In places like the West Indies, the Ivory Coast, Indonesia and Brazil, cocoa trees have large pods that grow straight out of trunks some 20 metres high, fall to the ground and burst open, revealing dark glossy beans in a pink fleshy mass. Chocolate, of course, is primarily cocoa - or at least the good stuff is. 'Newsagent chocolate' adds sugar and artificial flavours to lower quality cocoa beans and mass production techniques, often leading to a higher fat product. It still tastes good, but a trip to a true chocolatier makes it pale in comparison - 'real' chocolate has dark tangs of spice, fruit and cocoa which simply melt in your mouth.
How is chocolate made?
Cocoa beans are fermented, dried, exported, roasted and cracked into nibs. When the nibs are cracked, over half their content is broken into a substance called cocoa butter and a bitter cocoa powder called cocoa mass is also pressed out. Together these are referred to as cocoa solids. Remember this phrase when you come to check on the quality of chocolate because it helps to check on good chocolate and poorer quality blended with vegetable fat, sugar and dairy products.
Cooking chocolate
Chocolate making is a very complicated subject and requires great skill and temperature control; it melts at one degree under body temperature, which makes handling tricky. To make chocolate easier to handle, manufacturers might mix in extra cocoa butter but they can also add up to 5% vegetable fat, which 'newsagent chocolate' often does. Vegetable fat affects mouth feel so quality chocolate makers prefer to use all cocoa butter.
At one time the term 'cooking chocolate' meant a rather cheap inferior product with a high percentage of vegetable fat that made it easier to melt. Nowadays those products have to be called chocolate coating, and the term cooking chocolate has taken on a completely different meaning, as many recipes advise the use of chocolate with a minimum 60% cocoa solids for the ultimate chocolate hit.
How to recognise good chocolate
Appearance: Chocolate should be flawless with a smooth texture and evenly coloured. Aroma: Chocolate should smell good as you unwrap it with a sweetly fragrant but not overpowering smell. You may detect vanilla, berry, caramel or roasted nuts. It's bad to have no smell at all. If you can't smell, you can't taste! Touch: Chocolate should feel silky and not sticky. It should just begin to yield to the warmth of your finger. Remember it is the only food that melts at body heat. Sound: Take a piece and break it. It should snap cleanly. If it crumbles, that's not good. Mouthfeel & texture: Most of our taste buds are on the front of the tongue and this is chocolate's biggest test! If it doesn't start to melt straight away, it is probably a sign of poor quality. The taste explosion should begin now - smooth, buttery and gently dissolving into a creamy liquid, filling the mouth with its complexity of flavours. It must not be grainy or 'gluey'. If it's 'waxy' or 'clacky', it sometimes means the cocoa butter has been replaced with vegetable fat. This is not real chocolate. Flavour: Essentially, chocolate is bittersweet, fruity and spicy with a good balance of acidity and should be subtle rather than overpowering. Aftertaste: You want the flavour to linger for several minutes (good chocolate can linger for up to 45 minutes) with a clean aftertaste and no residue.
Grading chocolate
Remember, just because a particular chocolate boasts lots of cocoa solids, it's not necessarily a guarantee of good chocolate. This depends on the quality and origin of the cocoa bean and the manufacturer's recipe and process.
As a good starting point though, do look to the percentage of cocoa solids:
The best quality will have 70%, but sometimes that is too high for handling and chefs and cooks prefer a slightly lower grade in the mid-60's. Very bitter chocolate can have up to 90%. Plain chocolate has to have a minimum of 40% (many have more) Milk chocolate (with added condensed milk and a lot more sugar) around 20 – 30%. White chocolate has no cocoa mass, just cocoa butter plus sugar and milk.
The best chocolate is called 'couverture' which can lead to confusion, so be careful because 'couverture' also means covering. The confusion can arise because, in the UK, covering is not a good chocolate and is often synthetic.
The very beginning...
The first solid confectionery chocolate was launched at a Birmingham trade fair in the mid 19th century but it was another fifty years before the first chocolate bar, made by the American Milton Hershey, was launched in 1900. Now of course, Birmingham (or rather its satellite town Bournville) is the home of Cadburys' chocolate factory.
Many of the great British chocolate families were great philanthropists and reformers including Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer and the Rowntree family in York.
High quality chocolate
Chocolatiers and chocolate shops including Ackermans, L'Artisan du Chocolat, Bean, Charbonnel et Walker, Chococo, Chouchoute, Divine Chocolate, Green & Black's, James Chocolates, Montezuma's, Pierre Marcolini, Prestat, Rococo and Valvona and Crolla all stock real chocolate.
Brands with a high cocoa solids content (60%+): Lindt Excellence, Valrhona, Green and Black (organic), The Chocolate Society and Godiva. Most of the leading supermarket chains sell excellent chocolate under their own brand names eg, Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury, Waitrose.
