Archive | science of chocolate

Flavor in Chocolate: The Not-So-Secret Secrets Of Becoming A Great Taster

October 1, 2019 by Karen Cogan

Karen, our Flavor Manager, will openly and unapologetically tell you that she regularly eats chocolate for breakfast. She’s been a part of our team since 2013; first as a chocolate maker, then managing chocolate making, and now, managing flavor. In her current role, she gets to taste her way through the day as she helps build the systems and processes that encourage the development and preservation of our flavor.

This blog post is part one of a four-part series on flavor in chocolate. Karen will answer some of the most-asked questions around what we taste, how flavor happens, and how we as chocolate makers approach flavor in our process and in our bars.

We believe that chocolate is absolute magic. Becoming a great taster, however, is not.

As Flavor Manager since 2017, one of my absolute favorite things to do is to run our internal tasting training that we call Flavorientation. (And if you’re interested, we also offer a class in Tasting for the public.) Here I get the opportunity to meet each and every new taster in our growing team and use this unique moment to impart to them this one simple fact:

If you want to be a great taster, all you’ve got to do is practice.

In class, I keep the group size small, inviting no more than six people at a time to the table. This is purposefully done to create a safe space so that our new tasters can exercise this sometimes new and awkward-feeling muscle: the palate. I take them through a series of tasting exercises where I highlight the nuanced impact that both large and small changes in our raw product, production processes, and makers can have on the final flavor of a chocolate bar. I work hard to crack open the exciting world of flavor to our new team members.

As with any table full of new tasters, there is often at least one individual around the tasting table that says something like, “I’m terrible at tasting! I don’t taste a single thing that everyone else seems to be getting!”

If there is one piece of advice that I can give to anyone wanting to be a great taster, it would be to stop comparing yourself to those around you. I know, I know! That can be like asking some of you to stop writing with your dominant hand; awkward and unnatural. However, remember that comparison stifles your own experience and hinders your ability to practice pulling up your own unique aromatic memories buried deep within your consciousness.

Aromatic memories are, in large part, the things that breath life and brightness into your memories of that magical tropical vacation or the warm fuzzy feelings you have toward your favorite holiday. Aromatic memories can transport us miles in an instant with one whiff of the nostalgic.

This is what makes chocolate magical. Chocolate is known as one of the most aromatically complex things out there. The possible combinations of the chemical compounds within chocolate are essentially endless. Couple this with the fact that, unlike other craft industries like coffee or beer, chocolate, consumable by any age group, has typically woven itself into our earliest childhood memories. More often than not, understanding our connection to chocolate is so entangled within the story of our lives that it is near impossible to find its source.

This is one of the main reasons I absolutely love what I get to do here. I get to hear people’s life stories framed by their unique and deeply personal tasting notes. I get to literally hear them unpack some of their most potent experiences as they practice naming and identifying the aromas that have framed their lives.

Magic.

So next time you sit down to a meal, walk through your local farmers market, or step into your favorite relative’s kitchen, take a second and breathe deeply. These are the things your chocolate memories are made of!

4000 Years and Counting: A History of Drinking Chocolate

February 16, 2019 by Amie Bailey

Amie Bailey is the General Manager of our soon-to-open 16th Street Factory, and she just started with us in January, 2019. She is a food blogger, a pastry chef, a hyper-organized person, and a fan of chocolate in all of its drinkable (and non-drinkable) forms.

For most of my childhood, the process of making hot chocolate started by opening a packet. I, for one, have always loved that aroma coming from the little foil envelope that can only be described as “sweet.”

These days I’m more likely to be enjoying a Mission Hot Chocolate at our Valencia cafe, or whisking up our Hot Chocolate Mix at home, and as a result I’ve been digging into the history of drinking chocolate. While bars of chocolate and confections are available around the world, historically we as humans have preferred drinking our chocolate over biting into a bar.

Let’s go back about 4000 years to 3300 BCE to prehistoric South America, in what is now known as Ecuador. In October of 2018, archeologists from UC Berkeley uncovered ceramic pots from the Mayo-Chincipe people with traces of cacao residue on them, making chocolate one of the oldest beverages known to humanity.

