Cooking World

Not really chocolate, white chocolate is, as a rule, a mixture of sugar, cocoa butter, milk solids, lecithin and vanilla. This product can’t be officially defined as “chocolate” because it doesn’t contain chocolate liquor in it, which means there’s also very little chocolate flavor. White chocolate should be melted very slowly over low heat to prevent it from scorching and clumping.
Chocolate
The word “chocolate” comes from the Aztec xocolatl, which means “bitter water”. Really, the unsweetened drink the Aztecs made from pounded cocoa beans and spices was probably extremely bitter. Bitterness nevertheless, the Aztec king Montezuma so believed that chocolate was an aphrodisiac that he supposedly drank 50 golden glasses of it each day.
Chocolate comes from the tropical cocoa bean, “food of the gods” cacao. When the beans are removed from their pods they’re fermented, dried, roasted and cracked, separating the edges from the shells.
If additional cocoa butter is extracted from the chocolate liquor, the whole result is ground to produce unsweetened cocoa powder. If other ingredients are added, for example, milk powder, sugar, etc, the chocolate is refined again. The final step for most chocolate is conching - a process by which huge machines with rotating blades slowly blend the heated chocolate liquor, so that it get rid of rest moisture and volatile acids.
Chocolate should be stored, tightly and thoroughly wrapped, in a cool (60° to 70°F) and dry place. If stored at warm temperatures, chocolate will develop a pale gray “bloom” (streaks and blotches on the surface), caused when the cocoa butter rises to the surface. In damp conditions, chocolate can form tiny gray sugar crystals on the surface. In both cases the chocolate can still be used but the flavor and texture will be slightly affected. Under ideal conditions, dark chocolate can be stored for 10 years. However, because of the milk solids in both milk chocolate and white chocolate, they shouldn’t be stored longer than 9 months.