Test kitchen secrets: dark chocolate

Often, recipes suggest a cocoa percentage when cooking with chocolate. The percentage tells you how much of that bar is pure cocoa solids from cocoa beans (the rest will be a mixture of sugar and other ingredients). The higher the percentage of pure cocoa, the darker, more complex and bitter the bar will be.

In the UK, milk chocolate must have a minimum of 25 per cent cocoa solids for it to be sold as chocolate, but this varies across the world. In the US, it only needs to have 10 per cent cocoa solids to be sold as milk chocolate. Chocolate can be expensive, especially when made with responsibly sourced cocoa, because its production isn’t cheap. However, there are good-value supermarket own-brand options, and it’s worth stocking up when they’re on offer if you’re an avid baker. If you’re making something where chocolate is the star of the show, it’s worth considering where you’ll use the expensive chocolate.

Using a cheaper bar in the cake, for instance (which is baked, so it loses a lot of the complexity in the cooking process), is more economical, while using a more expensive option in the fudge icing means you get the pronounced flavours of the chocolate, so it’s worth spending a little more.