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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Indulge/  Core ingredient: Chocolate, the simple, sweet joy
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Core ingredient: Chocolate, the simple, sweet joy

On chocolate’s journey from the equator to the world over

When chocolate is used in its base form (and not as candy), it is in all reality a spice like cumin or cinnamon, and there’s no reason why it cannot be used in savoury dishes. Photo: Bloomberg (Bloomberg )Premium
When chocolate is used in its base form (and not as candy), it is in all reality a spice like cumin or cinnamon, and there’s no reason why it cannot be used in savoury dishes. Photo: Bloomberg
(Bloomberg )

For the most obvious reasons, chocolate is quite the flavour of the month. From chocolate heart truffles to other undesirable anatomical parts moulded out of the chocolate, everything is being tried to get customers to use chocolate to woo their partners.

A cocoa pod goes through a long-winding journey to become a bar of chocolate. Theobroma cacao is a demanding tree. It will grow only within 20 degrees of the equator (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Indonesia, Brazil and Cameroon are some countries that fall in this belt), that too below 1,000ft in altitude. And this is just the beginning. It needs shade, it needs humidity and a temperature that doesn’t fall below 16 degrees Celsius. Eight countries produce 90% of the world’s cocoa. It doesn’t respond too well to farming and is susceptible to a host of pests that can wipe off entire plantations before you can consume your stash of duty-free chocos (assuming you don’t go through them in a day).

It’s worthwhile understanding how a tree product is transformed into this brown bar that gives you midnight cravings. The cocoa pod grows from the tree’s trunk. It is harvested by hand, a labour-intensive process, as a tree has pods in different stages of maturity. Each pod is then broken open, a bit like breaking open a coconut, to scoop out the sweet and mucilaginous pulp. The pulp encloses the beans or the seeds.

The flavour and aroma of chocolate is a result of the fermentation, drying and roasting of these seeds or beans. The cocoa beans from the pod are collected and fermented in a wooden crate, covered with banana leaves, for up to five days. This is the start of developing the chocolaty aroma, as we know it. After fermentation, the beans are dried, mostly under the sun, to remove all the moisture content and develop deeper reddish-brown colours and more intensified flavours. They are now ready to be packaged and sent to the finest chocolate makers in Europe and around the world. According to the World Cocoa Foundation’s report of 2014, the Netherlands is the largest processing country by volume, handling about 13% of global grindings. Though unsuitable for growing cocoa, Europe as a whole comprises nearly 40% of the processing market.

The beans on reaching their destinations are cleaned, checked for quality, and then roasted—the roasting process further building up on flavour. The roasted beans are cracked to obtain cacao nibs, which can be eaten as they are. Some roasters shell the beans and roast the cocoa nibs for a more pronounced flavour with higher theobromine content. Ground nibs are called chocolate liquor (not of the alcoholic variety) or cocoa paste, which contains cocoa butter and cocoa. Sugar, soy lecithin, cocoa butter and milk solids are added to this liquor in another complex process of conching and tempering, to form a bar of chocolate. Cocoa butter melts at body temperature and this is the reason a piece of milk chocolate melts in the mouth.

Nibs can also be hydraulic-pressed and separated into cocoa powder and cocoa butter, the latter being used in the cosmetic industry. If you are wondering where white chocolate fits into this scheme of things, it is a derivative of the above process, where the extracted cocoa butter is mixed with milk solids and sugar. It has no cocoa or the real chocolate whatsoever. Sorry to disappoint the white chocolate aficionados, but white chocolate is not even chocolate.

Fairtrade is another important word that has found its way into this chain of chocolate production, and rightfully so. It helps cocoa farmers in Ivory Coast and Ghana obtain a minimum price for their produce and invests in local communities to ensure a better life for the farmers and their families. The Fairtrade website lists brands that source fairtrade chocolate.

