Many people argue that white chocolate cannot be considered as chocolate because it doesn’t contain cocoa solids in its ingredients to give it a recognizable and more celebrated flavour and colourof dark chocolates. However, I would like to put across my point eventually through this, because white chocolate is absolute love!
Touching the basics, a cocoa bean is made up of cocoa powder and cocoa butter. Cacao nibs are produced by removing the shell from the cocoa bean after the fermentation process. Cocoa mass or pure chocolate is a result of these nibs. Cocoa mass usually comes in a liquid form which can be processed into its two components which are cocoa butter and cocoa powder. White chocolate is made only from the cocoa butter extracted from the bean, making it a pure bean to bar chocolate.
The basic ingredients needed to make white chocolates are cocoa butter and milk solids. Cocoa butter (an irreplaceable ingredient of white chocolate) and cocoa powder both are constituents of cocoa bean. This indicates towards the logical deduction of white chocolate being classified as a variety of chocolate. As the source of both the components’ is the famous cocoa bean. We can think of it in this way- so for example just because ramen, maggie, etc., are instant noodles and somewhat pre-processed it cannot be excluded from the common classification of noodle.
In my opinion, people are so used to the conventional ideology of chocolate that when their set mental notion about chocolate doesn’t match with white chocolate, they tend to miss significant points without careful consideration.
White chocolate is white because even thoughit is produced from the same cocoa bean as dark chocolate, it doesn’t contain cocoa liquor which is a processed component of cocoa bean that gives the beautiful dark brown colour to dark chocolates. Hence, cocoa butter gives it a caramel like colour (that is not pure white).
The misconceptions about white chocolate primarily stems from the fact that many chocolate manufacturing companies in the market use just the bare minimum percentage of cocoa mixed with oils and favouring while formulating them, giving it a sweet, milky, sugar bar flavour. This makes it lose it’s pure essence of chocolate. According to the American FDA, the product of “white chocolate,” must contain at least 20% cocoa fat, at least 3.5% milk fat, and at least 14% total milk solids; it can’t consist of more than 55% nutritive carbohydrate sweeteners, to legally be marketed as white chocolates. Therefore, in order to get the true essence of white chocolate, one must carefully look for the ingredients and colour and avoid anything made with random oils like palm oils, hydrogenated oils or artificial flavours.