Why You Don't Use Fully Sweet Chocolate For Baking

Chocolate comes in an amazing array of flavors, colors, and textures and all of them are easy to love. However, when it comes to serious business like baking, you might have noticed that sweet chocolate doesn't get a lot of respect. Open the page of your favorite baking cookbooks, and find a recipe that uses chocolate. You'll inevitably see either semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate in the ingredients list. Maybe some will be really hardcore and ask you to use completely sugar-free bakers chocolate, but you can usually bet on a recommendation squarely in the range of 60 to 65% chocolate. But aren't we usually making sweets when we're baking with chocolate? Why are darker and bittersweet varieties the go-to instead of fully sweet and milk chocolate?

It turns out that semi- and bittersweet chocolate are more balanced options for baking. They provide a little extra sweetness, excellent flavor, and a decent amount of richness from the moderate cocoa fat. When you bake with chocolate you actually want to taste it, not just sugar. Moreover, fully sweet chocolates can be overwhelmed by the other ingredients. In fact some milk chocolates may be as little as 10% cacao. At that point you might as well just be adding butter and sugar instead. Semisweet chocolate still gives you a nice, mild sweetness, but you want some of that bitterness that's naturally in chocolate to balance it out.

So you might be saying to yourself, "This balance stuff is all well and good, but I personally like sweeter options more." Well even in that case, it's usually better to start with darker, more bitter chocolate because it also gives you greater control over your recipe. When you use sweeter or milk chocolate, you are adding a lot more stuff that isn't cacao, and once it's in there you can't take it out. You can always add more sugar to your recipe if you want more sweetness. It's much like how recipes recommend using low-sodium stock so you can add your own salt. Baking is all about precision. Ideally you would determine exactly how much of every ingredient to add and could make precise adjustments.

Of course if you really want control you can opt for 100% cacao baking chocolate. However most people aren't used to baking with it, and the amount of sugar in bittersweet is small enough to not make a huge difference. If you want to experiment with baker's chocolate, you can use it to recreate the flavor of bittersweet by adding 3 teaspoons of sugar for every ounce of 100% chocolate. Start there, and if you want it sweeter, just keep adding sugar.