By Laura Coffee, Marketing & Owner Services Manager
There is so much to say about chocolate.
Let’s start by exploring how chocolate is made. First, you’ll need to start by harvesting the cacao pods. They look almost like a cross between a star fruit and an acorn squash – a skinny football growing out of a tree trunk or branch. They start out green, slowly turning yellow, then red as they ripen. The pods have a fleshy outer layer and beans in the middle. After harvesting, the beans are taken out, covered up, and left to ferment. This process brings out the flavor that we know as chocolate. Without the fermentation step, cocoa is a very bitter food. Once the fermentation is complete, the beans are dried and roasted, the shells are removed, and the beans are chopped. That’s when you end up with something called cacao nibs.
Cacao nibs are similar in texture to a coffee bean, but when you chew on them, you can feel them get a little bit softer and smoother in your mouth. That’s because nibs still contain cocoa butter. They can be used as-is in things like smoothies and overnight oats, or processed further. The next step would be to grind the nibs, converting them into something called cocoa mass. Cocoa mass still has all the constituent parts of chocolate in it, and the most common way to use it is as chocolate liqueur, or melted cocoa mass. Chocolate or cocoa liqueur is simply ground cocoa nibs subjected to heat until they turn into a liquid. This substance is a blend of chocolate solids and chocolate fats. Chocolate solids are basically cocoa powder, the drier, finer part that’s left over after separation. Cocoa butter, on the other hand, is the fats. On its own, cocoa butter looks a lot like white chocolate or even a little like soap. There isn’t much of a scent. It’s not amazingly chocolatey. This is the part that makes chocolate feel smooth and melty in your mouth.
When chocolate is made into a candy or bar, there will typically be a blend of cocoa mass, cocoa liqueur, solids, and fats. The reason that’s done, especially in higher percentage bars, is to improve the texture. In a very dark chocolate bar, if you don’t add extra cocoa butter back into the bar, it will be chalky. That’s why baking chocolate has that stiff, dry, almost waxy texture to it – there’s no extra cocoa butter to make it smooth and delightful like in a candy bar. So, what exactly does it mean when you see 45%, 70%, or 85% on a bar of chocolate? Simple, the percentage refers to the total amount of cocoa mass in the bar. That number is a blend of the cocoa liqueur, the cocoa butter, and the cocoa solids. You can have any mixture of those ingredients, and that’s what will shape the flavor and texture of the finished product.
Of course, there’s more to the flavor and texture in your favorite bar than a single number. Most chocolates over 55% are considered dark, but there is so much variability in that dark range, from 55 to 100, depending on the type of sugar that’s added, the amount of cocoa butter that’s blended in, and whether there is milk included or not. For example, if a bar is 45% cocoa, the other 55% is typically made up of milk and sugar, possibly with additional flavorings (like vanilla). That’s why milk chocolate is so much sweeter and often creamier than dark chocolate – there’s a higher percentage of other ingredients in the bar. Depending on the blend, at 55% you could have a bar that tastes like milk chocolate even though it’s technically dark. Typically, though, if you want a sweet bar with added milk, you’re going to have to include fewer cocoa solids, and that’s why milk chocolates tend to be a lower percentage.
Besides adding extra cocoa butter to get a smoother texture or extra cocoa solids to get more of that intense caffeinated kick, another thing you can do when making chocolate is to treat the cocoa mass a little bit differently. A good example is stone-ground chocolate. The best way that I can describe this is instead of making the cocoa mass as fine as possible and then melting it into the cocoa liqueur, what they’re doing is leaving a portion of those nibs coarse and mixing them back in. Then there will be tiny little cornmeal-sized particles of cocoa nibs in the finished chocolate, giving it a unique texture. Many people would describe it as grainy (but not in a bad way). However, once it hits the heat of your mouth and you begin chewing, it does soften up and melt into a smooth, chocolaty texture. Stone ground chocolate also has more of a fruity kind of fermented flavor (like you’d get from a cocoa nib) because there’s more of that raw product in the mix.
From harvest to fermentation, drying and roasting to grinding and tempering, there are many steps between chocolate and cacao. We’re lucky to carry many versions of that finished product at the Co-op, from sustainability-conscious brands like Alter Eco, Theo, Hu, Equal Exchange, Tony’s Chocolonely, and more besides. While we’ve barely scratched the surface of all there is to know about chocolate, I hope this little primer will bring you an extra level of appreciation as you savor your favorite bite or bar!
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