Let them eat chocolate

I was just sent the link to apply for the Mars Real Chocolate Relief Act. https://secure.realchocolate.com/ This site allows 500,000 people to register for a free bar of chocolate every Friday through September. You only have 5 minutes to register and it takes 6 weeks to get the chocolate, but where there is free chocolate I am always in.

According to an article on msn.com the purpose of the promotion is to increase awareness about the need for cocoa butter in chocolate. Supposedly some of these other brands are using vegetable oil instead of cocoa butter and the Mars company has decided it needs to make a statement about it's pure cocoa butter chocolate usage in a big way.

It is pretty easy to spot out candy bars with vegetable oil in them. Cocoa butter melts at about the same temperature as your body temperature. This is why holding chocolate in your hand might not be the best of ideas unless you enjoy a goopy chocolate mess. Vegetable oil on the other hand is emulsified into the chocolate in such a way that it won't melt at body temperature. If you've ever gotten a candy bar that you really had to chew and it kind of didn't melt in your mouth. That was most likely made with vegetable oil or a mixture of vegetable oil and cocoa butter. Of course vegetable oil is cheaper, so companies using chocolate to coat a candy bar might not see the harm in using some vegetable oil to stretch out their profit.

Chocolate has basically three main ingredients: cocoa solids, cocoa butter, chocolate liquor and in milk chocolate, milk or dried milk solids. Europe has strict guidelines for chocolate and what can be called chocolate. They didn't give white chocolate the nod till just recently. Before it had to be called something else since it didn't have any cocoa solids in it. This chocolate that candy companies are making with vegetable oil isn't really chocolate in the purest European sense of the word. It is what we in the industry call coating chocolate. If people are willing to buy and eat something that is not going to taste as good and does not have the ingredients that make chocolate melt in you mouth, then companies are going to continue to make more money by using subpar ingredients.

I give Mars props for trying to bring this problem to the forefront by giving away their chocolate that has real cocoa butter in it. I am pretty picky about my chocolate choices, as in if it's not a Hershey's chocolate bar I'm probably just going to nibble on it. Thankfully Hershey's bars are still all cocoa butter.

It saddens me when anyone says that chocolate is just chocolate and that it doesn't matter. Would it matter if you ordered steak and someone gave you beef tips? I think it would. I'll be online getting my free bar from the Mars company every Friday. Join me in celebrating free chocolate and the use of real cocoa butter.

Happy Eating!!!

Emily