If dark chocolate has turned up in a recipe or caught your eye at the store, here's what you need to use it with confidence and how to choose it, cook it, store it, what to substitute, and 39 recipes to try it in.

What is dark chocolate?

Dark chocolate is the umbrella term for chocolate made without milk solids. Under it sit chocolate, semi-sweet, chocolate, bittersweet, and the very dark bars that push toward chocolate unsweetened.

What they share is that the only fat is cocoa butter, with no milk added. That gives dark chocolate its clean snap and deeper color, along with a grown-up, less sugary flavor.

The number on the wrapper is the cacao percentage, and it is the most useful thing on the label. A 70% bar is 70% cacao solids and cocoa butter, with most of the rest sugar.

Higher cacao means more bitter and less sweet, not better.

Because the words on the front are loose, read the percentage to know how a bar will behave before you unwrap it.

Cooking With Dark Chocolate

Dark chocolate does double duty: it is good enough to eat on its own and reliable in the oven.

For eating and quick treats, its bitterness is the point. It is what makes Three Chocolate Covered Strawberries taste like more than candy, and it gives Chocolate-Peanut Butter Crispy Bars their grown-up edge against the sweet peanut butter.

In baking it carries the recipes where chocolate is the whole point, from a Chocolate Roulade with Coffee Cream to chunks folded into Dark Chocolate Chunks & Dried Mango Cookies.

Melt it gently. With no milk solids it is more forgiving than milk chocolate, but it still seizes the instant a drop of water gets in, turning grainy and stiff.

Keep your bowl and spatula dry. Use a double boiler held below a simmer, or microwave in 20-second bursts at half power, stirring between each so it does not scorch.

Pairing and a Common Mistake

Dark chocolate loves a contrast. Salt sharpens it, coffee deepens it, and acid lifts it, which is why a spoonful over a 10 Minute Fresh Berry Dessert with Yogurt & Chocolate works so well.

It also stands up to bold partners that would bury milk chocolate. Orange, raspberry, espresso, and a little chili all hold their own against 70% cacao.

The common mistake is treating two dark bars as the same just because both say dark. A 55% semisweet and an 85% bar behave completely differently in a recipe. Match the percentage your recipe expects, or adjust the sugar to make up the difference.

Substitutes

Within dark chocolate, semisweet and bittersweet swap for each other freely, with only a small shift in sweetness. Pick whichever percentage is closest to what the recipe wants.

To stand in for 1 ounce of dark baking chocolate, melt 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder with 1 tablespoon of butter or oil, then add sugar to taste. The fat replaces the cocoa butter you lose by switching from a bar to powder.

Avoid cocoa powder as a swap in anything that sets on melted chocolate, like a ganache or a mousse, where the cocoa butter is doing the structural work.

Buying and Storing

Choose dark chocolate by cacao percentage, not the word on the front. A 60% to 70% bar handles the widest range of jobs, from a snacking square to a smooth ganache.

For melting and baking, buy bars rather than chips, since chips hold stabilizers that keep them from flowing smooth.

Store it cool and tightly wrapped, away from anything strongly scented, because cocoa butter pulls in odors.

Around 65°F (18°C) is ideal. The fridge is a last resort, since its humidity causes a dull sugar bloom.

Well-wrapped dark chocolate keeps for up to two years. With so little moisture in it, there is almost nothing for spoilage to take hold of, and the gray bloom that sometimes appears is harmless and melts out smooth.

Quick facts

In Chinese

黑巧克力

British (UK) term

Dark chocolate

en français

chocolat noir

en español

chocolate oscuro

Recipes using dark chocolate

There are 39 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 39 recipes