseries

See also: Budwood, Recalcitrant seed, Self-incompatibility

A genetically identical population propagated vegetatively from one selected tree, usually carrying a code such as CCN-51 or ICS-1.

Most named cacao 'varieties' in commercial planting are clones rather than botanical varieties. The codes identify a specific selected individual and its descendants.

Commonly misused: Clone numbers are sometimes printed as if they were flavour designations. They identify genetics; flavour still depends on fermentation and roast.

See also: CCN-51, Grafting

A trade name for pale-bean cacao types associated with low bitterness and delicate aromatics.

Commonly misused: Treated as a verified botanical category and a guarantee of quality. It is a trade classification, it is not audited on packaging, and most material sold under the name carries ancestry from other populations.

Explained in full: Criollo

The principal flavanol in cacao, and the compound most cocoa health research is actually about.

Degraded substantially by fermentation, roasting and especially alkalisation. No bar states its epicatechin content, which is why research doses cannot be converted into a quantity of chocolate.

Explained in full: Cocoa flavanols and blood vessel function

A horizontal branch of a cacao tree, of the kind produced at the jorquette. Fan branches carry the flowers and therefore the pods.

Horizontal growth breeds horizontal growth. A cutting taken from a fan branch grows into a low spreading bush that never produces a trunk, which is a genuine constraint on propagating by cuttings rather than a detail — it decides the shape of the resulting plant.

Explained in full: How a cacao tree grows

See also: Chupon, Jorquette, Rooted cutting

The thickened point on a cacao trunk from which flowers and pods emerge repeatedly over years.

Damaging a cushion during harvest costs future crops, not just the pod being taken. This is why pods are cut with a blade leaving a short stalk rather than pulled.

Explained in full: Harvesting

See also: Cauliflory

A fungal disease affecting cacao pods, and one of the pressures that displaced Criollo planting across much of Latin America.

See also: Witches' broom

The point where a cacao seedling stops growing upward and throws out a whorl of horizontal branches. It happens once, at a height the tree decides.

The jorquette is the single most consequential event in a cacao tree's structure: everything below it is trunk, everything above it is fruiting canopy, and its height sets how a person will work the tree for decades. A tree that jorquettes low is harvested from the ground; one that jorquettes high is not.

Explained in full: How a cacao tree grows

See also: Chupon, Fan branch

The class of mild stimulants to which theobromine and caffeine belong.

Content scales with cocoa solids, so dark chocolate carries substantially more than milk and white chocolate carries essentially none.

Explained in full: Caffeine and theobromine in chocolate

The Ecuadorian population carrying the floral aromatic character the origin is known for.

Genetically pure Nacional is now scarce and much material sold under the name is admixed with CCN-51 through cross-pollination. A Nacional claim benefits from genetic testing rather than farm assertion alone.

Explained in full: Nacional

See also: CCN-51

A monounsaturated fatty acid making up roughly a third of cocoa butter.

The same fatty acid that dominates olive oil. Its presence is part of why cocoa butter is softer than a fully saturated fat would be at the same melting point.

Explained in full: Cocoa butter

A compound in cacao, structurally related to amphetamine, routinely offered as the reason chocolate lifts mood.

Extensively metabolised by monoamine oxidase in the gut wall and liver, so very little reaches systemic circulation intact. A compound that is present but does not arrive cannot be the mechanism.

Commonly misused: The most persistently misused compound name in chocolate writing.

Explained in full: Chocolate and mood

The fruit of the cacao tree, containing 30–50 beans surrounded by white pulp.

Pod colour at ripeness varies by variety, which is why a single colour cannot be used as a universal ripeness test. An immature pod is called a cherelle, and most cherelles wither on the tree naturally.

Commonly misused: Pod shape and colour are often presented as a reliable variety identifier. They are not — morphology varies within populations and overlaps between them.

See also: Cherelle wilt, Pulp

Plant compounds in cacao responsible for astringency and bitterness, and the subject of most cocoa health research.

Fermentation oxidises and polymerises them, which is what reduces astringency and turns the bean brown. Roasting and especially alkalisation degrade them further. That processing loss is why a conventional bar is an unreliable source of the flavanols studies use.

