Ruby Chocolate

So what is this craze people are talking about?  I recently attended the 10th Dallas Chocolate Festival and more than one person asked me about this.  Fortunately I've had a little experience trying some of this elusive chocolate specifically at one of the book readings my wife had in Minneapolis at Maggers & Quinn this year as produced by Sweets Engineer.

My response was a less than glowing review.  It tastes ok but not really my thing.  The flavors really haven't been developed.  This is mostly because the beans haven't been fermented.  The red color comes from the natural color of the bean which is a darker form of the color you see.  The cocoa butter, sugar, and other ingredients that might be added to it lighten it to this reddish pink color you see in the picture or probably it's more accurate to say the cacao colors the other ingredients.  Really what you have is a colored white chocolate.  It would be interesting to know if the cocoa butter comes from the same beans.  I would be shocked if they were since the ruby beans are supposed to be so special.  Typically you add extra cocoa butter to chocolates.  So in this case that's a lot of extra cocoa butter.  Callebaut is claiming 47.3% cocoa content.  Looking further into it's ingredients shows 2.5% fat-free cocoa.  This would be your red cocoa bean with cocoa butter removed. So total cocoa butter would be (doing the math) 44.8% and still sugar is the #1 ingredient.

At the Dallas Chocolate Festival we took a chocolate making class where ruby chocolate was discussed briefly.  The consensus was that it wasn't necessarily bad but also wasn't real exciting to those giving the class or any of the participants who had tried it beforehand.