Time for a little experiment.
Take a piece of the best dark chocolate you have and snap off a section. Put it in your mouth but don't chew it - the trick is to experience it properly. At first you just notice its crisply defined shape and a tiny bit of flavor. After a bit of time it loses hardness rather suddenly (assuming it was a thin piece) and you feel your tongue getting a bit cooler. It flows over your tongue and the flavors begin to fire. At first you'll probably notice sweet and bitter as it moves over your taste buds. A bit later the real flavors start their parade as your metasense of flavor gets excited by volatiles. There may be fruity, nutty and a dozen other hints. The chocolate you've been wolfing down all these years is suddenly a complex treat. Now wait for your senses to come back to normal and try again with a different chocolate. If you have a high quality chocolate the experience will start out the same, but the flavor explosion will likely be different.
The fact that I like chocolate probably comes through in the blog as an anonymous reader sent a selection of excellent Mast Brothers bars as a thank you for the blog.1 I don't know who it is, so I want to thank whoever it is in return. There is no need for this, but it is appreciated and I just opened the first bar - one made with chocolate from Peru. I only had about 20g, but it was excellent!
Good chocolate is a heavily designed and engineered material. Cocoa nuts taste nothing like what we think of as chocolate. I can save you the experience - just don't go there. The real process of making chocolate starts when the nuts are placed on the ground and allowed to rot and ferment. After a few weeks there is a complex chemical transformation that yields esters and a number of other compounds that are the basis of chocolate's complexity. The result is very dependent on the type of bean, how it was grown, how it was allowed to ferment, air and pile temperature, humidity, the geometry of the pile (this controls available oxygen). A good chocolate maker usually travels to the cocoa farms to understand the terroir of the product.
The chocolate maker roasts the beans to add to the richness of the esters. Roasting causes a caramelization of the sugars and the sugars and proteins are brought together in the Maillard reaction to create hundreds of complex and highly flavored molecules. The details of the roasting can be technical and, like the fermentation step, are usually trade secrets of the artisans.
Now we're to the level of Aztec material science. They ground the roasted nuts and stirred the powder into hot water to make bitter water or chocolatl. I've had it, but didn't like the bitter taste or its gritty texture. Cortez brought it back to Europe as a novelty, but never threatened the emerging popularity of coffee.
The next step towards modern chocolate came when a Dutch company used a screw press to crush the roasted beans separating the cocoa solids from the cocoa butter. Dutch process powder has a fine texture and can be turned into hot chocolate with sugar and some hot water or milk. It can be great, but remember to drink it immediately. The esters are volatile in the hot liquid and are mostly gone after a few minutes. Fresh hot chocolate is a world apart from the same cup ten minutes later.
We're still not there yet
The Dutch process separated the solids from the fat. Cocoa fat turns out to be a key substance and years of experimentation and serious material science led to the idea of carefully recombining the solids and the cocoa butter.
A quality chocolate bar remains solid at room temperature, but melts in your mouth. As it melts the flavors are released over a short amount of time in exactly the location that allows them to be appreciated. Artisans learned to take advantage of cocoa butter's crystalline properties. It is mostly composed of triglycerides - large carbohydrates that look like three threads tied together at nearly the same point. There are several geometrical patterns these can take to fill space - each with their own density. Five major crystaline forms exist. Two have a low melting point - too low for the mouth experience, but sometimes useful in desserts. Two more are soft and tend to crumble - they are relatively easy to make and you see them in cheap chocolates. The fifth, Type V, turns out to be difficult to make, but has the right properties. It has the highest melting point of all of the crystals at 34°C - just below the temperature in your mouth. It is made by a somewhat fussy tempering process. Type V will degrade over time if you heat it to 18°C (about 65°F) so you should store fine chocolate in a cool and dry place. Books have been written on the subject and home tempering is possible, but I've had more failure than success.
The cool sensation in the mouth is real - it takes energy to turn the solid Type V crystals into a liquid and that comes from your tongue. A latent heat of ecstasy:-)
I'm a fan of darker chocolates as they have richer flavors. A 70% cocoa solids (20% cocoa powder, 50% cocoa butter and 30% sugar) is a good place to start. 85% is getting too bitter for me although, I've had a few remarkable bars. Milk chocolates are usually below 40% don't offer the fireworks...
A very close friend is a partner in a daily chocolate ritual. He keeps it secret from his wife as she is of the opinion it isn't healthy - it turns out it may be in small quantities. At about four every day we each have ten to twenty grams and savor it for at least ten minutes. Great chocolate is expensive, but not if you have it this way. We've been performing this quiet ritual nearly every day since 1989.
Chocolate for baking and cooking usually doesn't have to be great - it is mostly there for something of a normal 'just eating it' chocolate taste and the cocoa butter. Chocolate is similar to olive oils and vinegars. There are normal inexpensive varieties for cooking and excellent finishing varieties when you want complex flavors that heating removes.
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1 There is an explosion of craft chocolate making. The best examples are no longer from Europe - Brooklyn is arguably ground zero.
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recipe corner
No chocolate recipes:-) Just buy a few different bars and appreciate them over a few days. The interesting kitchen experiment of the week was a roasted pineapple. I've seen someone do something like this - there are probably dozens of variations that would work. It is wonderful by itself and fantastic on vanilla ice cream.
Roasted Pineapple
Ingredients
° 1 ripe pineapple, peeled, cored and quartered
° 1/2 cup fresh orange juice (actually I used frozen, but it is less embarrassing to put fresh in a recipe)
° juice of one lime
° one cup apricot jam - probably a lot of jams would work. I'm thinking hot pepper jelly
° 1/2 cup rum or brandy (a cheap rum was used)
° a half dozen allspice berries crushed or some other spice
Technique
° heat oven to about 300°F
° put the pineapple quarter into a baking dish of similar size but big enough to allow basting
° mix the other ingredients together and pour over the pineapple
° roast for about 2 hours until the pineapple caramelized on the outside turning the pineapple a few times an hour,
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