The Maya continued the tradition of drinking chocolate and passed it along generation after generation. It took many centuries for the Maya (and then the Aztec) people to develop the techniques for making chocolate into a beverage worthy of the devotion we pay it even today. Highly prized, chocolate was a reward, a sacrifice, a currency, and sometimes exclusive to royalty and the military (Montezuma II reportedly drank 50 golden goblets of hot chocolate per day).

It’s tempting to think that chocolate was only for the wealthy in ancient lands, but in ancient South and Central America, chocolate was truly a group activity. It’s a lot of work to grow, harvest, ferment, roast, and grind chocolate into a paste and then convert it into a drink. Our melangers refine our chocolate for four to five days after we roast and winnow the beans (depending on the origin), and they run on electricity! Imagine doing that by hand! Consequently, and up until very recently in history, chocolate has been hard to come by. While maybe not *everyone* got 50 cups per day in Mesoamerica, it’s likely that everyone got a taste of it.

Chocolate was also a decidedly different experience back then. None of these cultures grew and processed sugar, and honey was harvested in the wild and by chance. Chocolate wasn’t just “not sweet”; it was pretty bitter – more akin to coffee than what we think of hot chocolate. It was also mixed with a variety of spices, vanilla, ground corn, or almonds.

None of these cultures were traditional herding cultures either, so the chocolate was made with water rather than milk. The texture came from pouring it from cup to cup to create foam. Today, Mexican Hot Chocolate is made with a molinillo, and the foam is considered particularly desirable.

Cruising right up to 1500 AD, the Spanish invade and conquer these cultures in a brutal fashion, taking not just their gold, but their cacao (and the skills they developed to make it into chocolate) as well. Cortez presented cacao for the first time in Europe, and from there drinking chocolate found favor and fame throughout the continent. Sometime in the 17th century Europeans began to eschew adding spicy chili pepper to their drink in favor of sugar, which was expensive but available.

The pirate botanist (what a job title!) William Hughes published a book in 1672 titled The American Physitian that devoted an entire chapter to “The Cacao Nut Tree” and the ways in which it could be prepared for drinking, going so far as to call it “The American Nectar.”

In the 18th century, we see chocolate houses rising right alongside London’s famed coffee houses as places to gather, gamble, and carouse. At this time and in these places, chocolate had reached its most opulent form to date, with sugar being bountiful and using dairy instead of water to make the beverage. Many of these places still exist in London today and you can see them, or at least the outside. White’s is one of the best known. This is where Prince Charles had his bachelor party, and it does not admit any woman other than The Queen of England. You can also view The Cocoa Tree on Pall Mall in St. James’s London which is now The Royal Automobile Club.

17th century British chocolate house

From there, mass availability followed lock step with the industrial revolution. It wasn’t THE first thing to be made in a factory, but it was really close. In 1828, Dutch chemist Coenraad Johannes van Houten invented the process of extracting the cocoa butter from chocolate leaving a cake that is pulverized into powder. With this invention we enter the era of Hot Cocoa (made from cocoa powder) taking the lead over Hot Chocolate (made from the paste of cocoa nibs) and making the drink widely available (unless you were a very, very lucky child) and what we all grew up with.

With small-batch and bean-to-bar chocolate gaining a wider and wider audience, I think we live in one of the best times for enjoying Theobroma cacao, the scientific name for chocolate, meaning “food of the gods” in ancient Greek. From enjoying single-origin chocolate bars to drinking a spicy Mission Hot Chocolate at our cafés, I hope you’ll join us at our shops or online to explore.

Learn more about the history of chocolate.

Resources:

Science Magazine Online: World’s Oldest Chocolate Was Made 5300 Years Ago – In a South American Rainforest

Smithsonian Magazine Online, What We Know About the Earliest History of Chocolate

Gastro Obscura, The Rambunctious, Elitist Chocolate Houses of 18th-Century London

Cooking In the Archives

Chocolate Class, Enlightenment-Era Chocolate/Coffee Houses

Pleasant Vices Video on Making Mayan Style Hot Chocolate in the 18th Century Manner

Hot Chocolate, William Hughes’s ‘American Nectar

How to Store Chocolate: Tips and Tricks (and the Science) for Keeping Chocolate Bars at Their Best

June 13, 2018 by Becca Taylor-Roseman

Becca works on chocolate quality, team safety, and risk at our SF Valencia location. She enjoys the science that explains how chocolate works. Her favorite bar at the moment is Gola Rainforest, Sierra Leone. And yes, she once left chocolate to accidentally melt on the backseat of her car.

