Chocolate liquor, also called cocoa liquor, paste or mass, is pure cocoa in liquid or semi-solid form.[1] It is produced from cocoa bean nibs that have been fermented, dried, roasted, and separated from their skins. The nibs are ground to the point cocoa butter is released from the cells of the bean and melted, which turns cocoa into a paste and then into a free-flowing liquid.[2]
The liquor is either separated into (non-fat) cocoa solids and cocoa butter, or cooled and molded into blocks, which can be used as unsweetened baking chocolate. Like the nibs from which it is produced, it contains both cocoa solids and cocoa butter in roughly equal proportion.[3] Its main use (often with additional cocoa butter) is in making chocolate.
The name liquor is used not in the sense of a distilled, alcoholic substance, but rather the older meaning of the word, meaning 'liquid' or 'fluid'. The terms paste and mass are also commonly used.[4] According to American legislation, chocolate liquor is classified as a chocolate product.[5] According to European legislation, it strictly remains a cocoa product until sugar is added.[6][7]
^Afoakwa, Emmanuel Ohene (2016). Chocolate Science and Technology. Wiley. p. 111. Grinding of nib cells releases the cocoa butter into liquor with particle size up to 30 μm
^Food Chemistry. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. 2013. p. 900. The resultant product is a homogeneous mobile paste, a flowing cocoa mass or cocoa liquor.
^"CFR - Code of Federal Regulations Title 21". Food and Drug Administration. Retrieved 22 January 2025. Nomenclature. The name of the food is "chocolate liquor", "chocolate", "unsweetened chocolate", "bitter chocolate", "baking chocolate", "cooking chocolate", "chocolate coating", or "unsweetened chocolate coating".
^"Sans sucre, le chocolat en perd son appellation". 20 minutes. 21 February 2021. Retrieved 22 January 2025. Les produits chocolatés dans lesquels les sucres sont totalement absents ne relèvent plus de la définition du chocolat. [Chocolate products in which sugars are completely absent no longer fall within the definition of chocolate.]
