With the advent and popularity of food programming on television the average consumer is aware of the history and reality of foods they eat. Most know now that in America we don’t actually get real cantaloupe, instead it’s a subspecies of those found in Europe and that originally came from India and Africa. Speaking of India, that’s where you can get a wide variety of mangos. All of which are not available in the US. Back to chocolate though, because who cares about fruits when you’ve got chocolate to devour.
Today’s chocolate is usually served up smooth with a very silky mouth feel, but that’s not how chocolate always was. Up until 1879 chocolate had a very grainy texture and was most often enjoyed as a beverage. Then along came Rudolphe Lindt who forgot to turn off a piece of machinery when he left for the weekend. He returned and found the machine still chugging along and the chocolate inside was quite different.
Clay Gordon, longtime chocolate critic (how about that for an awesome job?), got a chance to explore the difference the conching process makes to chocolate when he visited Max Felchlin AG in Switzerland last week. The conching process evaporates the water and volatile aromatics in the chocolate, all of those clumps break down into their individual particles and cocoa butter coats them. This produces a very smooth texture.
You can still get a grittier chocolate, which has advantages. For one it doesn’t melt so much as ooze when the temperature goes up. Like the chocolate of old this is best used for drinking. So there you go, now you know when modern day smooth chocolate had its birth. Don’tcha just feel like enjoying a nice rich truffle this evening?
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