What Is Compound Chocolate?
The short answer
Compound chocolate is a coating made from cocoa powder (sometimes with some cocoa liquor), sugar and a vegetable fat that replaces most or all of the cocoa butter. Because of that fat it usually sets glossy without tempering. In many markets it cannot be sold under the plain name “chocolate”.
How it works
Cocoa butter needs tempering because it can set in several crystal forms. Compound fats are picked to avoid that problem. Lauric fats, from palm kernel or coconut, set hard simply by cooling. Non-lauric fats, often from palm, rapeseed or soy, behave differently and tolerate more cocoa butter in the mix. Coatings built on cocoa butter equivalents are the exception: those fats behave like cocoa butter, so the coating has to be tempered.
Lauric fats do not blend well with cocoa butter, which is why lauric coatings are built on cocoa powder rather than on cocoa liquor.
The difference shows up in the mouth. Compound melts and tastes different from chocolate made with cocoa butter, and how much depends on the fat and the recipe. For a bakery dipping thousands of biscuits, the time saved on tempering can matter more.
On the label
Look for a named vegetable fat other than cocoa butter in the ingredient list. In the US, these coatings have their own legal names, such as “sweet chocolate and vegetable fat coating” or “milk chocolate and vegetable fat coating”, sometimes with the specific oil named instead. “Chocolate-flavored” is a different case: it’s required when the only chocolate flavor comes from cocoa. The word “coating” alone proves nothing, since US names for real chocolate include “milk chocolate coating”. “Compound coating” is a trade term, not a legal name. Which names are allowed depends on the country.
Where you’ll see it
On biscuits, ice cream coatings, cake decorations and candy coatings, and in bakeries that dip in bulk.
Related terms
It is usually set against couverture. The reason it skips tempering lies in cocoa butter polymorphs. Lauric fat, non-lauric fat and cocoa butter equivalent have short entries in the glossary list.