Chocolate liquor

Chocolate liquor, also sold as cocoa liquor, cocoa paste or cocoa mass, is pure cocoa in liquid or semi-solid form, and it contains no alcohol; liquor here simply means a fluid. It is made from cocoa bean nibs that have been fermented, dried, roasted and separated from their skins, then ground until the cocoa butter in the cells melts and the nibs become a free-flowing paste. The liquor is either cooled and molded into blocks, sold as unsweetened baking chocolate, or pressed at high pressure to split it into cocoa butter and a dry cake of defatted cocoa. Its main use, often with extra cocoa butter, is in making chocolate. It is roughly 53 percent cocoa butter, with carbohydrates, protein, tannins and theobromine. American law treats it as a chocolate product, while European law treats it as a cocoa product until sugar is added.