Commonly misused: Cited on packaging as a health credential. Flavanol content is not stated on labels and is heavily reduced by normal processing.

Explained in full: Cocoa flavanols and blood vessel function

See also: Astringency

The sweet white flesh surrounding cacao beans in the pod, and the substrate that fermentation actually consumes.

Fermentation is a fermentation of the pulp, not of the bean. Its sugar content determines how the microbial succession runs, which is one of the few genuine routes by which growing conditions reach the finished chocolate.

Explained in full: Cacao pulp

See also: Pod, Pulp preconditioning

A seed that cannot be dried and stored without dying. Cacao seed is recalcitrant, which is why there is no such thing as a packet of cacao seed on a shelf.

It has consequences far beyond the nursery. Cacao genetic material cannot be conserved in a seed bank the way wheat or maize can — it has to be kept as living trees in field collections, which are expensive, occupy land, and can be destroyed by exactly the diseases the collections exist to breed against.

Commonly misused: Read as a storage inconvenience. It is the reason cacao conservation is a standing institutional problem rather than a solved one.

Explained in full: How new cacao trees are made

See also: Clonal garden

A piece of cacao branch induced to grow its own roots, producing a plant genetically identical to the tree it came from and carrying no rootstock.

Because growth habit travels with the material, a cutting taken from a fan branch produces a low spreading plant with no trunk and a shallow root system. That is the standing trade-off against grafting, and it is structural rather than a matter of technique.

Explained in full: How new cacao trees are made

See also: Budwood, Fan branch, Rootstock

The seedling that provides the root system of a grafted tree. The top is the chosen clone; the roots are somebody else entirely.

Rootstock is selected for vigour and for tolerance of what is in the soil, not for flavour — the beans are produced by the grafted top and carry its genetics. This is the mechanism that lets a grower plant a clone chosen for its pods on roots chosen for the ground it is going into.

Commonly misused: Assumed to influence flavour, by analogy with wine. In cacao the case is far weaker than the confidence with which it is asserted, and the catalogue does not make the claim.

Explained in full: How new cacao trees are made

See also: Budwood, Rooted cutting

A genetic mechanism by which many cacao trees reject their own pollen, and the pollen of genetically identical trees, so that no fruit forms.

It matters most where trees are clones. A block planted with a single self-incompatible clone can flower heavily and set almost nothing, because every tree in it is the same tree. Planting design has to supply a compatible pollen partner, which is a real constraint on how clonal material is used rather than a curiosity.

Commonly misused: Read as sterility or as a defect in the clone. The tree is fertile; it simply requires a partner, and the failure is a planting-design failure rather than a plant one.

Explained in full: How a cacao pod forms

See also: Cacao midge, Clonal garden

A saturated fatty acid making up roughly a third of cocoa butter.

Frequently cited as behaving differently from other saturated fats in relation to blood cholesterol. That is a statement about one fatty acid rather than an endorsement of chocolate.

Commonly misused: Quoted as evidence that chocolate's fat is healthy. It is a claim about one component of a food that also delivers substantial sugar and energy.

Explained in full: What is actually in chocolate

A relative of cacao, known as pataxte or mocambo, whose seeds were used in Mesoamerican drinks alongside and sometimes in place of cacao.

It appears constantly in ethnobotanical and archaeological writing about early chocolate and almost never in writing about chocolate as a product, which is why a reader meeting it usually meets it unexplained. It is a different species; it is not a grade or a variety of cacao.

Commonly misused: Read as a kind of cacao. Confusing the two makes a mess of any account of what Mesoamerican drinks actually contained.

See also: Theobroma grandiflorum

The botanical name of the cacao tree, from the Greek for 'food of the gods' and the Mesoamerican word for the plant.

A small understorey tree of the Malvaceae, native to the upper Amazon. It is cauliflorous — pods grow directly from the trunk and main branches rather than from twigs — which is why harvesting is done with a blade rather than by shaking.

