The Best Dark Chocolate for Baking, Melting, and Snacking
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Photograph by Scott Semler, Food Styling by Rebecca Jurkevich, Prop Styling by Maggie DiMarco
Whether you’re team dark chocolate, team milk chocolate, or team I-don’t-care-just-give-me-a-piece-of chocolate, you’ve got a lot of choices when choosing a bar at the grocery store. While we celebrate whichever team you play for, today we’re diving into dark chocolate—the midnight snack and baking ingredient of choice for many of our staffers, myself included. Dark chocolate, a term encompassing both semisweet and bittersweet varieties, boasts bouquets of rich flavor with notes of citrus, nuts, caramel, tropical fruit, and more, which blossom on your tongue as the chocolate slowly melts away.
Even ignoring the other chocolates—the milks, the whites, the unsweeteneds—there’s a huge selection at almost any grocery store. You’ll find a handful in the baking aisle, another round in the candy aisle, and still more staring you down as you wait in line to check out. To find the best dark chocolate in your local shop, look for bars with a range of cocoa solids between 65% and 80% (more on this below).
For this taste test, we compared nine bars of dark chocolate, both on their own and baked into chocolate chip cookies. (And yes, we said bars; if you’re after the best chocolate chips, head over here.) After sampling and then sampling again (followed by some friendly debate), we settled on our top three dark chocolate bars for baking, snacking, and more.
Before we reveal our winners, a note about tasting chocolate: According to Megan Giller’s Bean-to-Bar Chocolate, one must take it slow. Giller writes to keep an eye out for bloom—the dusty white stuff on the surface of some chocolate bars. Its presence indicates the fat or sugar may have separated, often due to storage issues, and signifies the bar’s texture may be compromised. Giller also recommends smelling the chocolate before taking a bite to get a sense of some of the flavors you can expect. Next, she suggests biting down on a piece of chocolate a few times before letting it melt on the tongue, allowing its aromatic complex compounds to coat your palate; then it’s all about what flavor notes you pick up.
How we picked the products
We started our hunt for the best dark chocolate by defining the category: Dark chocolate is often divided into semisweet and bittersweet, though there technically isn’t a difference. Ask a handful of bakers and you’ll get a handful of answers; ask a chocolate manufacturer and you’ll find they label dark chocolate at their own discretion.
But here are some general rules. Dark chocolate must be made with at least 35% chocolate liquor, the liquid mixture of roasted, ground cacao nibs. It may include up to 12% milk solids, which act as an emulsifier and add an extra-creamy quality; using more than 12% milk solids would render it milk chocolate. Semisweet chocolate usually contains a higher ratio of sugar, but you should consider anything less than 50% cacao far too sweet for baking. For most purposes we prefer a bar that lies somewhere in the range of 65–75% cocoa solids. For this test we tasted bars that went up to 80%; percentages higher than this tend to be unpleasantly bitter with a crumbly texture.
While we love single-origin and other high-end dark chocolates, for this tasting we chose to include only bars widely available via a supermarket or easily purchased online. We polled our staff, talked to bakers we admire, and combed through taste tests around the web to find out which brands were taking top spots—and which were underrepresented. Finally, we settled on nine bars and put them through their paces in the test kitchen.
How we set up our blind taste test
We chopped each bar of chocolate into large, rough chunks, making sure to mar any brand name embossed on the bars’ surfaces to make each one unidentifiable. We then divided them into numbered bowls. Tasters cleansed their palates after tasting each entrant so they could home in on the differences between samples.
What were tasters looking for? Our editors tend to keep a bar of chocolate in the pantry for a few reasons: It’s a great dessert all on its own, whether you’re grabbing a piece at midnight or drizzling a few shards with olive oil and flaky salt for a casually chic dinner party dessert. But it’s also there for chocolate chip cookies and other baked goods. To make sure our winner would work well in both contexts, we baked each contender into a batch of BA’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies.
How we evaluated
Our tasters declared flavor the most important factor in determining the ideal dark chocolate. They wanted a bar that had a delicate balance between sweet and bitter, with some of the astringency typical of a great dark chocolate. Tasters also said they wanted their chocolate to have some notes of fruit: berries, cherry, orange, raisin—anything to temper the deep richness in each bite.
Texture was important as well. Tasters wanted what commerce writer Alaina Chou described as the “snap and melt”—a sharp bite followed and a luxurious dissolution on the tongue. A grainy or chalky quality, tasters agreed, would disqualify any chocolate from our winners circle.
