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Your Chocolate Gift Basket Questions Answered

How can you tell good chocolate from bad chocolate? If the percentage in alcoholic beverage gives you the alcohol content, what does the percentage in the chocolate wrapper mean? Does fair trade chocolate have anything to do with you, as a chocolate lover? Before you dig into one of those chocolate gift baskets, here are some of the chocolate-related questions you’ve been dying to ask but didn’t know who could answer…

What is Fair Trade chocolate? Does it taste different from ordinary chocolate?

Fair trade doesn’t have anything to do with how chocolate tastes or how different the bars are in chocolate gift baskets. Any product that’s labeled “fair trade” means the workers or farmers who manufacture or grow the raw materials used in the product have been paid a fair compensation and have not been subjected to cheap prices for their commodities. Fair Trade Certification is issued when products meet the standards set by the Fair Trade Labeling Organization International. The rationale behind the practice is that by paying farmers and workers a fair price, they won’t have to cut corners to increase their profits. Thus, the quality of the raw materials like cacao beans, and ultimately, the finished chocolate bars in those chocolate gift baskets, are maintained. In chocolates, fair trade means the chocolate you’re getting was made from organic cacao beans grown under the rainforest canopy halfway around the globe.

And what’s organic chocolate?

Organic chocolate is made from organically grown cacao beans, or beans that were grown without the aid of modern and synthetic tools like pesticides, herbicides, genetic alterations or radiation. It simply means “all natural.”

Enough of the serious stuff. What do I look for in “good chocolate”?

Your choice is normally anything from none to limited when you buy or receive chocolate gift baskets. But when you have to choose, our ultimate advice is this: Don’t take the experts’ word for it. Chocolate is personal, and the choice of what’s good and what’s not is always subjective. Try, try and try some more until you develop a standard for “good chocolate.” Then you can bet that your standards are as good as any expert’s.

What’s with the percentages printed on the wrapper?

When you open chocolate gift baskets, you will normally see different percentages on the labels of the chocolates. These percentages represent the percentage of cacao in the bar. For chocolate experts, these percentages give them an idea of the level of “chocolatiness” of the bar. If you’re a health-conscious chocoholic, you might want to go for chocolate gift baskets with bars that have higher cacao percentage because they leave less room for sugar.

What is the best way to store chocolate?

Don’t leave the bars in the chocolate gift baskets after opening. The ideal way to store chocolates is to keep them in dark and dry place with a temperature of 60 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Make sure you store them away from items that emit a pungent or strong odor because they tend to absorb surrounding odors. You wouldn’t want to be eating chocolates that smell like used socks or detergent. It is also not good to keep them inside the refrigerator where the temperature is too cold.