See also: Cacao, Cauliflory

Cupuaçu — a Theobroma species grown in Brazil for its pulp, whose seeds are also pressed and made into a chocolate-like product sold as cupulate or cupuassu chocolate.

It is the relative most likely to be encountered as a product rather than in a footnote, and the labelling question it raises is real: a bar made from it is not chocolate under most legal definitions, whatever it resembles.

Commonly misused: Sold and described as a chocolate. It is a different species with a different fat, and the composition rules that define chocolate are written around cacao.

See also: Theobroma bicolor

The principal methylxanthine in cacao, a mild stimulant present in far larger quantities than caffeine.

Dogs metabolise it very slowly, which is why chocolate is toxic to them at doses harmless to people. Content scales with cocoa solids, so dark chocolate and cocoa powder carry the most.

Explained in full: Chocolate, theobromine and dogs

See also: Polyphenols

The fat molecule type that makes up cocoa butter, three fatty acids attached to a glycerol backbone.

Cocoa butter's unusually uniform triglyceride composition is why it melts over such a narrow range, and therefore why chocolate melts cleanly at body temperature.

Explained in full: Cocoa butter

A fungal disease of cacao that produces distorted shoot growth and destroys pod yield.

It collapsed Brazilian production after arriving in Bahia around 1989, turning a major exporter into a net importer within a decade. Breeding for resistance to it is the main reason clones like CCN-51 exist and spread.

A dated seasonal format containing one small chocolate per day through December.

The calendar predates its chocolate form — counting the days with a printed calendar is a nineteenth-century German Protestant practice, and filling the windows with chocolate is a twentieth-century commercial addition. The format constrains the chocolate hard: twenty-four identical small mouldings at a price.

Commonly misused: Judged as chocolate. It is a ritual object, and the mass-market chocolate in it is thin, low-cocoa and frequently made with vegetable fat because the format demands it.

Explained in full: Christmas chocolate traditions

See also: Selection box

The intermediary who buys small farmers' cacao and consolidates it into export volumes.

A typical smallholder produces a few hundred kilograms a year — far too little to reach an exporter directly. Aggregation is structurally necessary and is also where much of the price gap opens.

Explained in full: Cacao farming economics

See also: Terminal market

The rigid, flat-topped box designed to carry filled chocolates without crushing them.

An early twentieth-century Belgian development, and the direct answer to a problem the filled praline had created: soft-centred chocolates travel badly in a paper cone. The rigid box is what turned an assortment from something eaten in a shop into something given as a present.

Explained in full: The chocolate box

See also: Praline (Belgian)

The number of dried beans per 100 grams, used as a size grade in the cacao trade.

A lower count means larger beans, which are generally preferred because they have a better nib-to-shell ratio and roast more evenly. Around 90–100 beans per 100g is a common commercial specification.

See also: Cut test

The trade's two-way split of cacao, distinguishing high-volume blending material from cacao bought for its distinctive character.

Commonly misused: Read as good and bad. The terms describe intended use. Producing consistent, well-fermented cacao at industrial volume is a harder logistical problem than producing a small distinctive lot.

Cacao grown, fermented and traded for consistency at industrial volume, and blended before use.

Commonly misused: Read as low quality. It describes intended use. Producing consistent, well-fermented cacao at that scale is a harder agricultural and logistical problem than producing a small distinctive lot.

See also: Bulk and fine or flavour cacao

The relative market prices of cocoa butter and cocoa powder, which together determine whether processing beans is profitable.

Butter typically commands considerably more per tonne. When the ratio moves, so does manufacturer behaviour — including how much vegetable fat substitution appears in the market.

Explained in full: Cocoa butter equivalents

See also: Grindings

In trade and technical usage, generally the tree (Theobroma cacao), the pod and the unprocessed bean.

Commonly misused: As a signal that a product is raw, unprocessed or more nutritious. The word carries no such guarantee, and products labelled cacao are frequently processed identically to those labelled cocoa.

See also: Cocoa

Forest clearance for cacao planting, particularly significant in West Africa.

EU deforestation regulation requires supply chain due diligence for cocoa among other commodities, which is pushing traceability requirements down the chain.

