Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

The rest of a chocolate bar is almost entirely sugar, so a “75%” chocolate bar will contain about 25 percent sugar. Thus, the higher the percentage number on the wrapper, the less sweet, more bitter, and more complex the flavor. Minor ingredients, usually present at less than one percent, may include vanilla or vanillin (an artificial flavor) and lecithin, an emulsifier obtained from soybeans that enhances the chocolate’s smoothness and creaminess.

Here, then, are the three major components of a quality chocolate bar, together with their aliases. My preferred names (and I wish the world would standardize upon them or their translations) are in boldface.

Chocolate liquor,cacao, cacao mass, cacao paste, or cacao liquor: By any of these names, this is the “raw material” of chocolate: ground-up cacao beans. It is often referred to as a paste or liquor because the friction of grinding melts the dense fat, and what comes out of the grinding machine is a glistening brown paste. The percentage of chocolate liquor in a bar is the percentage of actual chocolate.

Cocoa butteror cacao butter: The fat from the cacao bean. Butter is a more appealing word than fat , but don’t let it fool you into thinking it comes from a cow. Not even a brown cow.

Cocoa, cocoa solids, or cacao solids: The brown, solid parts of the cacao beans, ground to a powder.

That’s it. Just three main players in the cast of characters: whole chocolate, its fatty part, and its solid part. If the cocoa butter and the cocoa solids are separated, they can be combined with sugar in various proportions to make a variety of different “chocolates.”

“Unsweetened chocolate” or “baking chocolate” is simply chocolate liquor that has been poured into molds and solidified by cooling. The FDA requires that it contain between 50 percent and 58 percent fat, a leeway of 4 percent on either side of natural cacao beans’ fat content of 54 percent.

In addition to its 54 percent content of fat, chocolate liquor contains about 17 percent carbohydrates, 11 percent protein, 6 percent tannins, and 1.5 percent theobromine, an alkaloid similar to caffeine and a mild stimulant. It also contains less than 1 percent of phenylethylamine, a somewhat stronger stimulant similar to amphetamine, known in certain quarters as “speed” or “uppers.” Other minor ingredients of chocolate are polyphenols, antioxidants that counteract harmful free radicals; and anandamide, a close relative of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana. But note that the amounts of all these physiologically active and psychoactive chemicals are minuscule. Moreover, the “highs” they produce are short-lived and not very lofty.

Before a batch of molten chocolate is ready to be poured into bar molds, it is usually conched : kneaded and massaged in heated tanks for anywhere from two to six days while chemical changes take place, flavors develop, moisture and bad flavors such as acetic acid evaporate, and the sugar is reduced to smaller particles, leading to a smoother texture. (The word conch comes from the shell-shaped blades of the early conching machines.)

Chocolate factories can squeeze the fat out of whole cacao, thus separating the fat from the solids. The fat-free solids are commonly and quite properly called cocoa and are sold as such. The manufacturer often adds some of the separated fat to a chocolate-bar mix in order to adjust the smoothness and melting properties of the ultimate bar. Because this added cocoa butter changes the cacao’s natural 54-to-46 ratio of fat to solids, it is listed separately as an additive in the list of ingredients. The percentage number on the wrapper includes this added fat.

Note that I have not included milk, milk solids, or nonfat milk among the ingredients because (and I know I’ll get flak for this) I don’t consider milk chocolate to be chocolate. It’s just candy. Milk chocolate contains so much milk and sugar that its percentage of true cacao may be as low as 10 percent, the minimum required by the FDA for calling it “chocolate” on the label. Hershey’s milk chocolate contains about 11 percent cacao. By contrast, a serious dark chocolate bar will contain anywhere from 65 to 85 percent cacao.

The smoothness of a chocolate bar—one result of how much fat it contains—is a matter of national preference. In continental Europe, people like their chocolate very smooth, containing sugar particles no bigger than 80 millionths of an inch (2 microns), while the British prefer slightly gritty chocolate containing 400-millionths-of-an-inch (10 micron) sugar particles. Almost nobody likes the grittiness of chocolate containing solid particles bigger than 600 millionths of an inch (15 microns).

In 2003, as a result of squabbling among Belgium, England, France, and Germany with anxious input from Switzerland, the European Union ruled that up to 5% of the cocoa butter in chocolate may be replaced with other vegetable fats. That’s why many of the best European dark chocolate bars brag about their high cacao content by printing their percentage numbers in huge type on their wrappers.

If you’re truly interested in upping your snob quotient, taste as many serious dark chocolate bars as you can find (or afford; they’re not cheap). Use the percentage of chocolate liquor only as an initial indicator of how sweet or bitter you like your chocolate. Then try a variety of bars in that range to find your favorites in brittleness or “snap,” flavor, and mouth feel. Learn the cacao percentages and countries of origin of a few bars, and at every opportunity, talk about them in terms taken from a wine magazine (bouquet, fruit, finish, and so on). Use the word cacao (not cocoa) as often as possible, and you can be as good a chocolate snob as any of your friends.

MY CHOCOLATE HAD A SEIZURE AND I LOST MY TEMPER!

As a pastry chef, I know all the techniques for working with chocolate to prevent disasters such as my chocolate’s seizing or losing its temper, or being too hard or too soft for molding or piping, etc. From training and experience, I know all the exact temperatures and so on, but I would like to know more about how and why they work.

Chocolate is indeed a difficult material to work with, owing to its complex composition, mostly its content of several different fats.

As it arrives in the kitchen from your purveyor in the form of slabs or pastilles, it consists of microscopic particles of cocoa and sugar distributed throughout a sea of solidified fat or cocoa butter. It’s the fat that’s the main problem, because it consists of at least six different chemical compounds—different fats that have different crystallization temperatures—and you have to keep all but one of them from crystallizing. It’s a temperature juggling act called tempering. Table 7 shows what chocolatiers have to deal with.

In the table, the six different fats are listed, from bottom up, in order of increasing crystallization temperatures. What is a crystallization temperature? Consider the liquid called water. When we cool it down to 32°F (0°C), it crystallizes into what we call ice. But when we heat it above 32°F (0°C), the crystals melt into liquid. That magic temperature is both the crystallization temperature and the melting temperature of H 2O.

Similarly, the crystallization temperatures in the table are the approximate temperatures below which the fats crystallize into their own unique kinds of crystals and above which they melt into liquid. Of the six crystal forms ( polymorphs ), it is only number V that has exactly the properties we want in our chocolate: it’s glossy and, when solid, crisp and snappy when bitten into. But it will still melt in our mouths because our body temperature of 98.6°F (37°C) is a few degrees higher than its crystallization (or melting) temperature of 94°F (34°C).