Y’all know and love cocoa. And geeze, how bloody blah would baking be without it? Very. We can’t even. Cocoa is essentially what’s left after cacao beans are fermented, roasted, then pressed to extract the cocoa butter used to make chocolate. And as anyone dumb enough to eat it straight from the pack will know, cocoa tastes concentrated, bitter and strong; it’s essentially the essence of chocolate, but without the fun stuff. Namely, fat and sugar. 

Cacao beans are the seed of the cocoa tree, native to equatorial parts of the Americas. The trees have been cultivated for millennia, with the beans used to brew potent bitter drinks and also exchanged as currency. Columbus took chocolate to Spain in the early 1500s where it was also consumed as a drink by the ruling classes, made more palatable by the addition of sugar. From Spain it spread through Europe and later the American colonies, becoming more accessible to we merry plebs over time. Solid chocolate as we know it wasn’t developed until much later, with Lindt, Nestle, Hershey and Cadbury variously getting their starts in the 19th or early 20th centuries.The rest is delicious, addictive history. Yay for chocolate!

If you’ve never given cocoa much mind, there are actually two distinct forms of it; regular, bog standard ‘natural’ cocoa, and Dutch (or ‘Dutch-process’) cocoa. It’s called ‘Dutch’ because it was developed in the early 19th century by Conrad Johannes van Houten, a Dutch chemist. 

The difference between the types is in the processing and pH levels. Natural cocoa is quite acidic whereas Dutch cocoa has been processed to alkalise it, using substances like potassium carbonate. This increases the natural pH from 5 to around 7 or 8 and as a consequence it tastes richer, less sharp and has a darker colour; the precise outcome depends on the alkalising agent used and the temperature of the process. The colour can go from reddish to rich brown all the way to black (as in Oreo cookie black). Dutch cocoa also has a lower fat content than natural cocoa, meaning it mixes into liquids easier. 

For baking, a recipe should call out Dutch cocoa specifically if it’s required. It gives a particularly deep chocolate flavour without any bitterness, and also imparts a richer colour to the finished product. The two types of cocoa can’t always be used interchangeably and that’s because recipes using Dutch cocoa require baking powder as the raising agent (it won’t react with baking soda), whereas regular cocoa actually needs some baking soda in the mix. So if a recipe doesn’t specify the cocoa and you’re not sure, check the raising agent used. If a recipe uses both baking powder AND soda, you’re covered to break out either type of cocoa. Note that because of the added processing for Dutch cocoa, it tends to be more expensive than regular cocoa.