Explained in full: Cacao and climate change

A documented and persistent issue in West African cacao production, and the subject of repeated industry commitments.

Independent investigations have found it on certified farms as well as uncertified ones, which is part of why certification is best understood as an improvement with known limits rather than an assurance.

Explained in full: Cacao farming economics

Someone who makes chocolate from cacao beans — roasting, winnowing, grinding, conching and tempering.

The distinction from chocolatier matters when reading a maker's claims: a chocolate maker's roast and conch decisions are theirs, while a chocolatier inherits them from whoever supplied the couverture.

See also: Chocolatier

Someone who makes confections from finished chocolate, as distinct from a chocolate maker who makes chocolate from beans.

Commonly misused: The two are used interchangeably in English. The distinction is real and useful: a chocolatier buys couverture; a maker buys beans.

See also: Artisan, Bean-to-bar

In trade and technical usage, generally the processed products of the cacao bean — cocoa powder, cocoa butter, cocoa liquor.

The convention is loose and inconsistently applied even within the industry, where 'cocoa beans' is entirely standard.

Commonly misused: As the counterpart to a supposed 'cacao is raw and healthier' distinction. No standard establishes that distinction.

See also: Cacao

An international programme that collects cacao samples from producing countries, processes them to a standard protocol and assesses them through trained panels — the closest thing the crop has to a comparative quality reference.

WHAT MAKES IT UNUSUAL IS THE PROTOCOL RATHER THAN THE AWARDS. Samples are fermented and dried by the producer, then roasted and processed to liquor under a STANDARDISED method before assessment. That controls the variable that otherwise makes cacao comparison meaningless: two beans processed differently taste differently regardless of what they were, and most origin flavour comparison is really a comparison of somebody's roast. So the programme produces something rare — a set of assessments where the material differs and the processing does not. IT IS ALSO WHERE 'FINE FLAVOUR' BECOMES SOMETHING OTHER THAN A MARKETING PHRASE. The catalogue's position on the fine-versus-bulk distinction is set out at length elsewhere: it is a trade classification with real content and blurry edges. A programme that assesses submitted samples under a common protocol is one of the few places the distinction gets tested rather than asserted. WHAT IT IS NOT is a survey of what a country produces. Samples are submitted, which means they are selected, and a country's showing reflects who entered as much as what grows there. Reading award results as a ranking of origins is the error the format invites and the programme does not claim.

Explained in full: Fine-flavour vs bulk cacao

See also: Bulk and fine or flavour cacao, Sensory panel

A member-owned organisation through which smallholder farmers aggregate, process and sell their cocoa.

The unit most certification schemes certify and most premiums are paid to, because reaching millions of individual smallholdings directly is not practical. That is also why the relationship between a premium paid and a household's income is indirect and hard to measure.

Explained in full: Cocoa supply chain

See also: Aggregator, Minimum price

Cutting a fixed sample of beans lengthways and counting how many are properly fermented, under-fermented, mouldy or germinated.

Fully fermented beans are brown with a fissured internal structure; under-fermented ones are slaty purple. The defect percentage across the sample determines the grade and therefore the price. It is cheap, simple and the closest thing the trade has to a universal quality measure.

Explained in full: Sorting, grading and shipping

A maker buying beans from a named producer without intermediaries, typically at a stated multiple of the commodity price.

Commonly misused: Treated as equivalent to certification. It has no auditor and no standard — the transparency is often better and the verification is the maker's word alone.

Explained in full: Direct trade chocolate

See also: Farmgate price

A certification setting a minimum price and a social premium paid to producer organisations, audited against published standards.

A specific and checkable claim about price and premium. Its limits — periodic sample-based auditing — are real and acknowledged by the scheme itself.

Explained in full: Chocolate certifications explained

What the farmer actually receives per kilogram, before any onward margin.

It is distinct from the commodity exchange price, which is what beans trade for internationally. The gap between the two is where aggregators, exporters and in some countries state marketing boards take their share.

See also: Living income differential

The trade's designation for cacao bought for its distinctive character rather than for blending at volume.

