Chocolate Rain II
This weekend your dearest Foodistory writers have been incredibly busy. When Cesar is not in the kitchen in Bar Berta. You can find him preparing a 44 person multi course catering for his sister’s birthday and I am his companion. On Friday I am on mise-en-place duty and on Saturday I manage the front of house with Cesar as chef de cuisine. A busy weekend with the pans and pots clinging and the flames spitting and a small side eye to an exciting start of the new Formula 1 season.
In the previous part of Chocolate Rain we dove deep into the chocolate. Chocolate like it’s taste has a rich history with a large amount of healthy symbolism attached to it. Ancient tribes used it to commemorate the dead. The conquistadors merely saw it as a good way to energise their armies. Interestingly enough to my surprise, dark chocolate has large amounts of caffeine. 40 gram of 70% pure chocolate equals a shot of espresso. I always made a strong chocolate milk in the evening which resulted in a staring contest with my ceiling later that night.
When chocolate reached Europe it became, like many colonial products, a status symbol for the aristocrats. Opulent chocolate houses were opened in wealthy European cities, where the upper class could enjoy a cup of hot chocolate. The aristocrats believed, like the Mayans, that the chocolate had healing powers.
For the Europeans only the rich had access to this precious fruit. In 2023 its hard to image not eating chocolate, it’s so widely available and common. So let’s continue on the food(t) that we left off, how did chocolate become available to the masses?
The Factors
In the 1800s, the world witnessed a significant increase in the consumption of chocolate and sugar. This was a time when sugar prices decreased, and technological advancements in the chocolate production process were made.
The importance of sugar to the production of chocolate cannot be overstated. Sugar has always been a major ingredient in chocolate, and the decrease in its price allowed for greater accessibility to chocolate for the masses. With sugar becoming more affordable, people from all walks of life were able to afford chocolate, which led to its increased popularity.
But it wasn't just the decrease in sugar prices that contributed to the spread of chocolate. Several individuals, including inventors and entrepreneurs, played a crucial role in making chocolate production more efficient and cost-effective. They invented new machines and methods that made it easier to produce chocolate and distribute it to a wider audience. Their innovations helped shape the chocolate industry as we know it today.
Dutching
As with all things (except football/soccer); the Dutch always win. Because for the true innovation in chocolate we need to look no further than Dutch chemist Coenraad Van Houten.
He basically invented an hydraulic press that could grind chocolate finely and in process removing large amounts of cocoa butter. Van Houten then used alkaline salts to raise the pH levels thus improving the taste to the more European palette because by raising the pH levels it got rid of the acidity in cocoa. The result of the Dutching is a more malleable and creamier product that can be used to make other chocolate products.
Swiss Prowess
Another man who helped refine chocolate from a coarse and gritty product to a smooth consistency was Switzerland’s very own Rudolph Lindt. If you have ever visited Switzerland, you know how nationalistic the Swiss are. If there isn’t a big plus symbol on a product it’s no good. The same goes for Lindt chocolate, if you visit the top of a mountain they will bother you endlessly with Lindt chocolate. Anyway, what Mr. Lindt did was invent a technique called conching.
In the previous part I explained to you that I was experimenting with chocolate and that I thought that you could just heat chocolate and pour it into a mold. Lindt’s technique of constantly heating, cooling and agitating chocolate over a period of 3 days gave it signature crunch and flavour that we all know and love.
Now you may assume that Rudolph Lindt was a freaking genius but in reality he just forgot to turn the machine off so the chocolate kept mixing and mixing and mixing until all the crystals were aligned for maximum smoothness and so Swiss chocolate was born.
Here we are, with the efforts from Van Houten en Lindt. We went from a gritty product to something that could be moulded and formed. Chocolate started to evolve in the hands of chemistry Instead of drinking chocolate it could be molded into bite sized pieces.
One of the first companies who started leveraring the molding technique was J.S. Fry & Sons. They started molding chocolate into a bar for commercial use and were extremely successful with their practice.
However the chocolate was still quite strong until a certain Nestlé came into the picture with a new take on tradition: milk chocolate
Milk Chocolate
Today, milk chocolate is considered just chocolate, and with the merging of these two concepts into one, a stark difference between the past and the present is established. What was once an original idea is now the accepted norm, and what was previously considered novel is now popular convention. What was originally a humble invention is now the leading product of the entire chocolate industry.
Although milk chocolate was never expected to give rise to the largest corporations of the past century or replace the standard so quickly, it has become a revolutionary product. It was created as a commodity hardly related to candy at all, and its invention was due to nothing more than the development of powdered milk. This revolutionary good was created by Henri Nestlé, who also became the unanticipated inventor of the world’s first milk chocolate bar. As such, the sweet, luscious treats that have now redefined chocolate itself, owe their existence to a mere coincidence, a matter of excellent fortune, and the combined efforts of a Swiss nutritionist and his neighbor candle-maker.
It all started in Vevey, Switzerland, where a pharmacist, in the hopes of saving the life of his neighbor’s child, put together a mixture of “cow’s milk, wheat flour, and sugar” which he referred to as “Farine lactée”.
That pharmacist was Henri Nestle. His neigbour Daniel Peter saw the healing power that the milk product had on his child who was saved from death and was inspired to create an milk product himself. Peter and Henri fixed their gaze on chocolate for its health benefits and energy The two devised a simple plan using Nestlé’s condensed milk and drying the mixture before adding the necessary cocoa butter. This method not only produced creamy milk chocolate bars without the original bitterness, but it also enabled manufacturers to reduce the proportion of cocoa in their goods. This could not be possible without earlier work on chocolate production by Van Houten and Lindt by optimising cocao butter for production purposes
Quick Timeline
Chocolate started from the Americas as an indigenous fruit and later was used as a drink by the Aztecs and Mayans. Europeans came and took the product and used it as a status symbol but the taste was not suited for the European palette. Chemists started working on chocolate. Van Houten created “Dutch” cocoa by milling it and treating it with alkaline salts. Lindt invented conching by mixing and agitating chocolate thus creating Swiss Chocolate and another Swiss person added milk to chocolate to create a pleasant taste. So in my mind the only missing is Belgian chocolate.
The Belgians
Well the only thing that makes Belgian Chocolate special is a Belgian law that all chocolate needs to be at least 35% cacao. This ensures that the main fat source is chocolate and not cheap fillers. The other part that makes Belgian Chocolate.. well Belgian, is that it came from Belgian owned Congo. Belgian quickly rose to become the main exporter of cocoa in Europe. Brands like Cote D’Or came from this era of Belgian colonialism
Where Belgian Chocolate shines is through its small and independent chocolatiers. The chocolatiers in Belgium prefer to use traditional methods of creating chocolate over mass production. They are famous for its creation of praline and through the country you can find around 2.000 independent chocolatiers ranging from humble towns to large and prestigious ones in Brussels like Neuhaus founded in 1870.
Centuries later and chocolate is as conventional as the fruit section in any store. It can be eaten at any moment of the day, although sometimes I wish it was as special as it was to our American ancestors. As with many things people forget it’s true form as a fruit. That why I consider my bar of chocolate, a piece of fruit. Full of vitamins and a cure to many things uncertain in life.