Is Baking Chocolate Really That Different From Regular Chocolate?

Picture it: your childhood kitchen, the way it was when you were about eight years old. You've managed to sneak downstairs without waking up your parents, and you're ready to find some tasty snacks and nibble on them like a mischievous little mouse. You open up the cupboard and consider your options. No Oreos, no Pop Tarts, no Cheez-Its — but what's this? You see a neatly-packaged bar of something called "baking chocolate." Jackpot! This must be the good stuff, the stuff that makes chocolate chip cookies and lava cakes taste so decadent. Hands shaking with anticipation, you carefully unwrap it, break off a piece, and take a bite...

...only to be met with a tastebud-shriveling blast of bitterness. It tastes like a prank, as though someone surgically removed the joy from a Hershey's bar and foisted it upon unwitting consumers. In your childish haste, you learned a valuable lesson: baking chocolate is usually (but not always) unsweetened.

There are a few different kinds of baking chocolate, but its most classic form is completely unsweetened. Instead of a normal chocolate bar, which mixes chocolate liquor with sugar, milk, and other additives, unsweetened baking chocolate is made of pure chocolate liquor – which, as it turns out, tastes pretty nasty on its own. Even the most intimidating, midnight-black piece of dark chocolate has some kind of sweetener to cut through the sharpness, but baking chocolate offers no such mercy: it tastes like if "Wonka" was directed by Michael Haneke.

So why does it even exist? Well, for much the same reason unsalted butter exists. When you're making certain chocolate recipes, like brownies, you're going to be adding plenty of sugar; if the chocolate you use for the recipe has sugar as well, your brownies are likely to be overpoweringly sweet. You want to control the sweetness of your recipe as best you can, and using unsweetened chocolate makes that much easier.

With that said, there are some instances where baking chocolate has sugar added. If you see a recipe call for "bittersweet" or "semi-sweet" chocolate, that's just baking chocolate with enough sugar added to balance out the bitterness. It's still not necessarily something you would pull out and have as a snack on its own, but it's not as harsh on the palate as the unsweetened stuff. You'll usually see these used in desserts, like chocolate chip cookies, that are chocolatey without being aggressively so.

Some kinds of baking chocolate get even sweeter. If you've ever heard of "German chocolate", as in "German chocolate cake", it's not referring to sweets from the Black Forest. In fact, it's named after one Samuel German, who decided to make things easier for his fellow bakers by pre-mixing chocolate and sugar. German's Sweet Chocolate, is still not the kind of candy you'd find at the drugstore checkout, but it's baking chocolate all the same.