Are you thinking about giving a gift of chocolate on Mother’s Day? Shopping for chocolate isn’t as easy as it used to be. Because of the growing interest in chocolate varieties, it can be difficult to understand the new language of chocolate.

To decipher the package labels, you’ll need to know a little about how chocolate is made. Every cocoa product begins with the “nib” in the center of the cocoa bean. After the beans are harvested, the nibs are separated from the beans, then roasted and crushed between grinding stones or rollers. Heat friction turns the nibs to cocoa liquor, which, despite its name, contains no alcohol. At this point, the liquor can be used in chocolate or pressed, separating it into two products - cocoa butter and cocoa powder.

If you took the cocoa liquor and did nothing more than cool it and form it into bars, it would be unsweetened baking chocolate. All other varieties of chocolate – bittersweet, semisweet, milk chocolate and sweet chocolate – are made from a combination of three main ingredients: cocoa liquor, cocoa butter, and sweeteners.

Milk chocolate, the most popular variety of chocolate in the United States, is made by combining the three main ingredients with milk and other flavorings. The FDA requires that milk chocolate made in the U.S.A. contain at least 10% chocolate liquor and 12% whole milk. Recently, manufacturers have introduced a dark milk chocolate, which contains up to 42% chocolate liquor.

Sweet chocolate, frequently used for candy and icing, is made with more sweeteners and carries a heftier load of chocolate liquor than standard milk chocolate – a minimum of 15%.

Semisweet and bittersweet (or dark) chocolate are both required to contain at least 35% chocolate liquor. The higher percentage means more antioxidants (and more intense chocolate flavor), so if you are shopping for chocolates that may have health benefits, these are the kinds you should be looking for. High quality bittersweet chocolate can contain as much as 85% percent chocolate liquor.

What about white chocolate? There is a good-natured argument in the candy world about whether white chocolate is really chocolate at all. Introduced to Americans in the mid-1980s by Nestlé through their now-extinct Alpine bar, white chocolate is a combination of cocoa butter, milk, sugar and flavorings. Although missing the chocolate liquor or cocoa required of all real chocolate products, the FDA ruled in 2004 that products containing at least 20% cocoa butter, 14% milk solids and less than 55% sweeteners can be called white chocolate.

In my family, chocolate preferences are genetic. We fight over bittersweet chocolate, tolerate milk chocolate, and reject white chocolate. If you don’t know which variety your mother likes best, do some taste-testing. What could be more fun?

Contributed By Laura Weaver