Chocolate trivia
English pirates raiding a Spanish galleon returning from South America once threw a load of cocoa beans overboard, believing them to be dried sheep droppings!
The Aztecs treated cocoa as precious, cocoa beans were used as currency and only the Aztec aristocracy drank chocolate. Money grew on trees!
A Spanish doctor recommended chocolate as an aphrodisiac as early as the 17th Century!
The first chocolate drink shop opened in London in 1657.
The first chocolate bar was made by Fry's in 1847.
The best chocolate melts at body temperature. It is also full of chemicals that are also found in the human body, released in association with pleasure and even orgasm!
Cocoa contains theobromine which is a mild stimulant for people, but a powerful one for horses and has been the cause of race horse doping scandals!
Italian researchers in 2004 found that women who consumed chocolate have better sex lives than those who turned down chocolate! (Salonia, 2004; Proceedings of European Society for Sexual Medicine).
Chocolate drinks aid recovery from workouts. A study in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition in 2006 showed that chocolate drunk with milk has "an optimal ratio of carbohydrates to protein to fuel tired muscles".
Michael Phelps, the phenomenally successful US swimmer, has chocolate drinks between races.
Spanish proverb: "Ideas should be clear and chocolate should be thick."
"I never met a chocolate I didn't like." Deanna Troi in Star Trek: The Next Generation
"Chocolate is the world's perfect food." M. Levine, US Nutritional Scientist.
The Mayans in 900BC to AD 250 consumed a chocolate drink with every meal, mixing it with water, chili, maize or honey!
In 2002, the American Association for the Advancement of Science revealed results that showed that chocolate could reduce your blood pressure, keep your heart healthy and generally improve the flow of your blood, but also that dark chocolates were better at doing all of this than milk chocolates.
Chocolate contains tryptophan, an essential amino acid that acts in people to decrease anxiety by releasing serotonin and endorphins.
Antioxidants help protect the body from the harmful affects of free radicals. US research shows that dark chocolate contains twice as many antioxidants as milk chocolate and that a cup of hot chocolate made with milk has at least as many antioxidants as a glass of red wine. In fact dark chocolate has more antioxidants than many fruits!
All about chocolate
A brief history
Chocolate is made from the fruit of the cocoa tree, whose Latin name, Theobroma cacoa means food of the gods. In South American mythology cocoa was consumed by the Gods as a drink and has been drunk by the indigenous people for 3000 years. It was the Spanish who came across the Aztec version. The chocolate wasn’t as we know it today, but was unsweetened and flavoured with spices such as chilli and vanilla.
The Spanish brought it back to Europe as an exotic drink, where it was consumed in café society, often being drunk as traders made their deals, although here in Europe it was usually drunk with sugar to make it more palatable to European tastes. It was also included as an ingredient in fine bakery. It took the industrial revolution to provide the machinery to produce chocolate bars, one of the first processed foods! In making chocolate bars large quantities of cheaper milk and sugar were added, which masked the distinctive flavours of good quality cocoas from different parts of the world. Only now are manufacturers returning to the rich flavours that cocoa can infuse in chocolate. The Mortimer Chocolate Company seeks to bring back to the consumer the flavours and varieties of the original chocolate drink that seduced the Spanish to bring it half way across the globe.
How do you make chocolate?
Let’s start with the tree. Cocoa trees grow in a band 20 degrees north and south of the equator. It originated in South America, but, because of the popularity of chocolate, has been transported by man to be grown in many tropical countries. The tree will not grow at temperatures below 15°C and does not tolerate being dry. It is often found in small plantations as an under planting to other crops, such as banana or palm, which provide shade to protect the cocoa from the sun. Unlike our native trees, the fruit of the cocoa tree, the pod, grows directly from the trunk and branches of the tree. The pods are the shape of small rugby balls and vary in colour, usually being yellow, red or orange when ripe. Once broken open, there are 30-or so cocoa beans inside, surrounded by a moist, sweet white pulp. Small farmers harvest their pods during the week, until they have collected sufficient in order to make a pile of around 250kg of beans and pulp, which is heaped on a carpet of palm or banana leaves. The pile is then covered with leaves and left to ferment.
The inside of the heap will reach a temperature of 55-60°C and will be turned once. The whole process usually lasts 5 days, after which the beans have turned a rich brown colour. They are then spread out to dry in the sun. Once dry, the beans are put into sacks and usually sent to traders, who, when they have accumulated enough will sell them on, so that they are eventually shipped to Europe for processing into cocoa products to make chocolate.
The next stage is that the beans are roasted at around 130°C in batches. The blending and roasting of beans allows major European manufacturers to produce branded chocolates that taste the same, year in, year out despite changes in the cocoa crop and differences in tastes between cocoas from different origins. Once it has been roasted, the beans are broken up so that the shell can be removed in the process known as winnowing. This breaks the cocoa into pieces, or cocoa nibs, these are ground down into a very fine paste, known as cocoa mass or cocoa liquor, which contains around 55% cocoa butter. The mass is then mixed with other ingredients, such as sugar and milk. This mixture then undergoes a process known as conching, when the mix is paddled for a long period of time to create the mouth feel of the chocolate. However, this also tends to drive off the flavour characteristics of the cocoa, which may be fine for bland, mass produced chocolates, but not for premium origin chocolates! The chocolate is ready to be made into bars, or confectionery, but to make drinks (other than ours) requires even more processing!
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