Commonly misused: Treated as a quality certification. It is a trade category assessed at country level by an intergovernmental body, and it describes intended use rather than guaranteeing anything about a specific lot.

See also: Bulk cacao

A company that formulates flavourings to a manufacturer's brief. A small number of them supply most of the food industry, and their formulations are trade secrets.

The work is closer to reconstruction than to invention. A flavourist analyses the target — typically by gas chromatography coupled both to a detector and to a human nose, because the compounds PRESENT and the compounds that MATTER are different lists — and then builds an approximation from materials that are affordable, stable in the product, and approved in every market it will sell in. Those three constraints, rather than any limit on knowledge, are what shape the result. A compound essential to the aroma but expensive, unstable at the product's processing temperature or unapproved somewhere gets dropped or approximated, and the gap is what a taster perceives as artificiality. This catalogue does not publish or guess at any formulation, and nothing here should be read as describing a specific product.

Explained in full: Artificial chocolate flavour

See also: Artificial flavouring, Natural flavouring

An individually wrapped miniature bar, frequently reformulated rather than simply reduced in size.

Shrinking a filled bar changes the ratio of coating to filling and the coating has to survive more handling, so miniatures are commonly a different formulation. Individual wrappers also frequently omit the full ingredient list carried on the multipack outer, which matters for allergens.

Commonly misused: Assumed to be the same product in a smaller wrapper. The recipe frequently differs.

Explained in full: The Halloween chocolate custom

See also: May contain

The ingot-shaped moulded gianduja piece characteristic of Turin, wrapped in foil.

Named after a Piedmontese carnival character. The shape is not decorative — gianduja is soft because hazelnut oil is liquid at room temperature, and the ingot form gives a piece that holds together without needing a shell.

Explained in full: Gianduja

See also: Praliné

Chocolate given in Japan on Valentine's Day as a social courtesy to colleagues and acquaintances rather than as an expression of affection.

The category is explicitly named as obligatory, which is unusual — most gift customs leave the relationship implicit. That precision is also why it became criticisable as an unpaid social duty, and the practice is in visible decline.

Explained in full: Valentine's chocolate in Japan

See also: Honmei-choco, White Day

The volume of cocoa beans processed into mass, butter and powder, used as the industry's demand indicator.

Quarterly grindings figures are watched as a proxy for chocolate demand, and are among the most closely followed numbers in the trade.

See also: Terminal market

Chocolate given in Japan on Valentine's Day to a romantic interest, expected to be better than obligation chocolate and frequently hand-made.

Explained in full: Valentine's chocolate in Japan

See also: Giri-choco, White Day

The intergovernmental body that publishes cocoa market statistics and maintains the fine-or-flavour country classification.

Its fine-flavour list is assigned at country level and reviewed periodically by an expert panel. No individual bean is certified.

See also: Terminal market

The income a household needs for a decent standard of living in its own context — the benchmark most cacao income initiatives are measured against.

Distinct from a minimum wage, which applies to employment rather than to smallholder farming. Studies have repeatedly found typical West African cacao households below the benchmark.

See also: Premium

A per-tonne premium introduced by Ghana and Ivory Coast on cacao exports, intended to raise farmgate income.

It is a state-level intervention rather than a certification, applied to all exports from those countries. How reliably it reaches farmers is contested and is not settled here.

See also: Farmgate price

Keeping a specific harvest or farm's beans distinct through fermentation, drying and shipping rather than pooling them.

It is the operational prerequisite for any origin claim below country level, and its absence — not bean quality — is why West African single-origin bars are uncommon.

Explained in full: African cacao

See also: Traceability

The larger of the two annual cacao harvests, generally producing bigger and better-filled beans.

The smaller mid crop follows several months later, with lighter beans and volumes that make fermentation harder to manage. Traders price the two differently.

Explained in full: Cacao harvest seasons

See also: Harvest year

A French state-recognised craft title awarded by competitive examination, held by a small number of chocolatiers.

Unusual among terms on a chocolate shop window in being an actual credential with an examining body behind it, rather than a self-applied description. The collar worn by holders is legally protected.

Commonly misused: Grouped mentally with 'master chocolatier' and 'artisan', which are self-applied and mean nothing in particular. This one is examined.

