Chocolate Chips, Couverture & Cooking Chocolate

Cooking chocolate should always be the best quality chocolate. Valrhona mini blocks and couverture chips are the preferred chocolates for high-end restaurants, confectioners and patisserie schools. Like their Guanaja 70%, which is one of the world's favourite dark chocolates. Valrhona also founded l'Ecole du Grand Chocolat - a school where professional chocolatiers can develop and perfect their craft.

If you work with modelling chocolate or make your own chocolates, using coloured chocolate can make your work stand out. Deco Relief coloured cocoa butters and fat-soluble food colouring powders are exactly what you need. But do remember that you can only add colour to white chocolate or pure cocoa butter. Deco Relief products are used by professional French pastry chefs and chocolatiers, so you can be confident you'll get great results.

What is the difference between chocolate and cooking chocolate?

Cooking chocolate tends to have a lower sugar content so that you can control how much sugar to add to your bakes. Therefore, the cocoa flavour is much stronger and bolder for a more intense chocolate flavour. You can also easily change the chocolate flavour of your bakes by choosing chocolates with a higher cacao content.

How do you temper chocolate?

Tempering chocolate is a very important technique for chocolatiers. It's a process of careful heating, cooling and re-heating that gives the finished chocolate an exceptionally glossy finish, smooth mouth feel and pleasing 'snap' when broken or bitten into.

For more information, read our full guide on How To Temper Chocolate.

Can you eat cooking chocolate?

Of course! In fact, a lot of cooking chocolate is delicious straight from the packet. However, it doesn't work both ways. If you want to make the best chocolate truffles, chocolate decorations or filled chocolates, use good quality cooking chocolate - not regular chocolate confectionery.