So while cocoa liquor (aka cacao liquor) is actually an alcoholic liquor more comparable to a fruit wine, chocolate liquor is unsweetened liquid chocolate. This is a delicious product that’s quite hard to get off of the farm, but if you do run into it, know that it won’t taste at all like chocolate. Therefore, cacao liquor is best described as the fermented juice of the cacao tree, which tends to have a very sweet lychee-like flavor, crisp like apple cider. So over time, farmers have taken to draining this cacao juice off the seeds and fermenting it separately into an alcohol commonly called cacao liquor. The chocolate tree, Theobroma cacao, actually only grows cacao fruits, whose seeds are harvested, fermented, and dried into the cacao beans that are made into chocolate (it doesn’t actually bear finished chocolate bars).īut these fruits are quite juicy themselves, and some varietals produce more juice than others, way more juice than could possibly be needed to properly ferment the cacao seeds. While chocolate liquor is pure chocolate in liquid form and chocolate liqueur is an alcohol-based chocolate beverage, cacao liquor is technically a fruit wine. Now not to throw a wrench in the great definitions above, but there is a third cacao product we should be considering here: cacao liquor. The two are so commonly confused that even Wikipedia name drops chocolate liquor as the “food ingredient made from fermented cocoa beans” for which chocolate liqueur is often mistaken. It’s quite common at bars, but not often found in a home bar setup, so if this is the first you’re hearing of it, then you’re probably not alone.Īnd if until now you had confused chocolate liquor with chocolate liqueur, you’re also not alone. If you’re unfamiliar, crème de cacao is a chocolate-flavored liquor (usually artificially-flavored) made from a clear alcohol (usually vodka). Examples of cream-based chocolate liqueurs include Bailey’s Chocolate Cherry and Mozart Dark Chocolate Cream Liqueur, while the most common clear chocolate liqueurs are variations of cremes de cacao. Such companies’ chocolate liqueur recipes seem to fall into two camps: cream-based or clear. Since there’s no standard definition for a chocolate liqueur, over the decades, a variety of recipes have emerged. Some such examples are Creme de Cacao or Godiva Dark Chocolate Liqueur, both of which make use of cacao nibs to give them their characteristic flavors. On the other hand, chocolate liqueur is an alcohol flavored like chocolate. Cacao beans drying at a rural chocolate factory in Myanmar. Since chocolate liquor is produced from cacao beans, it has the same nutrition profile, which includes high concentrations of magnesium and zinc, heart-healthy antioxidants, fiber, and some protein. But chocolate liquor delivers a lot more than flavor to the final product. Milk chocolate is actually a hybrid, because while dark chocolate is basically cacao + sugar, milk chocolates are based in lots of cocoa butter + sugar plus a bit of chocolate liquor & milk powder. While milk and dark chocolates both contain some amount of chocolate liquor, by law a white chocolate contains only the cocoa fat, also known as cocoa butter. This means that all chocolate bars contain some amount of chocolate liquor, then, right? Er, well, not quite.Ĭhocolates are all different, but there are three legally recognized types: milk, white, and dark. Chocolate liquor is known by a bevy of names, including- but not limited to- cacao liquor, cacao mass, baking chocolate, cocoa liquor, cocoa mass, and even just “chocolate.” But whatever you call it, this liquid is made from cacao beans (also called cocoa beans or cocoa nibs), and it contains both cocoa solids & cocoa butter in roughly equal measure.Ĭhocolate liquor is so called because many centuries ago, when the substance was being named, it was the liquid or fluid from which chocolate was being produced.
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