What Do You Know About Chocolate?

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The famous bar has come a long way in terms of quality and sophistication. Here’s a primer on how to make it, and how to choose the best and most ethically produced.

You actually think you know all you need to know about candy now.

For example, the higher the cacao proportion, the better the chocolate, right? The term “one source” on the package shows that the chocolate represents a local terroir. Or hadn’t a few born guys in Brooklyn started the whole bean-to-bar movement?

Wrong; not necessarily; certainly not.

Americans spend $21 billion a year on chocolate, so that doesn’t mean we know what we’re doing just because we eat a lot of it. So malentendus in the shop will make it particularly difficult for chocolate lovers to decide which bars, which are bundled in jaunt, are the right to purchase, in terms of both flavors so ethics.

One that is obvious is that there are more varieties than ever of specialty chocolate at prices as high as $55 a piece.

In 2018 sales of quality chocolate rose by 19 percent, as opposed to 0.6 percent for generic chocolate like the iconic Hershey Piece, according to the Fine Chocolate Industry Association. In the last decade, from around five to over 250, the number of little American bean-to-bar chocolate makers — the kind with cocoa percentages and places of origin written on those hyper chic labels — have soared.

However, while chocolate ingenuity and scientific acuity have flourished, ethical and environmental issues continue to plague the supply chain. [ Read more about Melissa Clark’s favorite bean-to-bar chocolates ] These things may indeed get worse, despite a 20-year effort to combat systemic poverty, child labor, and deforestation that is endemic to the industry.

It might seem a lot to think about when you choose your Valentine’s Day chocolates, but some basic questions that you may not already know are answered here.

Lets Understand Ho chocolate is made.

The fruits of the cacao tree, an equatorial Seussian-looking plant with plump, bumpy, ovoid pods which develop directly from the bark, start with all chocolate, including white chocolate.

The cacao beans are the seeds that emerge inside the capsule, surrounded by a juicy fruit, and taste something like a mango mixed with a pear holding lychee. Upon processing, the beans are fermented and dried for up to a week.

The dried beans are then roasted, cracked to separate the outside husks from the inner nibs, which have a nutsy, terrestrial flavor and crunchy texture — and are excellent ingredients added to the baked product. The nibs are about half chocolate and half cocoa butter.

Chocolate makers ground the nibs into what is known as chocolate liquor or paste. This beer, sugar and other ingredients, including milk powder for milk chocolate, lecithin for smoothing texture and vanilla for flavor, are ground again. Extra cocoa butter is sometimes mixed into dark chocolate to create an eat without adding a great deal of sugar.

This is a process called conching, aimed at reducing sugar and cacao particles to the scale they look like satin in the mouth, which may take anywhere from 24 to 72 hours. (Industrial chocolates may contain other ingredients such as vegetable oil, corn syrup or glucose or vanillin, artificial vanilla. Then the chocolate is tempered (heated and cooled up to certain temperatures) to produce a smooth and snappy look. It’s good to taste after that.

Did You hear about bean-to-bar chocolate?

All chocolate is, simply speaking, Bean-to-bar, as all meals are mostly farm-to-table. But as the chef who scans all her ingredients fanatically, up to the salt flakes that garnish her sustainably selected crude, the bovine chocolate producers obsess about the moral and ethical roots of their boots.

This contrasts markedly with traditional commodity chocolate, where beans are a component, purchased in bulk at a price rather than an expense.

“If the infested moldy, terrible beans mix with the decent, big chocolate companies will buy them anyway,” said John Scharffenberger, founder of San Francisco’s Scharffen Berger chocolate maker. Since major producers also combine with so many other products that in the finished product the customer does not taste any bad beans.

The best chocolate makers (also known as craftsmen or micro chocolate makers) choose the beans that are used by chefs as a tomato — always obsessively inspecting the ferms where the beans are cultivated. Until making it into chocolate bars, they roast and ground the beans.

Chef and chef David Lebovitz, who wrote “The Great Chocolate Book,” contrasts chocolate from the bean to the bar with natural wine. “It’s exciting and vibrant in a way that isn’t even very good regular candy,” he said. “You may be surprised.”

The new craft chocolate movement started with Scharffen Berger, created in 1996 by a winemaker Mr. Scharffenberger, and Robert Steinberg, trained in the famed Bernachon chocolate shop, in Lyon, France.

“Before we started there were only nine cacao firms in the U.S., and all of them were big except for Guittard,” said Mr. Scharffenberger, referring to the Guittard Chocolate Company in the San Francisco Area as well. “In 150 years we were the first new chocolate maker on the scene.”

When the company’s fourth-generation owner, Gary Guittard, sampled Scharffen Berger chocolate, he revised his production, sometimes in the manner that his grandfather made chocolate when he began the company in 1868.

“Scharffen Berger was the troublemaker,” said Mr. Guittard. “Trying their sweets was terrible for me. It opened my eyes to a variety of flavors 50 years ago but missed in our chocolates. In 2005, Scharffen Berger was sold to the Hershey company, who moved the business to Illinois. But Scharffen Berger was quickly led by other small bean-to-bar makers. In the United States, there are now more than 250 employees. And even if Brooklyn did not invent the bean-to-bar craze, contrary to popular belief, it has several suppliers, including Kahkow, Cacao Prieto, Jacques Torres, Raaka so Fine & Raw.

A bean-to-bar manufacturer makes cacao bars. A chocolatier buys premade chocolate and mixes it with other ingredients, for example, truffles or pralines. And it’s no bad thing at all: the best chocolate makers buy excellent chocolate from one bar to the next. (Very many professional chocolate makers buy from Valrhona.) Bars manufacturing so cake making are two different skills.

What is single-origin chocolate?

To return to the wine example, many assume the single-source cocoa beans are like grapes from a single vineyard that create chocolate the reflects complexities in the same way a wine might.

And that’s true occasionally. But just as often, in Peru and Trinidad, beans labeled with one origin will come from small farms in various parts of that area, each of which has a distinctive terroir, diversity of cacao beans and fermentation process.

Maricel Presilla, the author of the book The modern taste of chocolate, revised: a cultural and natural history of cacao with recipes, says “Single-origin is a versatile word.” “It could be linked to a certain farm renowned for its unique cultivar of fine cacao. Or this could mean a larger region where a number of cultivars are grown, some of which are high-quality and some are not.

Just saying that cacao comes from Ecuador opens up a can of worms, since so many genetic variants are there. You can’t be sure what you get.” That said, understanding the root of chocolate can teach you something generic about its taste. I have found that great Latin American bean chocolates tend to be complex. Some may be fruity and sweet with dried apricots, fresh berries, and dark fruit, while others may taste nuts but fresh herbs. West African chocolates are often more plain, teated with sugar, raisins and coffee flavors.

Dr. Presilla’s advice is to be as thorough as possible on the label when you buy single-origin chocolate, including the country and region, the farm or estate and the genetic variety of cacao. “It’s a lot to understand for the customer,” she said, “but if the maker of chocolate is translucent, that’s a sign they put thought and care into the product.”

Cacao percentage on the label mean?

The amount of cocoa in a package is the total of cocoa mass (ground-up beans).

To be labeled chocolate in the U.S., it will have a cacao mass of at least 10 percent. The majority of dark chocolate is 10-30% cacao, the other bittersweet chocolates 35-55%. (For white chocolate, cocoa butter only is used, and must constitute at least 20 percent of the bar.) Usually, if it was specified at all cacao, the amount was printed on the back of the box in a small type. Nonetheless, by 1986, when Valrhona introduced the Guanaja chocolate, the first bar had a cacao weight of 70 percent. And it was so sweet on the front of the bottle, suggesting a bittersweet flavor. Many chocolate producers followed suit quickly.

This is the confusing part. While the greater the proportion of cacao, the saltier the chocolate, is not always the case. In some cases, 68 percent of a chocolate maker may taste bitter than 74 percent.

That is because both cacao solids in which cocoa butter make up the percentage. The solids are oily and the fat fluffy and warm. When a chocolate maker uses more cocoa butter to make it healthier, the amount of cocoa overall reduces but the bitterness does not increase.

In New Orleans, Carol Morse, the creator of Alli Chocolate, adds in her Teapa Dulce 64% dark bar a small amount of Cocoa butter to round up the toasty flavors of cocoa and give the chocolate a little more moist in the mouth.

She told me in her laboratory just outside of New Orleans this “I am working with so few ingredients and it’s all about combining them,” she had rolled the latest batch of light brown bars in a gold film by hand. In a corner, burlap bags of raw Peruvian cacao booze waited for processing and then baked in a repurposed rotisserie oven used once in a Walmart store. “A little cocoa butter added will make a big difference.”

What is direct-trade cacao?

The cacao supply chain is one of the biggest ethical concerns in chocolate production. In the current system, the vast majority of cacao beans are sold without respect to price as surplus crops. Since farmers do not pay more for better beans, there is no incentive to plant finer cultivars for them. I wouldn’t have the money to do that. Many cacao farmers live below the poverty line in West Africa, which grow 60-70 percent of the world’s beans, making less than $1.90 a day.

Direct exchange refers to beans obtained outside this system, usually directly from producers or farmer cooperatives. Generally, these beans are higher quality and farmers are paid 50% to 300% more than the market price of cacao. Nonetheless, foreign exchange actually accounts for less than 1% of cacao beans on the market.

While some chocolate makers buy from the farmers directly, most of the American micro-bean-to-bar producers get beans from one of two importers of direct trade cacao, Uncommon Cacao, and Meridian Cacao. Both have strong social goals, which include farmers ‘ living wages.

Emily Stone, founders of Uncommon Cacao, said that “ninety percent of world cacao is grown on six million small farms, and most of the farmers can not survive on what they’re paid for.” “Our mission is to create a fairer and more open supply chain.”