Dark chocolate has been a favorite, but new milk chocolates have full flavor.

By JULIA MOSKIN

Chocolate¡¯s dark mood is lightening .
Until recently, midnight-black, bittersweet bars with punishing percentages of cacao were, like coffee and wine, on a quest for brooding intensity. Milk chocolate was left behind, dismissed as child¡¯s play, an indulgence in sweetness and nostalgia.
Now, some chocolatiers are fighting back, with suave ¡°dark milk¡± chocolates that reinvent milk chocolate by increasing its cacao content, reducing its sweetness and refining it to give it the snap and velvet of dark.
¡°Personally, if I had to choose one or the other, I prefer dark chocolate,¡± said Joseph Whinney, founder of Theo Chocolate, a small producer based in Seattle, Washington. ¡°But there is no product on the planet that can match that lush, meltedchocolate mouth-feel of milk chocolate.
Percentages tell nothing about the taste or the quality of chocolate, said Chloe Doutre-Roussel, a Paris-based expert and former chocolate buyer for Fortnum & Mason in London. The percentage tells how much of the bar is cacao solids - the pure, unsweetened content of the cacao pod. But the flavor and quality are determined by many other factors: how the pods are fermented, how long they are roasted, how the cacao is ground. Two milk chocolates, both with 45 percent cacao solids, might have utterly different levels of sugar and dairy content.
¡°Seventy percent of bad cacao is still 70 percent, Ms. Doutre-Roussel said. ¡°It is all about the producer and the recipe, especially when you are talking about milk chocolate.
¡°Producing milk chocolate, said Andrea Slitti, a chocolate maker in Tuscany, ¡°is much more complicated than producing dark chocolate, as you can see in the marketplace: there are far more good dark chocolates available. At each step, we have to work to keep the clean taste of milk and not overwhelm it with the strength of the cocoa mass, then balance them both with sweetness.
Mr. Slitti is one of several serious chocolatiers - including Pralus, Bernachon and Amedei - that have forged new hybrids that, at their best, can please partisans on both sides of the dark-versus-milk divide.
¡°In our tastings, I found that lovers of milk chocolate felt a little bit uncomfortable in admitting that they prefer it to plain chocolate,¡± he said. He spent more than a year developing Lattenero, one of the first ¡°dark milk chocolates. Instantly popular, it is the only milk chocolate available in five cacao levels, from 45 to 70 percent.
Cacao cultists have provoked chocolate makers to keep stripping chocolate down, eliminating distractions like emulsifiers, vanilla and even sugar. The 100 percent cacao bars that have arrived recently on the market are virtually inedible, but are no less joyfully greeted by connoisseurs .
However, some tasters say that percentages can go too high. ¡°The extremes of bitterness have been reached with dark chocolate,¡± said Alex Landuyt, director of research and development for Barry Callebaut, one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world.
¡°And as we move in that direction, the more we need the rounding of the milk to balance it out.

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