The Top 3 Dark Chocolate Bars, Tested and Reviewed

Whether you’re team dark chocolate, team milk chocolate, or team I-don’t-care-just-give-me-a-piece-of chocolate, you’ve got a lot of choices when choosing a bar at the grocery store. While we celebrate whichever team you play for, today, we’re diving into dark chocolate—the midnight snack and baking ingredient of choice for many of our staffers, myself included. Dark chocolate, a term encompassing both semisweet and bittersweet varieties, boasts bouquets of rich flavor with notes of citrus, nuts, caramel, tropical fruit, and more, which blossom on your tongue as the chocolate slowly melts away.

Even ignoring the other chocolates—the milks, the whites, the unsweeteneds—there’s a huge selection at almost any grocery store. You’ll find a handful in the baking aisle, another round in the candy aisle, and still more staring you down as you wait in line to check out. To find the best dark chocolate in your local shop, look for bars with a range of cocoa solids between 65% and 80% (more on this below).

For this taste test, we compared nine bars of dark chocolate, both on their own and baked into chocolate chip cookies. (And, yes, we said bars; if you’re after the best chocolate chips, head over here.) After sampling and then sampling again (followed by some friendly debate), we settled on our top three dark chocolate bars for baking, snacking, and more.

Before we reveal our winners, a note about tasting chocolate: According to Megan Giller’s Bean-to-Bar Chocolate, one must take it slow. Giller writes to keep an eye out for bloom—the dusty white stuff on the surface of some chocolate bars. Its presence indicates the fat or sugar may have separated, often due to storage issues, and signifies the bar’s texture may be compromised. Giller also recommends smelling the chocolate before taking a bite to get a sense of some of the flavors you can expect. Next, she suggests biting down on a piece of chocolate a few times before letting it melt on the tongue, allowing its aromatic complex compounds to coat your palate; then, it’s all about what flavor notes you pick up.

How we picked the products

We started our hunt for the best dark chocolate by defining the category: Dark chocolate is often divided into semisweet and bittersweet, though there technically isn’t a difference. Ask a handful of bakers and you’ll get a handful of answers; ask a chocolate manufacturer, and you’ll find they label dark chocolate at their own discretion.

But here are some general rules. Dark chocolate must be made with at least 35% chocolate liquor, the liquid mixture of roasted, ground cacao nibs. It may include up to 12% milk solids, which act as an emulsifier and add an extra-creamy quality; using more than 12% milk solids would render it milk chocolate. Semisweet chocolate usually contains a higher ratio of sugar, but you should consider anything less than 50% cacao far too sweet for baking. For most purposes, we prefer a bar that lies somewhere in the range of 65–75% cocoa solids. For this test, we tasted bars that went up to 80%; percentages higher than this tend to be unpleasantly bitter with a crumbly texture.