36.3 From cocoa bean to chocolate

In the factory

Chocolate making in North America began in Massachusetts in 1765.

The beans go through these steps:

• Cleaning. Magnets pull out bits of metal, and sand, dust and other dirt are taken away.
• Roasting. Some of the bean's starch turns into dextrins, which makes the flavor better.
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• Grinding. The beans are cracked and ground so finely that they become a liquid. This liquid is called chocolate liquor.
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• Pressing. Hydraulic presses squeeze out cocoa butter. The fat falls from 55% to about 10% to 24%, or lower, and what is left is a solid block called press cake.
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• Making cocoa. The press cake is broken up, ground to powder, cooled and sifted. That is cocoa powder. Bakeries mostly use cocoa with a low fat content.
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• Conching. Chocolate gets one more refining step, which makes it smoother. It is kept at 55–65°C (131–149°F) while it runs. Sugar and protein join to form amino sugars, and the paste gives off acids and moisture.
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The kinds of chocolate

Real chocolate contains cocoa butter. The main kinds, from the most cocoa liquor to the least, are:

• unsweetened
• dark
• milk
• white

Inside the dark family, the names follow sugar:

• Sweet chocolate has the most sugar, sometimes nearly as much as the liquor and butter together, in the range of 45% to 55%.
• Semi-sweet has less sugar than sweet and is often used in cooking. "Dark" usually means semi-sweet.
• Bittersweet has less sugar and more liquor again. "Extra dark" usually means bittersweet. In baking, semi-sweet and bittersweet can often stand in for each other, and both are sometimes sold as couverture.

The higher the cocoa percentage, the less sweet the chocolate. For fillings, cooks often choose chocolates with more flavor, from 60% to 99% cocoa.

What the label means

Cocoa and chocolate have legal definitions, set out in food regulations and enforced by food inspectors.

• Cocoa butter must be the only fat. Chocolate may not contain vegetable fats or oils.
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• Chocolate must contain chocolate liquor.
• Only sweeteners on the approved list are allowed. Artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sucralose and acesulfame potassium, and sugar alcohols such as sorbitol and maltitol, are not.
• Milk and milk ingredients, emulsifiers, and flavors such as vanilla are allowed.
• A product made with a forbidden ingredient cannot be sold as chocolate. It needs a name such as "candy".
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• Lecithin, the most common emulsifier, may make up no more than 1% of chocolate. Most of it comes from soy, both GMO and non-GMO, so read the package if the source matters to you. see chapter 7: Chocolate that flows

Cocoa

Cocoa powder comes in two styles, natural-process and Dutch-process. They are treated differently, and they differ in how well they mix into liquid, in color and in flavor.

In most recipes, 1 ounce of unsweetened chocolate can be replaced with 3 tablespoons of cocoa plus 1 tablespoon of fat.

Hot chocolate and cocoa

Both drinks are made the same way.

• Heat the chocolate or cocoa with sugar, a pinch of salt and a little water, stirring.
• Let it boil gently for 2 minutes.
• Add the milk and bring it up to serving heat.
• Just before you serve it, whip it with a rotary beater until froth covers the top.

A cup of cocoa takes five ingredients.

• 1 tbsp. cocoa
• 1 tbsp. sugar
• a dash of salt
• ¼ cup water
• ¾ cup milk

After the first boil, you can finish heating it over a double boiler, which takes 10 to 15 minutes.

A good cup meets several marks.

• evenly blended
• no skin on top and nothing settled at the bottom
• a clear taste of chocolate
• a color and flavor that suit the kind of cocoa used
• body, about as thick as thin cream