Chocolate Fundamentalism

Originally I was going to call this post "Chocolate vs. Candy" but (1) that isn't the entire scope of the post and (2) this title amuses me more.

Before I go any further, let me apologize. This is not short.

I read Chocolate: A Bittersweet Struggle Between Dark And Light a while back, but due to time constraints and a lack of motivation on my part I never posted a review (same for The Stand, Alchemist and a couple other books, but that's off task). Perhaps this post can serve as a quasi-review of the book. My final verdict: Enjoyable and worth reading if you love chocolate and find the science, business, history and culture of food interesting. I liked it, others may not. It was not so well written that people who have no interest should read it, nor was it so poorly written that people who do have interest should skip it. Now, let's talk chocolate.

People go on and on about caffeine, but my alkaloid of choice is theobromine, which differs from caffeine only by the methylation of one nitrogen (not that you probably care, but...). Theobromine is found in chocolate, made from cacao beans, the seeds of the tree Theobroma cacao. Obviously, the botanist who assigned this scientific name to the cacao tree had good taste and possibly a sense of humor, as theobroma means "food of the gods."

So, this whole thing started because of my last post and some the comments about it. I'll see what I can do to clarify them and not be too incredibly boring about the whole thing. No guarantees, though.

First, white chocolate as opposed to chocolate. When the cacao beans are processed they are fermented, roasted and ground/milled to produce cocoa liquor. The liquor is pressed to create two separate things: cocoa solids, and the fat layer: cocoa butter. To actually be chocolate, something must contain cocoa solids. The cocoa powder you can typically find in the stores is made up of cocoa solids. Chocolate in the sense we typically think of it (bars, chips, chunks, etc.) is an emulsion of cocoa solids in cocoa butter along with a few other ingredients based on how sweet it is going to be, whether or not it is milk chocolate and any other flavors to be added. White chocolate is made of cocoa butter combined with other ingredients like sugar, milk, vanilla, etc. Since it has no cocoa solids, white chocolate is a cocoa butter confection, but cannot truly be called chocolate.

Second, chocolate versus chocolate flavored candy. This is not really as much of a true distinction as a preference (the white chocolate issue is actually a legal distinction). I'll explain it with a parable: Your friend Milton invites you over for dinner and tells you that you are going to have tuna, you may have visions of sushi or perhaps a nice yellowfin steak seasoned and seared/grilled to perfection. You arrive at the Milton's house, already salivating thinking about dinner. He sits you down at the table and serves you a heaping plate of macaroni with peas and canned tuna mixed in...Tuna casserole. You feel let down, obviously. After all, it isn't at all what you wanted or expected. Why is that? He's still serving tuna, exactly like he said. Or is he? Just like the tuna in that story, much of the readily available chocolate does not live up to its full potential. There are several problems along the way with the tuna you were served by Milton and the chocolate you grabbed at the checkout aisle at the grocery store. First is the starting material. One quote I remember vividly from the book (though I cannot remember whether they are the author's words or those of someone he interviewed) explains that "you can make inferior chocolate from excellent beans, but it's impossible to make excellent chocolate from inferior beans." Good chocolate must come from good beans. The second issue is the process. After the tuna was caught, it was processed and canned. Then your friend added it into a mess of other ingredients and suddenly it was something else altogether. The same thing happens with chocolate. Different companies have different processes, and some are just better than others. Once they have the chocolate made, they will often decide to combine it with a bunch of other things giving us things like Snickers, Mars, Milky Way and Three Musketeers bars...the chocolate equivalents of the tuna casserole. There's nothing wrong the tuna casserole, nor is there anything wrong with any of those candies. I eat them all, but as chocolate it is underacheiving.

Then there is the difference between styles of chocolate (milk, dark, bittersweet). The differences here are fairly simple (all percentages are by weight and are very rough estimates, because I'm doing this off the top of my head, not to mention the fact that the specific rules will likely vary from country to country). Milk chocolate contains milk (surprise!) and not less than ~30% cocoa. Dark and bittersweet are used almost interchangeably for chocolate containing greater than ~50% cocoa solids. Bittersweet is often used for higher percentages, but there is no actual distinction. A Hershey's Special Dark is around 56% cacao, but others brands can be found with percentages in the 70's, 80's and in some cases 90's. I personally prefer right around 70%. At that point, you have an amazing chocolate flavor without too much bitterness. It's not a candy bar that you will sit down and eat all at once, but a special flavor to enjoy over a longer period of time.

Other things like company and how many/which variety of cacao tree the beans come from make a large difference. I had recently decided that I just didn't like milk chocolate because there wasn't enough flavor and it was always waxy. A switch from the typical milk chocolate to trying milk chocolate made by Valrhona quickly changed my mind and convinced me that I didn't like bad milk chocolate. With the higher percentage chocolates, you are still getting some chocolate flavor even with the not-as-good brands, but when you switch to milk chocolate the differences are striking. Even when you have quality brands with similar percentage chocolates, there are still differences based on the type of bean and the formula used to make the chocolate. I recently tried a chocolate made from only Venezuelan cirollo beans. This is the chocolate used to decorate the top of the cake in this post. The cirollo is a variety of cacao that makes up a relatively small portion of the world's crop and is typically less bitter but with other flavors coming to the forefront. The chocolate I tried was a 71% cacao and had a taste that could only be described as both spicy and fruity. It was not awful, but it was different enough that it was certainly not what I wanted. (Did you really think I'd use it to decorate a cake if I loved it?) My current favorite is Amer Noir, a 71% bittersweet made by Valrhona, but of course I still enjoy looking for a new favorite.

Ok, looking back that's a lot of writing about chocolate. A lot of nerdy writing about chocolate...and it's no wonder I'm fat.

Until later...