SUMMER EXPERIMENTS : CHOCOLATE : 1
The last few days chocolate is the only thing that has been on my mind. I have read all I can find about chocolate; from recipes and history to the exciting ingredient lists of different chocolate bars. I have even been dreaming about chocolate!
This is a crash course à la Agnes, in chocolate - or maybe more correctly: cocoa or cacao. (About definitions of cocoa vs cacao I find different explanations. Some says cocoa is the commercial name of cacao; what the products made from cacao are called. Some says cocoa is the powder, usually with added sugar and other ingrediences and some says that somewhere in the middle of the process where the beans are dried or roasted the cacao bean transforms into cocoa... If any cacao or cocoa expert reads this I would love to know what the actual difference is. Handy enough in Sweden it is only called KAKAO).
No 1: The plant
The cacao tree grows in tropical regions and there are three different sorts used commercially:
1. Forastero (stands for about 90% of the world production: low quality, high resistance to diseases)
2. Criollo (considered as the "high quality bean" but easily catch diseases)
3. Trinitario (a hybrid of the two others, between them in both quality and disease resistance).
No 2: The fruit
On the cacao tree grows fruit, called pods. They are green at first and when ripen the change to a red, orange, yellow or sometimes purple color. Inside the fruit are the seeds, or beans, growing aligned, covered with the sweet pulp. One pod contains around 30-50 beans, which also is what it takes to make 100 grams of chocolate (depending on amount of cocoa solids).
No 3: Prove like a dough
Once the beans are harvested they are put to ferment for a couple of days. Actually it is yeast that starts to grow on the white, causing a row of chemical changes (very interesting, read more about that here. On the second day the actual bean dies - means it cannot work as a seed and grow a tree anymore. The cocoa flavour and color is developed and the pulp eventually liquifies and drains away. At some farms fermentation is processed in the sun and at some in big tubs, beneath leaves to raise the temperature.
No 4: Raw or roast?
The fermented beans are then roasted or at least dried. Here peoples opinion splits into two camps: the ones who believe in RAW beans - they contain more nutrition, flavour and other important and healthy stuff; and those who believe in roasted beans - just like coffee beans they need to be roasted to develope their flavour, among other things. I have not figured out which is better or true, but the cacao liquor I bought states it is raw...
No 5: Peeling paper peel
When the beans are dry, they have a paper-like peel around them. One way to seperate them is to peel one by one, by hand. But since the industry is quite large, they beans are crushed and the peel is easily removed with a big fan. The crushed beans are sold under the name nibs.
No 6: Extract the components
The beans, or the nibs, are ground - pressed - into a paste called liquor. The cacao (or cocoa?) liquor contains about 50% fat, which also can be extracted: cacao butter. The dry mass is ground into cacao powder.
No 7: In the chocolate factory!
Cacao liquor and sugar are the main ingredients for making chocolate. Other components can be: milk (for milk chocolate), vanilla and quite often soy lecithin for getting the smooth consistence. And then of course chocolate often is flavoured with salt, nuts, berries or fruit.
The ingredients are mixed and brought to heat, just enough to make the butter melt. The liquid is refined and conched in a process where a sort of "mill in a pot" makes all small pieces disappear: the human tounge can feel particles in sizes up to 30 micrometers. This takes between 10 and 36 hours and the besides the texture, the flavours of the chocolate also are developed a bit further.
No 8: Silky, smooth, shiny and scrumptious
This is the last step before pouring the liquid chocolate into molds (and getting ready for packaging and transport to the store if made industrially) and it is probably on of the most important steps: TEMPERING. The cacao butter is what makes the chocolate solid, or melt, and how the butter molecules are combined in the solid state affects the look, taste and feel of the chocolate. If you want to read about temperature, the six different states - or forms - cacao butter can appear in, go to this page by The Cooking Geek - very educational.
In short terms it is the fifth form we want the chocolate to end up in, to get that characteristic shine and snap. So the mixture is brought to heat again (although never above 50°C, that would make the chocolate split) loosening all chemical bonds, then letting it cool just enough to let the fifth form crystalize - unfortunately, that is the same temperature the fourth form crystalized as well, and we don't want that one. Therefore it is brought up to heat again, but only just enough to loosen the fourth form and not the fifth form. How clever!
When cooled down the butter molecules are perfectly aligned, the chocolate has a nice surface, it is solid in room temperature, "snaps" when you break it and melts in your mouth. In factories, machines do this process but professional pastry chefs do it by hand - which of course you also can, at home!
I hope you enjoyed reading! This what I call "kitchen chemistry", which is certainly more interesting than the chemistry class we had in school - although it is basically the same!
In next post I will explain chocolate types, cocoa solids and the classification for them. I will also show my first atempts to make chocolate (almost) from scratch and how to temper chocolate in you own kitchen at home!
Happy weekend! /agnes elisabeth
