North Americans eat 4.5 kilograms of it apiece per year. The Swiss, Belgians, Austrians and others eat even more. And given unlimited resources and no worries about looking like a blimp, I’d be happy to eat even more than that.
“It” is chocolate, and most people agree with taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, who labelled the cacao plant “Theobroma cacao”–“Theobroma” is Latin for “food of the gods.”
That’s certainly what the Aztecs considered it to be. When Hernan Cortes arrived at the court of the Aztec Emperor Montezuma II in 1519, he discovered Montezuma drank 50 golden goblets a day of a cold, bitter drink called chocolatl (or xocoatl), made from the ground beans of the cacao plant, mixed with water, maize and spices. According to the Aztecs, chocolatl was brought down from the Garden of Life by the great god Quetzalcoatl as consolation to humans for having to live on Earth. In the afterlife, it was supposedly served perpetually.
Montezuma drank chocolatl in great quantities not only to prove his near-divinity but as a kind of conspicuous consumption: cacao beans were also currency. With 10 you could buy a rabbit; with 100 you could buy a slave. This interested Hernan Cortes, who, in the process of destroying the Aztec empire, cultivated this “money tree” in earnest and also sent back to Spain three chests of cacao beans and the recipe for chocolatl, more as a curiosity than anything else (although he did make oblique reference to its reputation for being an aphrodisiac).
Back in Spain they didn’t much like the bitter drink, until someone added sugar. Then it took off big-time and spread across Europe ahead of either coffee or tea.
It wasn’t until 1828 that C. J. van Houten of Holland, concerned about the fat in chocolate (like many a chocolate lover since) pressed the cocoa butter out it and added alkali to the remaining powder. The result has been known, ever since, as “Dutch cocoa.”
But for every action there’s a reaction, as they say in physics. Someone added powdered sugar to the cocoa butter that van Houten didn’t want, creating a new product: eating chocolate. In 1876 a Swiss firm added condensed milk, and milk chocolate was born.
Today there are hundreds of recipes for making chocolate, each jealously guarded by its manufacturer. But they all start with the bean of the cacao plant, a tropical evergreen tree. From South and Central America, it has been transplanted around the world, even though it’s actually very hard to grow. A young cacao tree can’t even survive full tropical sun: it has to grow in the shade of other plants, usually, in plantations, either rubber trees or banana trees, not only because they provide good shade, but because they also provide alternate sources of income should the cacao plants die, which happens frequently due to pests and disease.
After four or five years, each tree begins producing seeds, or beans, in no more than about 30 leathery-shelled seedpods about half the size of a football, each of which contains between 20 to 40 beans. The pods are harvested twice a year by machete-wielding workers. Then they’re split open (the pods, not the workers) and the beans, still covered with pulp, are piled up and covered with banana leaves or palm fronds. There in the dark the beans ferment: without fermentation, the chocolate will never taste right.
In fact, beginning with harvesting, every step of the process has an impact on the flavor of the final product. Pods must be harvested when they’re neither overripe nor underripe, and beans must also be fermented just the right amount: over-fermentation is just as bad no fermentation. Then the beans are dried before being packed for shipment.
Chocolate factories are huge, industrial places. (Even if you only buy expensive hand-made chocolates, the original processing is done in one of these huge plants.) First the beans are dumped into a giant cleaner that blows them free dirt and debris. Then they’re blended according to the end user’s preferences, and roasted. (Cacao beans, like coffee beans, come in a number of quality levels. The best beans, Criollo, are the ones Montezuma used, but they’re expensive because the plant they come from is harder to cultivate. Most chocolate is made from the lower-grade Forastero beans. An intermediate grade is called Trinitario.)
After roasting, the beans are “winnowed,” split open so that the unwanted shells fall out one side and the “nib” on the other. The nib is ground to make chocolate liquor, also known as bitter, baker’s or baking chocolate. It’s more than 50 percent fat (cocoa butter), which is why it liquefies easily at just 32 degrees Celsius (which, in turn, is why chocolate melts in your hands).
Chocolate liquor, sugar, cocoa butter and (if it’s milk chocolate) milk solids are then blended according to the manufacturer’s recipe. In general, “sweet ” chocolate consists of a minimum of 15 percent liquor mixed with sugar and cocoa butter. When the amount of liquor is greater than 35 percent, the result is bittersweet chocolate; a combination of at least 12 percent dry whole milk solids, sugar, cocoa butter and at least 10 percent liquor produces milk chocolate.
The ingredients are thoroughly blended and then crushed four times in huge five-roller refiners that reduce the mixture’s particles to microscopic fineness, giving chocolate its smooth texture. Then it’ “conched,” rolled over and over against itself at high temperatures (54 to 71 degrees Celsius) while being exposed to a blast of fresh air. (This happens in enormous circular machines which once resembled conch shells–hence the name.) This causes further complex chemical changes that develop the flavor.
Vanilla or other flavors may be added at this point, along with lecithin, which helps make the chocolate flow better for molding purposes.
Manufacturers would love to be able to create chocolate synthetically, but it contains hundreds of substances and nobody knows which ones give it its flavor: there are probably 40 to 50 unique compounds involved. One substance it contains is theobromide, which is closely related to caffeine: like caffeine, it can be toxic, but only in huge quantities. (If you ate nothing else but chocolate, you might suffer theobromide poisoning. Or you might not. It’d be fun to try…)
There are a lot of myths about chocolate. It does not cause acne. Almost nobody is allergic to it. And chocolate liquor itself isn’t even bad for your teeth: it may even have properties that prevent plaque formation. (But of course, you’re eating lots of sugar, too.)
Today, chocolate is probably the world’s favorite flavor. I know it’s mine. And I hope the Aztecs were right about chocolate being served perpetually in the afterlife.
That sounds like heaven to me!
