Cocoa butter

Cocoa butter is the pure fat of the cocoa bean: solid at room temperature, melting just below body heat. Use it for chocolate, glazes and vegan desserts.

What exactly is cocoa butter? The pure fat of the cocoa bean

Most of us know and love dark raw cacao nibs and bitter cocoa powder. But when the heavy, fatty cocoa beans are cold-pressed, something else separates out: raw cocoa butter (also called theobroma oil). It's the isolated fat of the cocoa plant. At cool room temperature it's rock-hard and brittle, and looks like small ivory-coloured, matt rocks or smooth blocks of soap. Put it on warm skin or on your tongue at 37°C, though, and it melts. Because all the cocoa solids stay behind in the press cake, raw, unrefined cocoa butter contains zero grams of carbohydrate, zero protein and zero sugar. It smells intensely of fine chocolate, even though none of the bitterness is left.

The fats: mostly saturated chains

In keto cooking, coconut oil gets a lot of attention (for its MCT fats), while many people ignore cocoa butter because more than 60% of it is saturated fatty acids. Here's what those fats actually are:

• Oleic acid (about 33%): the same monounsaturated fatty acid you find in extra virgin olive oil.
• Palmitic acid (about 25%): a saturated fatty acid the body also uses as a building block.
• Stearic acid (about 33–35%): the main reason biohackers are so keen on cocoa butter. This saturated fatty acid is a special case: in studies on heart and circulation, it has behaved largely neutrally on blood lipids, and in some it went along with slightly lower total cholesterol.

What research looks at: stearic acid and fullness

Stearic acid and the mitochondria

In cell biology studies (mostly in mice, increasingly also during keto phases), researchers have looked at what large doses of isolated stearic acid do to the mitochondria, the tiny power plants inside our cells. They saw the mitochondria change shape and how they process fat. These are early lab findings – they don't tell you what a spoonful of cocoa butter does in your body.

Cocoa butter in your morning coffee

Fat in a meal triggers satiety signals in the small intestine, such as the messenger cholecystokinin (CCK), and the stomach empties more slowly. That's why some people who do intermittent fasting melt a single teaspoon of cocoa butter into hot coffee in the morning: it tastes of chocolate, and it contains no sugar.

Good to know: cocoa butter on your skin

Pure cocoa butter is one of the few foods that's used just as much in the kitchen as on the skin. Many stretch-mark creams for pregnancy contain it as a main ingredient. Take a hard chip of cocoa butter, let it soften with the warmth of your wrists and rub it into dry skin on your elbows – it smells of milk chocolate and contains nothing but the fat itself.