27 Mar For the Delight of Chocolate
In the world of eating, we could talk a lot about comfort foods: mashed potatoes and gravy with slow-cooked, fall-apart meat, fresh baked bread, hot with melted butter, taking vegetables from planting to table, fresh fruit from orchard stands in the fall, and authentic dishes and spice combinations from cultures around the world. And, in the realm of dessert, perhaps no sweet treat is more enjoyed than chocolate.
From a classic, rich chocolate cake to chocolate dipped strawberries, and melt-in-your-mouth Lindt truffles to a soft, homemade chocolate chip cookie, there’s nothing quite like it. It gives all the feels, and gives a lot of us a culinary experience we want to have again and again.
Today we go and buy neatly packaged chocolate bars at the grocery store (maybe guiltily putting them in our purse for clandestine consuming), purchase boxes of our favorites for gifts, buy the richest hot chocolate mixes for cold winter nights around the fire, or get unsweetened blocks of it to use in baking. Later, sugar or honey were added to give it a sweeter flavor, and what we’ve done with cocoa beans has continued to change over time: adding cocoa butter (fat that is taken from the cocoa bean) back into the chocolate liquor to yield firm chocolate that you can mold into various shapes, adding milk powder in to create milk chocolate, and conching, a machine that was invented by Rodolphe Lindt in the 1800s.
However how do we get it from the beginning? It derives from the cacao tree, where seeds grow in pods. The seeds are taken out of the pods and then undergo a fermentation process when they are fully ripe. Once that is finished, they are roasted, and cocoa nibs are separated from the seed husks. Those nibs are then ground and ultimately liquefied into what we pertain to as chocolate liquor– which is, at its basic, fundamental level, pure chocolate.
That chocolate liquor is then blended with sugars and cocoa butter, to varying degrees, yielding the different kinds of chocolate bars we buy in the stores. White chocolate isn’t made with any of the chocolate liquor, though; in that case, the only component that comes from the cocoa bean is the extracted cocoa butter, or fat, that is then combined with other factors to make something yummy and sweet.
One of these is culinary tours, opportunities for foodies to expand their knowledge about different cooking techniques, combining new flavors, or making signature dishes and desserts. If this sounds like something you’d enjoy, call us today to find out more information. You just might end up learning some new things to do with chocolate that will revolutionize your dinner parties for the coming year!
(The following source presented information for this article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate).