History of chocolate

publish Opened 2023-08-16. See that journal entry for the pics!

This entry turned out surprisingly informative; added to Musings on everything else.

Chocolate development process

1. Cacao fruit gets picked
2. For (necessary) flavor, the fruit is fermented in giant fermentation buckets. You need ~500 fruit to do this. Typically it’s done on the plantation to save on transportation costs.
3. Cacao beans (technically they are seeds) are roasted and peeled.
4. Roasted seeds are ground into paste: cocoa butter!
5. Cocoa butter is combined with sugar + other materials to make chocolate solids or drinks.

Interesting things

^ Re: point #5, the “other materials” part was what drove chocolate into the mainstream. The Maya(ns?) drank ground cocoa butter-water mixtures because it tasted good and was nutritious for the time. They didn’t mix it. Once the Spanish and eventually Europe got their hands on cocoa-water drinks they started looking for ways to make the cocoa last longer.

• So the Spanish cut their drinks with milk, spices like cinnamon, and other nifty things. We tried some in the Dandelion workshop; it tastes nice and a little gritty.

^ side note to the above: it’s insane that the Maya figured out steps 1-4 on their own. Step 5 is where all the optimizations occur, but for a pre-industrial civilization to figure all that out… must be a ton of trial and error.

In a nutshell: the history of chocolate is largely a history of people figuring out how to make cocoa last longer. That’s the origin of virtually all the chocolate we eat today — with the exception of artisanal chocolate like Dandelion which can appeal to a luxury audience.

Fun facts

• Mainstream milk chocolate in England (e.g. Cadbury) tastes totally different than mainstream milk chocolate in America (e.g. Hershey) because the milk additive comes in the form of powdered milk and condensed milk respectively.
  • Americans prefer the taste they grew up with and vice-versa.
  • This is particularly cool imo, added to Fun facts.
• Madagascar only has 1 chocolate plantation so there’s a monopoly on it.
• Scharffen Berger - founded in Berkeley! - was the first in the craft chocolate industry to put their cocoa percentage on the label.
• Industrial (i.e. non-artisanal) chocolate is made by blending cocoa butter from lots of beans from different locations. Pro chefs, like our instructor Steve(?) actually prefers that because it’s consistent to work with.
  • Single-origin beans are finicky to work with but there’s more an art to it.
• Speaking of the art to it: At Dandelion, 1 person decides the procedure for a single-origin chocolate bar. Their bars will even include the name of that person on the label.
  • This is because the beans change per season and per harvest. Dandelion targets a certain taste for each of their bars, so each harvest season the person in charge decides the exact procedure for roasting + ratio of cocoa and sugar to make the bar taste as similar as last time. Obviously there’s input from the other Dandelion chefs, but that’s a cool responsibility to have.

If I ever want to organize a chocolate tasting

I thought it was really cool to taste all the different stages of cacao process. Here’s the laundry list of what Steve let us sample:

• Freshly-cut cacao beans (white film)
  • Suggested we let the fruit taste simmer in our mouths for a while before biting in and tasting how bitter the seeds are
• Roasted cacao beans
  • He warmed these up in a pan right before giving us a few and letting us peel.
  • The warmth significantly boosted the fragrance. I love this smell.
• 2 chocolate drinks
  • Mayan cacao butter + water (and I think sugar? I forget if he added any)
  • Spanish cacao butter + milk + cinnamon + a touch of course sugar (and maybe other spices, I forget)
• 7 chocolate samples
  • Taza’s chocolate from Boston (gritty; gives a sense of what early chocolate might taste like)
  • Cadbury milk
  • Hershey’s kiss
  • White chocolate (an english brand; I forget but it was important)
  • Scharffen Berger dark chocolate
  • Steve’s prepared version of the US Army Field Ration D (example of chocolate rations that don’t spoil. He says they tasted disappointingly good; army food shouldn’t be that good)
  • Dandelion single-origin chocolate from Tanzania
• Piece of cocoa butter (doesn’t taste good on its own, but shows an example of a room-temperature solid fat that is often replaced when making other chocolates)

Blurry pic of how this all turned out (I guess there was a third drinkable chocolate I forgot about, maybe fresh hot chocolate?):