Cocoa butter is the fat in cocoa bean seeds. It is found in the seeds’ leaves and is usually extracted by means of pressing. It is a particularly consistent and valuable fat. Its physical properties play a crucial part in high-quality chocolate’s gloss, as well as its clean, crisp snap, and its soft, melt-in-your-mouth mouthfeel.

Cocoa butter is a unique composition of unsaturated and saturated fatty acids. Unsaturated fatty acids are essential for humans. As our body cannot produce them itself, they have to be taken in through food. They aid the body in building membranes (cell walls) and important hormones. They also have a positive effect on cholesterol levels.

High-quality cocoa butter is extracted by pressing cocoa mass. The use of so-called “expeller” and “extraction" processes means that cocoa butter is not exclusively obtained from high-quality cocoa beans. It also comes from inferior raw material sources such as broken cocoa beans or cocoa shells.

Pressing cocoa butter first involves treating the cocoa mass, which is made from roasted and ground cocoa beans, with alkali salts such as potash or sodium carbonate. This allows the fat to be pressed with greater ease. The cocoa powder later acquires a deeper colour and is also more soluble. This procedure is called, “dutching”, after its Dutch inventor, Coenraad Johannes van Houten. It is also referred to by its chemical term, “alkalising”. The cocoa mass is then warmed and pressed by a hydraulic press.

As far back as 1815, van Houten used his factory in Amsterdam to find a way to separate cocoa butter from cocoa mass. Up to that point, it had only been possible by means of boiling and siphoning, which was not a particularly efficient method. In 1828, van Houten patented his invention: a hydraulic press. This reduced the amount of cocoa butter in untreated cocoa mass from 53% to between 27% to 28%. It is still possible to use this common method, which has now been technically developed, to reduce the amount of fat from 22% to 11%.

Finely ground cocoa mass is alkalised and warmed to between 90°C to 100°C. It is then pumped, with a special pump, into the pressing chambers of a large, hydraulic horizontal press. There, the desired fat content is pressed out. This occurs at a pressure of up to 900 bars (1 bar = 10 N/cm). The pressure is adjusted according to the cocoa mass’s original fat content and how much fat is to be left in the resulting cocoa powder. Warm cocoa butter flows clear and golden yellow from the cocoa during the pressing procedure. Afterwards, it is filtered and deodorised for further processing.

Cocoa butter is predominantly used in the production of high-quality chocolate. However, it is also used in pharmaceuticals and cosmetic products. After pressing has finished, a round, stone-hard, and approximately five-centimetre thick “press cake” remains. This, depending on how much pressure was applied, is either termed “lightly de-oiled” (24% fat content) or “strongly de-oiled” (10% fat content). This is ground to make cocoa powder, which we well remember from our childhoods. No sugar is added, of course.

Mainly fully-refined, pressed cocoa butter is used to make white chocolate and white chocolate coating. This refining technology includes the filtration, neutralisation, bleaching, and deodorisation of raw cocoa fat. This results in a white cocoa butter that is largely neutral in terms of smell and taste.

The European Union adopted a guideline in 2000 that states that up to 5% of the cocoa butter in chocolate may be replaced by other fats. At RITTER SPORT, however, we have what is known in Germany as a chocolate “purity law”. That means, just like before, only 100% pure cocoa butter is used to make our chocolate masses. We do this because it is cocoa butter that lends chocolate its fine structure, its crisp clean snap, its beautiful gloss, and its delicate, pleasant, melt-in-your-mouth quality.