Chocolate Expert Explains How To Tell Quality And Cheap Chocolate Apart

I love buying and snacking on dark chocolate, but it’s hard to figure out which bar to get. I usually buy in the 80-95% dark chocolate range (yes, I may be a little insane for that), but in terms of quality, I never know what I’m gonna get. I don’t even know how to tell what constitutes a good chocolate, to be honest.

Fortunately, a chocolate expert just shared some deep advice on YouTube on how to tell cheap and quality variants apart.

Chocolatier Amy Guittard recently went on Epicurious to showcase ways to tell if your chocolate is top-notch or not. Her family’s business, Guittard, is the oldest family-owned chocolate business in the country. That brings some serious credibility to the explanations she uses to separate the good from the bad.

Guittard samples varieties of milk chocolate, white chocolate, baking/chocolate chips, cocoa powder, and dark chocolate, leaving behind guides on what attributes to look for when evaluating these chocolates. It’s great advice to have when tasting a new brand for the first time, that’s for sure.

The one thing Guittard’s advice doesn’t help with, though, is how to fully evaluate quality prior to purchase. You can look at the ingredients and any sustainability claims on the label, but you can’t tell how it was processed from the outside. Thus, buying chocolate bars is still a game of chance for me. However, once I get one, at least I now know how to figure out if it’s high quality or not.