Ómós Digest #134: Chocolate
Unwrapping bean-to-bar with Cúán Greene.
A recent trip to Seville got me thinking more deeply about chocolate. This commodity derives from the cacao pod, from trees that thrive in continents like Africa and South America, but whose most precious varieties and beans have seen a recent upturn in demand amongst elite European chocolate makers. Although the variety of the bean is not to be overlooked, I’ve learned that chocolate’s quality is vastly dependent on the treatment of the cacao beans post-harvest, and thus the skill of the chocolate maker. If this is so, is cacao as relevant in a city like Glasgow or Belfast as it might be in the Amazon?
Chocolate is an extraordinary product. Long regarded as an aphrodisiac, it’s still to this day adorned as the food of love. Over the years, I have become a chocolate addict, particularly bean-to-bar dark chocolate - cacao’s truest expression of confectionery. It’s full of complex, delicious and fascinating flavours that I am only now learning to discover more about. It is one of the few foods that is both fermented and roasted, creating unparalleled flavour profiles that are alive and joyously unpredictable. I don’t want to go too deep into the origin of chocolate in this article, as there’s an enormous amount to read, watch, and listen to on the subject already, but what has fascinated me about chocolate is how its production is quite different from other revered products, like say wine.
There’s a saying that ‘wine is made in the field’. To make good wine, you need great growing practices. A failure to grow healthy crops will result in bad wine. One of the primary reasons for this is that wine is primarily just grape juice that has been fermented, with little to no additives. As such, its quality is dependent on the quality of the grape and thus reliant on its terroir. It’s largely accepted that grapes are picked and processed (into must) as soon as possible to prevent any risk of damage or rot, and that the strained juice begins fermentation soon after that. The best wines can be traced back to the very best single vineyards. The soil, microclimate, sun exposure, access to water... everything is perfectly balanced for the selected variety of grape, making these sites worthy of having their own name on the front label. With cacao, this is not the case. Firstly, when you see chocolate made using cacao from a single origin, for example Ecuador, it might be that the cacao is sourced from a single farm, but that’s rare. There are no labelling regulations to enforce it. Subsequently, the cacao in chocolate can be sourced from all four corners of the country. And while Ecuador might share similar climates from one province to the next, the soil and microclimate can vary enormously, ultimately causing wildly varied results and inconsistencies. Another key difference with cacao, and even more intricate than with coffee roasting, is the processing of cacao into chocolate. This process is dependent on the skill of the chocolate maker.
“Any large company is going to have different priorities than a small one, and for industrial chocolate, the priorities are consistency and low cost. Industrial chocolate may seem cheap but we are paying the cost in other ways. Each bar is full of unnecessary and harmful fats, e-numbers and additives – with often less than 20% cacao content.” - Barebones.
Cacao was brought to Spain via Seville in the mid-16th century. The city is responsible for today’s world chocolate obsession. It’s largely built off the riches of South America and the exploitation and exportation of the cacao bean. It’s no secret that when Spanish conquistadors reached what they thought were the Indies, they plundered South America in order to enrich Spain. Seville is a city of great mercantile activity and an important commercial port, built on the banks of The Guadalquivir River (the only major navigable river in Spain). Today the city boasts grand Mudéjar architecture, built off the back of imperialism, when Castilians dominated the globe’s land and seas for almost 800 years.
When the Spanish first arrived to the ‘New World’, they did not take to cacao like one might expect. Then cacao was served as a drink - ambient and seasoned with a melancholy of spices, scorched chillies, herbs and less appetising ingredients such as eels and even human blood... It was bitter, granular and unsweetened. It was considered a spiritual drink for cultural practices. This health elixir, known as xocoatl, often paired with sacrifice, was a custom that the Olmecs (early adopters of the bean) appeared quite fond of. So foreign tasting was this beverage, however, that early colonisers believed it seemed more a drink for pigs, much to the amusement of the Maya and Aztec Mesoamericans.
For centuries after its arrival to Spain via Seville, cacao was treated as a drink sweetened with cane sugar, honey and flavoured with vanilla. It was in the early 19th century, when Dutch chocolate maker Casparus Johannes van Houten developed the method of removing fat from roasted cocoa beans by hydraulic press around 1828, forming the basis for cocoa powder. This fat is now known as cocoa butter. For the first time in history, when the butter and cacao powder were mixed, they formed an emulsion, or what we now know today as chocolate. Other than the process, what's significant here are the ingredients. Traditionally, all you need to make chocolate is the roasted nib of cacao and sugar to sweeten it. This is how chocolate was made for decades. But there’s a familiar turn to this story. Commercialisation. The industrial revolution, by way of steam made cacao grinding far less laborious. Technological innovations meant chocolate could be made much more cheaply. Chocolate companies become mass national enterprises and in the 19th and 20th centuries, predictably in order make chocolate accessible, the quality of chocolate and percentage of cacao mass reduced significantly, to include ingredients like emulsifiers such as lecithin, flavour enhancers (like artificial vanillin), vanilla, oils, and starches - and in extreme cases brick dust and led.
Although today, metal and mortar have thankfully been removed, artificial flavour enhancers, emulsifiers and oils largely remain with with often less than 20% cacao content. Luckily, in the last two decades, the emergence of small independent chocolate companies known as craft chocolate makers, producing bean-to-bar chocolate and honouring traditional and ethical chocolate production, have sprung up across the world. These craft or micro chocolate makers go direct to source, buying specialty cacao and paying far beyond the global market fair trade price. Such chocolate makers turn the cacao into chocolate, unlike a chocolatier (which we may be more familiar with thanks to advertising) who turns the chocolate into confectionery. The process from bean-to-bar is a long and skilled endeavour. A labour of love, that involves precision and dedication. In these micro companies, many of the steps are done by hand, to ensure consistency and standard. Below I have broken down the process step-by-step.
”Paying for the worth of the cacao is so important in guaranteeing high-quality crops, creating a sustainable future for the farm and building a mutually beneficial relationship with the farmers. It’s not magic – an incredible chocolate bar starts with an incredible farmer.” – Barebones.