HOW SWEET IT IS
New world crop popular ingredient in candy, sauces, beverages and desserts
Chocolate popular ingredient in candy, sauces, beverages, desserts
There were boxes of Valentines chocolates in many Island homes Wednesday, and undoubtedly there are some available in stores for a good price.
Did you ever wonder where all that chocolate comes from and how it is produced?
Chocolate is a new world crop, first cultivated by the Olmecs about 3,000 years ago in what’s currently Mexico. Millennia later, the trees that produce the berries used in chocolate production are grown on four continents.
Just as farmers grow different varieties of apples or pears in orchards, so, too, chocolate producers work with several varieties of cacao beans. According to Jacques L. Rolland’s “The Cook’s Essential Kitchen Dictionary” (Robert Rose, Toronto, 2014), 90 per cent of the world’s cocoa supply is comprised of Forastero beans, grown in Africa, Brazil, and Asia.
Criollo beans are grown in South and Central America and Southeast Asia, and Trinitario, a hybrid of Forastero and Criollo beans, is cultivated in Trinidad and several South American countries.
Cacao and cocoa are similar words with slightly different meanings. Cacao refers to a type of tree and its seeds. Cocoa, on the other hand, is the unsweetened powder used in baking, which is made by processing the cacao beans.
It takes work to transform the beans from the cacao tree into the chocolates in the heart shaped box. The beans are removed from the pods, fermented, dried, roasted, and cracked, separating the nibs from the shells. The nibs are then ground to extract some of the cocoa butter, leaving a thick brown paste called chocolate liquor or cocoa mass, which is further refined in one of several ways. The cocoa butter, a cream-coloured fat in the beans, is then available for both culinary and cosmetic uses.
Extracting more cocoa butter from the chocolate liquor creates a solid which, when ground, becomes cocoa powder.
Cocoa powder is acidic. It’s the reason that baking soda (which is alkaline, or basic) is used in recipes that utilize cocoa. Further industrial treatment of cocoa by a technique called Dutch processing uses alkali to neutralize some of the natural acidity and consequently makes the flavour milder and the colour darker.
Other ingredients such as milk powder or sugar may be added to the chocolate liquor, followed by further refining. In the late 19th century, Rodolphe Lindt of Switzerland, initiated the process of conching, which is the final step used in producing most chocolate. It involves slowly blending the mixture with small amounts of cocoa butter in large machines (conches), for up to 72 hours, to eliminate moisture and volatile acids, and create a silky texture.
The end product of these processes is the chocolate that appears in numerous variations for baking, cooking, and eating as is.
Baking chocolate or unsweetened chocolate is pure chocolate liquor, cooled and moulded, with 53 per cent cocoa butter content.
Bittersweet, often called dark
chocolate, has at least 25 per cent chocolate liquor, sometimes much more. It has a concentrated chocolate flavour and is not very sweet.
Semi-sweet chocolate is usually somewhat sweeter than bittersweet, with a less intense chocolate flavour.
Sweet chocolate has about 15 per cent chocolate liquor and is used for both cooking and eating.
Milk chocolate combines at least 10 per cent chocolate liquor with cocoa butter, milk and other flavouring.
White chocolate, made with cocoa butter, milk, sugar, lecithin and usually vanilla flavour, but no chocolate liquor, is technically not chocolate at all. It melts at a lower temperature than regular chocolate and requires careful handling.
Couverture, professional quality coating chocolate used only in candy making and cooking, contains at least 35 per cent cocoa butter and creates a high gloss finish.
Cocoa nibs are roasted, husked cocoa beans broken into bits, and used to add texture and subtle chocolate flavour without sweetness to baked goods and some savoury dishes.
Artificial chocolate, or chocolate-flavoured products, differ in flavour and texture from real chocolates. This is noticeable in certain chocolate-flavoured chips, which although they have the advantage of being less expensive, don’t live up to the quality of chips made from real chocolate.
Chocolate, in its many forms, is a popular ingredient in sweets, beverages and desserts, as well as in savoury Latin American sauces called moles. How appropriate that Theobroma, the genus of the tree that it originates from, translates as “food of the gods”.