Like the other two main types of chocolate, white chocolate ingredients vary in detail.
Still, there is a general theme.
The basic white chocolate ingredients are:
• cocoa butter (cocoa fat),
• milk solids,
• milk fat.
In the U.S., white chocolate must have at least 20% cocoa butter, at least 14% milk solids and at least 3.5% milk fat. And it cannot have more than 55% sugar/sweeteners. The European Union rules are the same except that there is no limit on the amount of sweeteners.
Despite containing cocoa butter, it really is imitation chocolate. Because it does not contain cocoa solids (the brown part), which are the principal nutritional part of chocolate liquor.
During manufacturing, chocolate liquor ground from the cacao bean is separated into its fatty part, called cocoa butter, and its brown-colored nonfat part, called cocoa solids.
The brown cocoa solids contain the various micronutrients that are the source of the health benefits you've been hearing attributed to chocolate.
In the manufacture of dark chocolate and milk chocolate, the cocoa butter and the cocoa solids are recombined at a later stage in the process.
But for white chocolate, they are not. There are no brown cocoa solids in the white chocolate end product. (I know, seems obvious. One of the things I've discovered in life though, is it never hurts to double-check the obvious. That's because sometimes the obvious is not correct.)
In other words, white chocolate is missing chocolate's most healthful parts.
There is one more thing to be alert for in selecting white chocolate. There are some products that look like white chocolate, but are not. Generally they are made using naturally solid or worse, even hydrogenated animal or vegetable fats, and have zero cacao content. These products go by names such as confectioner's coating, simmer coating, white fudge and so forth. They may be white, in contrast to white chocolate's ivory color. And unless the maker has added chocolate flavoring, they will not taste at all like chocolate.
Now you know what white chocolate is. Any questions? You know where my Contact page is!
"It ain't what we don't know that hurts us, but what we do know - that ain't so." - Will Rogers