I Know More About Chocolate Than You Do (I Think)

Last week I attended a class on chocolate that I had been anticipating for a while. This class didn’t involve any actually cooking but it did involve a lot of tasting and some listening. When all was said and done I left class with a full plate of chocolate in my belly and some extra chocolate knowledge in my head.

Since almost everyone likes chocolate I thought I’d use this space today to share some tidbits from class that I thought were interesting/illuminating.

• Montezuma drank 40 cups of chocolate a day. He was also 6’4 and had very good skin. Drinking chocolate is good for your skin (it actually has lots of antioxidants.)

• Chocolate was first cultivated and consumed in Central America. When the Spaniards came (their skin wasn’t as good as people living in Central America because they didn’t drink chocolate) they had chocolate for the first time and loved it, shipping it back to Europe.

• Cacao was one of the first mass produced stimulants. Europeans drank chocolate as an upper before they started drinking coffee and tea.

• Chocolate is actually kind of good for you, at least in its less adulterated forms. The good fats in chocolate outweigh the bad fats. Chocolate with lots of cocoa butter is not good for you neither is milk chocolate.

• When you look at a quality chocolate bar and its label reads X% Cacao, that number is the actual percentage of cacao in the bar, the rest is sugar. Higher percentages mean more bitter chocolate.

• Chocolate has vintages! You don’t generally eat vintage chocolate but some years of cacao crops yield better cacao than others.

• You can taste fruit flavors when tasting chocolate. This is actually one of the most interesting things I learned in class. The reason we most often associate flavor expressions with fruit is evolutionary. Monkeys had to train their senses to eat the ripest and best fruit and thus had great memories for fruit flavors. We’ve kept this trait and thus when we taste and smell things the easiest comparisons for us to make are to fruit.

• The best way to actually experience this is to taste different brands of chocolate with the same percentage of cacao. If you let the chocolate melt on your tongue you can actually train yourself to taste some of the differences.

• Chocolate also has tannins. You may be asking, what exactly are tannins? The best way for me to explain it to you is that tannins are a manifestation of polyphenol and are the sort of bitter dry taste that comes into your mouth when you eat or drink things with tannins in them. When you eat something, you continue to taste it once it’s out of your mouth. Tannins come in and basically shut off the taste buds. That’s why when we age fine wines to mellow the tannins we do it so that we can actually fully taste our wine.

• Also in relation to wine… Cacao reproduces sexually while grape vines are reproduced through grafting. When you drink pinot noir from California you know that it’s genetically identical to pinot noir from France or South Africa or Australia. The differences we taste are literally due to the environment in which that particular pinot noir grape was raised in. Since Cacao goes through sexual reproduction every cacao plant is different and when we try to compare cacao from different regions its really impossible to tell whether the cacao is different because of its regionality or because its just different genetically. (That’s why buying chocolate because of its region is not worthwhile, Sao Tome can have both good and bad cacao plants, you should just buy good chocolate.)

• Finally, you can actually make chocolate at home. It’s supposedly not that difficult. All you need is cocoa nibs, a spice mill or coffee grinder, and a way of taking temperature. To make the chocolate you just throw the cocoa nibs into a spice mill with the desired amount of sugar or flavorings. The speed of the mill will actually melt the nibs into chocolate. To temper the chocolate and give it a sheen, place it into a pot and bring the temperature to 110, lower it to 86 and then bring it back up to the 89-92 range and pour into a mold. It will solidify into homemade chocolate!

Hope this was helpful…

If you’re really interested in chocolate, go visit the Chocolate Show November 9-11. I went last year and it was chocolate-y and fantastic, and for $28 dollars a ticket, quite a bargain. So yeah, if you like chocolate make sure not to miss it.