Chocolate can trace its roots back to Ancient Mesoamerican Civilization, where crushed cocoa beans were fermented, then roasted, and then ground into a paste. The paste was used to make a bitter liquid for royalty and military warriors to drink. The valuable beans were also used as currency. In the early 16th century, Christopher Columbus was offered beans as trade for his own goods but when he took them back to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, they were not impressed with the bitter taste. It took nearly a hundred years for chocolate to take hold and begin its spread through Europe. In the 1700s, the invention of the steam engine made an easier job of grinding the dried cocoa beans, and by the 1800s the cocoa press was invented, making cocoa powder more consistent, less expensive to produce, and thus available to more than just the elite. Combining the powder with sweetening agents and spices helped to make the drink more desirable, and it became a commodity in the American colonies as early as 1765. In 1847 the first solid chocolate bar was created, a popular invention that caused chocolate to be enjoyed by children and adults worldwide by the mid-1900s.
Today, there are three main types of trees used for chocolate—the Forastero, the Trinitario, and the Criollo. The Forastero tree is native to the Amazon basin region of Africa and is responsible for the largest amount of cocoas produced around the world. It is a hardy variety with a high yield of beans, but typically produce a quite bland chocolate. The Criollo, from Central America, is the rarest of the cacao trees, but the output is a delicate, complex bean that is favored among chocolatiers. The Trinitario tree is a hybrid of the Forastero and the Criollo, with some of the complex taste of the Criollo but with the disease-resistant qualities of the Forastero.
Specialty chocolate makers derive their creations from a single type of bean. The Criollo beans are the desired ingredient in specialty recipes, but the cost and availability is often a deterrent. Specialty chocolates can be made from other trees as well—the key is in the use of just a single bean. The beginning process of chocolate-making is the same from manufacturer to manufacturer: even with all of the progress in machinery since ancient times, the harvesting, fermenting, drying, cleaning, and roasting of cacao beans is still done by hand. Machines then take over to do the grinding. From there, each chocolate maker has their own process that makes their chocolate different from others on the market.
And it’s not like you might think it is. That is to say, if you ask people what makes a really great chocolate you will not get a standard answer. In much the same way as coffee roasting, there is a craft involved, and everyone has perfected their own roasting manner. The key, according to modern chocolate makers, is “not getting in the beans’ way.” Before this approach, chocolate makers roasted beans dark and the finished product reflected that process. Now, though, chocolate beans are roasted according to their variety and where they are grown. Today, you’ll “taste the bean itself, which can present flavors as varied as red berries, lemon, and tobacco” for example.
In the coffee industry, this boils down to a pairing process that requires much thought about how to marry the flavors. It is more than a simple recipe of coffee and chocolate. Alex Whitmore, owner of Taza, encourages “deeper roasts or low acidity coffees” for mochas made with modern chocolates. But Jamie Fey, café manager for Dogwood Coffee, claims that “many single-origin coffees open up in the presence of chocolate.”
Pairing specialty roasts of coffee with specialty roasts of chocolate opens up numerous doors for flavor experimenting in the coffee shop. The flavor potentials are seemingly endless, and this makes for a lot of fun coming up with the best concoctions.
I don’t know about you, but I think I will go out and get a mocha!
