Over its nearly 4,000 year human history, chocolate has mainly been consumed as a drink, but in the last 150 years or so, the solid form of chocolate has soared in popularity. The average American consumes about 20lbs per year, most as a mixture of cheap candy bars and the occasional great chocolate from a local manufacturer.
As with many food chemistry stories, chocolate’s starts with fermentation. The bean of the cacao plant is removed by hand, then laid out on raised wooden mats, often with banana leaves placed over them. This allows the natural yeasts and bacteria from the air to ferment the pulp around the beans, which drips away as alcohols and lactic and acetic acids – the final products of this fermentation.
The heat produced by fermentation changes the bean, producing the flavor chemicals familiar to the consumer as chocolate, and removes more dangerous bacteria, so they can then be sun-dried. The beans are further processed into the more recognizable cocoa solids and butter. Mike Grissmer, co-owner of Deborah Ann’s Sweet Shoppe, says the best cocoa products come from small farms where attention to detail means the fermentation and drying processes are well-controlled. Small batch processing, where grinding dictates the particle size of the cocoa solid powder, also affects the quality of the final chocolate. This makes choosing a cocoa importer as crucial as any part of making chocolate.
Grissmer explained the fascinating processes their chocolate goes through to create the high-end finished product. The smooth texture of exceptional chocolate is down to the quantity of cocoa butter and sugar in the chocolate, but also the chemistry of cocoa butter crystallization. There are six crystal forms of cocoa butter but only one, the beta version (or form V), that gives the tell-tale snap of fine chocolate.
The chocolate must be brought up to a specific temperature, known as tempering, then seed chocolate, with the beta crystal structure you are looking for, needs to be added, and finally, it must be allowed to cool slowly. “There are so many things that can go wrong with chocolate!” says Grissmer. “Early on, we would think we had it all tempered properly, but they were coming out with streaks on them. We talked to some more experienced chocolate people, 25 years ago, and they told us we needed the right cooling and airflow, so we now have fans blowing on the chocolate to get it to cool more quickly and bring cold air back to the chocolate, so that the right crystals
kept forming.”
If you want your chocolate to remain in its beautiful original state, keep it cool and dry or you may notice a whitish residue – this is called blooming. Heat or condensation mean the fat or sugar have come to the surface. Grissmer says that blooms aren’t bad, but your chocolate won’t be quite the same, so eat it when it’s fresh! •