Explained in full: The French chocolatier tradition

See also: Artisan, Chocolatier

A very small separated batch, sometimes a single fermentation from a single farm.

Borrowed from specialty coffee. It carries the most specific origin claim available and the least consistency, because there is no blending to smooth harvest variation.

See also: Lot separation

A price floor set by a certification scheme, below which certified cocoa may not be bought.

A floor is designed to protect against market collapse; it is not a target and it is not calculated to represent a living income. A separate premium is paid to the producer organisation on top, and how that premium is used is a decision of the organisation rather than a payment to an individual household.

Commonly misused: Read as the price the farmer receives. It is the price paid into a supply chain that still has intermediaries and deductions in it.

Explained in full: Buying sustainable chocolate

See also: Fairtrade, Farmgate price, Living income

A certification that specified inputs were not used in production, audited against a published standard.

It says nothing about price paid to farmers, labour conditions or flavour. Assuming it covers those is the commonest misreading of a chocolate label.

Commonly misused: Read as a general ethical or quality guarantee. It certifies inputs and nothing else.

Explained in full: Chocolate certifications explained

A flat thin disc of couverture sold in bulk, cast on a belt and designed for fast even melting.

Distinct from a callet, which is a deeper pellet engineered for machine feeding and accurate seeding, and from a retail button, which is frequently an eating chocolate rather than a couverture.

Commonly misused: Used interchangeably with callets and buttons. The first two are couverture formats; the third often is not.

Explained in full: Chocolate wafers

See also: Callets, Couverture

An amount paid above the market price for beans meeting a quality or certification standard.

Commonly misused: Read as reaching the farmer in full. Certification premiums are typically paid to producer organisations and their distribution varies.

See also: Aggregator, Living income

A certification focused on environmental and social farm practices, with its own audit regime.

Different in scope from Fairtrade, which centres on price. Neither covers what the other does, and a product can hold one and not the other.

Explained in full: Chocolate certifications explained

A shared household format containing an assortment, distinct from a gift assortment in purpose despite looking similar.

A selection box or tin is put out for a household rather than given to a person, which is why it is built around broad preferences and shelf-stable centres. Giving one as a personal gift, or putting a gift assortment out to be shared, is the most common seasonal format error.

Explained in full: Christmas chocolate traditions

See also: Ballotin

A sourcing claim that all the cacao in a product came from one named farm.

The narrowest rung of a ladder that runs single-origin (a country), single-estate (a named property or cooperative) and single-farm. None of the three is regulated or audited, and the useful signal is not the phrase but whether the farm is actually named — an unnamed single farm is an adjective.

Commonly misused: Used interchangeably with single-estate and single-origin, and read as a quality guarantee. It is a statement about where the beans came from, not about how they were fermented, dried or made.

Explained in full: Single-estate chocolate

See also: Micro-lot, Single-origin, Traceability

Pressed discs or tablets of ground roasted cacao, used for drinking chocolate in the Philippines and, under related names, across Latin America.

Frequently unsweetened or barely sweetened, and dissolved in hot water or milk. Cacao reached the Philippines on the Manila galleon trade from Mexico, and tablea preserves a line back to the Mesoamerican preparation.

Explained in full: Philippines

See also: Cocoa mass

The London and New York futures exchanges on which cocoa is priced internationally.

The exchange price is not what a farmer receives. The gap between the terminal price and the farmgate price is where aggregators, exporters and in some countries state marketing boards take their share.

See also: Aggregator, ICCO

The ability to identify where a given lot of beans came from, and how far back that identification reaches.

Ranges from country of export to a named farm and harvest. It is the substantive thing behind most sourcing claims, and the level reached is what distinguishes single-origin from single-estate.

See also: Lot separation

14 March, the day on which Valentine's gifts are reciprocated in Japan and several other East Asian markets.

Introduced by the confectionery trade and now established. It is the second half of a two-part custom in which the direction of giving on the first date is predominantly from women to men.

Explained in full: Valentine's chocolate in Japan

See also: Giri-choco, Honmei-choco