The chocolate thus obtained is revered as symbol of love (after diamonds, of course), a spice, an aphrodisiac, a gift sure to please most people and so much more. Chocolatiers and patisseries make the most obvious use of chocolate. Then there’s the mug of hot chocolate that you want to cosy up to on a cold evening. The cocoa used in this is called Dutch Processed (after Coenraad Van Houten who discovered this process). Here the cocoa nibs go through an alkalanizing stage before obtaining the powder, which gives a darker colour and softer flavour, and is more soluble for use in beverages.

Tejate (pronounced tay-ha-tay) is a lesser known ancient drink from rural Mexico. Corn, rosita-de-cacao (a flower unrelated to the cocoa tree), mamay seeds and cacao are ground in a local mill with water to make a viscous brown dough. This is kneaded vigorously with lots of water for a long period of time and the resultant curd-like foam is served as tejate, sweetened with a simple syrup as per the taste of the customer.

When chocolate is used in its base form (and not as candy), it is in all reality a spice like cumin or cinnamon, and there’s no reason why it cannot be used in savoury dishes. Mole poblano can be considered the national dish of Mexico, a sauce with over 20 ingredients going into it, of which chillies and chocolate are the stars. The sauce is usually poured over turkey. The dark rich mole sauce can be paired with quail or even as a topping over enchiladas. Cacao nibs can be sprinkled on top of a salad to provide a slight bitterness and crunch.

Chili and chocolate form quite the unusual pair that work together, be it in the mole sauce, or a Mexican hot chocolate or Lindt’s chili chocolate bar.

The other flavours that combine well with chocolate are coffee, mint, wasabi, cinnamon, citrus, etc. White chocolate, being sweeter, goes well with sea salt, pink peppercorn, wasabi, cranberry and caviar. The world-renowned chef of Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal, in 1999, discovered that white chocolate and caviar are quite the match made in culinary heaven. So the next time you cook or bake something with chocolate, get experimental and pair it with some more adventurous than vanilla!

As a child, I would receive one of those small bars of Amul chocolate each time my uncle and aunt made their weekly visit, and I would savour a square a day to make it last me the entire week. It was one of childhood’s simple joys. At this point, you may want to know that according to a consumer report, Amul dark chocolate has a higher cocoa solids percentage (14.31%) than Bournville dark (9.86%). This also brings us to this thing called chocolate snobbery that is on the rise. It is not different from wine or tea snobbery, where it is not enough to say, “Hey, I’m eating a bar of chocolate." It is infinitely preferable to say, “I’m eating organic, fairtrade, single plantation origin, 100% Madagascan, 99% cocoa, totally sugar free, made by an award winning artisanal chocolatier in Tuscany." The fact that chocolate snobs won’t dare to be seen with a simple bar of Dairy Milk in public or post a selfie eating one on Instagram shows that chocolate snobbery is serious stuff.

The luxury and romance that chocolate spells has ensured that it finds a place in cosmetics such as lotions and scrubs and spa treatments, and, yes, it does help that chocolate possesses antioxidant properties, comparable with red wine and green tea, if not more. Cocoa butter in chocolate has excellent moisturising properties. The pleasant feeling one experiences after eating chocolate can be attributed to its ability to boost endorphins and serotonin, both of which are also boosted when one is in love.

So it’s quite right that chocolate be the flavour of the season. It encompasses history, labour and chemistry to give you something that is good for you and makes you feel good. Go ahead and gift a bar of the best chocolate you can find to someone you love.

A doctor turned nutritional consultant, culinary trainer, food writer and columnist, who’s learning to grow the foods she likes to eat, Nandita Iyer lives in Bangalore and is mom to a five-year-old gourmand son.

Sources: WorldCocoaFoundation.org; https://consumeraffairs.nic.in/fairtrade.co.uk; Chocolate: A Global History (Sarah Moss, Alexander Badenoch); Chocolate: Food of the Gods (Alex Szogyi)

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Published: 27 Feb 2015, 06:04 PM IST
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