As the worlds appetite for chocolate increased, manufacturing
methods improved to meet the growing demand. Turning cocoa beans into edible
chocolate is a long and complicated process which begins on the plantations.
Cocao trees start producing when they are three to five years old. The beans
grow in spindle shaped pods which only from on the trunk and thickest branches
of the trees. The pods are harvested twice a year and split open at once,
so the beans can be scooped out and left to dry in the sun. An average tree
only yields one or tow pounds of dried beans a year, since the beans lose
50 per cent of their weight drying.
Once dry the beans are roasted to bring out their flavour
and then cracked so their protective shells and husks can be removed, leaving
the kernels called nibs. The nibs are then ground, which melts the cocoa butter
in the nibs, leaving a thick paste called chocolate liquor. This
liquor, cooled and hardened is unsweetened cooking chocolate. If the liquor
is then pressed more cocoa butter is released. The remaining hard mass is
ground to powder which becomes cocoa. In England cocoa powder is mixed with
powdered milk and sold as drinking chocolate.
To form the sweetened chocolate, extra cocoa butter is added
to the liquor, along with sugar and flavouring. Milk chocolate now made with
dried milk was originally created and made with condensed milk in. We owe
the taste and texture of chocolate as we now know it to Rodolphe Lindt. Until
1880, all eating chocolate had a rough grainy texture. In that year Lindt
increased the amount of cocoa butter in his chocolate recipe and mixed the
enriched liquor repeatedly over several days. The result of this was smooth
chocolate so popular today.
A good chocolate is shiny brown, breaks cleanly and is free
from lumps, tiny burst bubbles and white specks. It melts on the tongue
like butter and has a true aroma of chocolate rather than of cocoa powder
and it is neither greasy or sticky. The more cocoa butter it contains
the more softer and creamier the chocolate is. The less it contains the
harder and more brittle it becomes. The more bitter the chocolate is,
the more flavour it has. The finest chocolate always contains a high proportion
of cocoa butter, on average 35 per cent, but sometimes as much as 50 per
cent. In inferior types, palm or vegetable oils and shortenings are substituted.