I'm trying to figure out what is and isn't couverture by looking at the labels, and I'm a bit confused. My understanding is that in general couverture chocolate has more cocoa butter which makes it easier to enrobe/cover stuff. Since the cocoa butter is part of the stated percentage of chocolate, a 70% bar and 70% couverture could be quite different with regard to cocoa mass vs. cocoa butter.
So is there some guessing involved? Is it only couverture if it says so? Are blocks and disks usually couverture? What about the 9oz baking bar at the grocery store?
For example, the Valrhona page on chocosphere has tons of items but the word couverture only occurs 9 times.
As an example, would a Manjari block 64% be the same as a Manjari 64% bar?
How much less cocoa mass and more cocoa butter is most common?
I have attached an exel calculator that I use a lot basically because I make chocolate myself and like to see what other formulations manufacturers use. This only works for dark chocolate, so should be fine for your use. You just plug in % cocoa and % total fat and the calculator will spit out % cocoa butter, % cocoa liquor and % sugar.
For example the Valrhona El Pedregal bar on my desk says it is a 64% chocolate and in the nutritional info says 38.8g total fat in 100g so 38.8%. Plug that into the calculator and it tells me that the formulation for this is 36% sugar, 52.5% cocoa liquor and 11.5% cocoa butter.
The calculator assumes the following:
Formulation calculators assume the following:
Tom - thanks. I think that will be useful. Unfortunately, you can't always get the fat number until you have the chocolate in hand. It would be so much easier if they broke down the cocoa solids vs. cocoa butter for chocolate that isn't intended directly for eating.
Sorry - posted this in the wrong discussion y'day. Page 3 of this article might come in handy as well
Under the heading How Couverture is different from Eating Chocolate.
Try this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_chocolate
Under the European Union heading are several categories of chocolate and what their requirements are. In that table is listed Couverture Chocolate (Dark) and Milk Couverture. From my understanding, White chocolate is generally not considered a couverture due to the lower amount of fat - someone may correct me on that. If you want to do a bit of Googling, it's easy enough to find the EU standards in full.