Here are our top three dark chocolate bars:
Rich and Nutty: Godiva Signature 72% Cacao Dark Chocolate
At 72%, Godiva’s dark chocolate has a slightly higher cacao content than other contenders in our taste test. While this has the potential to give the chocolate a prominent bitterness, Godiva counters the addition by including “butter oil (milk)” among the ingredients here. While dairy isn’t typical of dark chocolate’s makeup, some manufacturers include it to boost the flavor or to give their bar a creamier texture. Here, it has the effect of mellowing out the earthiness of the extra cacao.
Why it won us over: Tasters were immediately delighted by the generous snap of Godiva’s dark chocolate. Senior test kitchen editor Shilpa Uskokovic remarked on how nicely it melted. Others called out the flavors developing across their tongues. Some registered nutty almond or tahini notes; others tasted a caramel- or brown-sugar-like sweetness. The flavors waned pleasantly after each bite, accompanied by delicate acidity.
We’d love it in: Warm Obscenely Chocolatey Chocolate Cookies or melted into Spiked Hot Chocolate
Godiva Signature Dark Chocolate Mini Bars (3.1 oz.); $8 on Amazon
Godiva Signature Dark Chocolate Mini Bars (Case of 12); $50 on Godiva.com
Bright and Fruity: Ghirardelli Intense Dark 72% Dark Chocolate
Included in the list of ingredients for this dark chocolate bar from Ghirardelli’s is vanilla extract. While they’re certainly not the only brand to use such enhancement, some tasters argued that doing so obscures the true flavors of the chocolate. The hint of vanilla is meant to supercharge some of the sweeter flavors inherent in the chocolate, skewing away from the more challenging bitterness that not everyone may enjoy.
Why it won us over: When asked to describe their ideal dark chocolate, the top two qualities our tasters mentioned were a balanced bitterness and bright, fruity notes. Ghirardelli had both in spades. It melted easily—though that may be because the bar was slightly thinner than others we tested—and immediately gave way to a zingy acidity punctuated by flavors of cherry and raspberry: “a fruity pop,” as senior commerce editor Noah Kaufman described it. Other tasters enjoyed its nimble interplay of sweet and bitter, and everyone agreed that Ghirardelli Intense Dark would work as well in a baked good as it would on its own.
We’d love it in: The zingy fruit notes of this bar would sing in the ganache of Shilpa’s Dark Chocolate-Orange Gingerbread Cake.
Ghirardelli Intense Dark 3.5-oz. Bar; $4 on Amazon
Ghirardelli Intense Dark (Case of 12 3.5-oz. Bars); $42 on Ghirardelli.com
All-Around Favorite: Tony’s Chocolonely 70% Dark Chocolate
Tony’s website proudly states that 182 cocoa beans go into this bar. Fascinating! Otherwise, its ingredients list is rounded out by sugar, cocoa butter, cocoa powder, and soy lecithin, an emulsifier. Tony’s mission is centered around ending unfair and exploitative practices: The company promises to pay fair prices to farmers, end child labor in the cocoa trade, and use ethically sourced products.
Why it won us over: While equitable practices always leave a sweeter taste on our tongues, we tested Tony’s blind. And we can report: Its chocolate stands up to intense scrutiny. Associate test kitchen manager Inés Anguiano praised its delicate coffee flavor, while Shilpa complimented its dusky raisin note. Commerce writer Alaina Chou loved the bar’s molasses undertones. Tasters appreciated the nuanced flavors, the smooth and even melt, ultimately deeming Tony’s Chocolonely Dark Chocolate their favorite bar for both snacking and baking.
We’d love it in: Let this bar take center ring in Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies With Toffee or layer them on no-bake Pistacharoo rice cereal treats.
Tony's Chocolonely Dark Chocolate Bar (6.35 oz.); $5 on Amazon
Tony's Chocolonely Dark Chocolate Bar (6.35 oz.); $6 on TonysChocolonely.com
We also tried…
Chocolove Strong Dark Chocolate (70%): Tasters reported this bar tasted like chocolate mousse—sweet enough for snacking but not bitter enough to bake with.
Guittard Bittersweet Chocolate Baking Bars (70%): Without any fruity aroma or nuance, tasters said Guittard was simply too bitter for snacking—though it would work for baking.
Hu Simple Dark Chocolate (70%): This chocolate crumbled on our tongues and tasted chalky to boot.
Lindt 70% Cocoa Dark Chocolate Excellence Bar: A strong contender with some fruity essence and a nice bitterness, though some tasters thought this bar had a waxy melt.
Scharffen Berger 70% Cacao Bittersweet Dark Chocolate: A nice snap and melt here, but tasters said there was an acrid quality that gave it an unpleasant finish.
Theo Organic Pure Dark 70% Dark Chocolate: Lots of bitterness here, without any sweetness to back it up.
Would you like some milk with that?
BA’s Best Chocolate Chip Cookies
Originally Appeared on Bon Appétit