Chocolate with streaking and sugar bloom

When bad things happen to good chocolate from improper storage. Left to right: fresh chocolate, streaked chocolate (when the cocoa butter separates), and sugar bloom (when sugar crystallizes on the surface).
📸@ericwolfinger

Leaving a bar of chocolate in your hot car will surely ruin your day. So much work goes into making a Dandelion chocolate bar: we bring beans into the factory from all over the world that undergo a meticulous production process to transform them into glossy chocolate. We wrap each bar in gold foil and make sure the label lines up. And then just like that, the whole thing is a puddle. The chocolate tastes great in the short term (yum! molten chocolate!), but after that it’s messy and, without retempering the chocolate, the bar won’t ever be the same again. So, in the interest of having the best chocolate-tasting experience days, months, or years from now, I share a few pointers on how to properly store tempered, finished chocolate bars.

Short-term storage for enjoying chocolate within a few months:

● Squirrel it away somewhere cool and dark; the back of your pantry is ideal.

● Keep it away from strong odors. Cocoa butter can absorb strong flavors like garlic and coffee, which can alter the delicate flavors of the chocolate.

● Keep the bar away from heat and out of direct sunlight. The stable form of cocoa butter (Form V or 𝜷V) starts melting at 84°F. Tempered chocolate is a sol: a suspension of solid particles (cocoa solids, sugar) in a liquid (cocoa butter). It can separate just like the emulsion of oil and vinegar in a vinaigrette, except with chocolate you get dark cocoa solids and white streaks of cocoa butter. If a chocolate bar melts in your beach bag and you pop it in the fridge to resolidify, the bar will likely have a streaky appearance, a soft break, and it will crumble when you bite it. The appearance may be unpleasant, but it’s still safe to eat. I recommend melting it into brownies or some other delicious chocolate-based dessert.

Mid-term storage for up to a year:

● For storing chocolate longer than a few months, keep it in a temperate climate: we’ve had good results storing our chocolate between 40-68°F. The kitchen pantry is ok, but a cool closet or basement area are ideal.

● Stable temperatures are best. Chocolate’s appearance and texture can be affected by transitional bouts of hot and cold.

Long-term storage for up to five years:

● For cellaring chocolate and holding on to vintage bars, I recommend using a wine fridge set to 50°F. Note that a regular kitchen refrigerator may have strong food odors and it is often too cold for the task (below 40°F). Greg, our Chocolate Sourcerer, and Todd, our CEO and co-founder, set their chocolate refrigerators to 50°F. If chocolate gets too cold or undergoes a temperature shock, condensation can form and potentially cause sugar bloom. Sugar bloom changes the texture and appearance of the bar. It occurs when the sugar in the bar absorbs water and, when the water evaporates, it recrystallizes on the surface of the bar. It’s still safe to eat, but the chocolate’s appearance and texture make it better for baking.

● Never freeze chocolate for all of the same reasons as above.

● All of our chocolate bars have a “best if used by” date of one year from production. This is the time period during which we’re confident that the flavor notes you’ll taste in our bars will be as close as possible to when the bar was first tempered. That said, the flavors in our bars evolve over time, and some chocolate even improves with age.

● After a year or two in storage, it’s possible for chocolate to start looking dull and a bit grey on the surface and acquire a brittle, chalky texture. Over time, cocoa butter transforms into an even more stable polymorph known as Form VI or 𝜷VI. As long as you’re storing the chocolate in controlled conditions, it should be safe to eat for several years.

● Chocolate like ours with just cacao beans and sugar tends to be shelf stable. You don’t need to worry about two-ingredient chocolate going bad. In milk chocolate or bars that have nuts, those other ingredients can become rancid over an extended period of time.

The chocolate/wine refrigerator of Greg, our Chocolate Sourcerer. What a collection!