From bean to cup I

It's only just recently that I have become a member of SlowFood. Last month I went to my first SlowFood event in London's Borough Market. I was a bit apprehensive at first, I must say, as organisations like this seem to always attract a multitude of slightly odd people. Don't you agree? Maybe it's just me, but I still I remember when I was studying in Vienna, for example, I was totally into Esperanto at one point and wanted to find people who I could practise it with. So I went to an event organised by the Esperanto association or whatever they called themselves, and, well, let's say I did not find the like-minded individuals that I was looking for, it was like setting foot on an alien planet! I have not practised Esperanto for many years now although I think it's a wicked language.
So I was a tad worried to find a group of more or less freaky people obsessed with food at my first SlowFood event - but I need not have worried, they seem to be a really nice bunch of people. Definitely going back for more.
This first session was all about chocolate - providing insight into how it is produced, what it consists of and which factors determine the quality of chocolate. The person imparting his knowledge and tasting/discussing a variety of cacao beans, powder and chocolates with us was Robert Steinberg, the co-founder of Scharffen Berger chocolate makers in Berkeley, California.
It was very interesting. I'll give you the basics now to get you in gear, read on about cacao solids and what chocolate is made of, I'll be posting more soon on the importance of fermentation and a bit on nationalism, and blends vs. single origins...

First of all, Steinberg speaks of cacao, not cocoa. Or rather, I get the feeling that when speaking of good quality products or original beans he uses the term cacao. I had never actually read the labels that closely, expecting them to be full of E-numbers anyway. When a chocolate is declared as 72%, this means that almost ¾ of the ingredients come directly from the cacao bean. Meaning unsweetened chocolate, which in turn consists of cacao (46%) and cacao butter (54%). Even more interesting (or shocking, as it were) is that the rest is sugar. Yep, sugar. Even if there's vanilla or soy lecitin present, this never totals more than 1%, so even if you eat 100 g of a 72% chocolate, you're consuming 27 g sugar at least. And milk chocolate usually has around 41% cacao... holy shnikeys!
The next thing about labelling is that the percentage of cocoa butter vs. cocoa solids is not indicated. The 54% - 46% rule does not apply as most manufacturers add some additional cocoa butter. But you can still find out how much cocoa per se you're getting by dividing the total fat by the serving size, then substracting this from the total cocoa percentage. God, this is turning into a maths lesson! So to put this in laymen's terms, if you've got a bar with 75% and you have a fat content of 8 grams in a serving size of 20 g, this results in a fat percentage of 40%, meaning that 35% is cacao. For all you bakers/patissiers out there this formula is essential when switching from your tried and trusted chocolate to another (and it just tells me that next time I screw up a recipe, the chocolate will be my scapegoat)!
So far, so easy. We then learnt about cocoa powder and the fact that it is almost always much inferior to real chocolate, as it contains loads of alkali to mask poor fermentation (more on that one later). Apparently most people have got so used to the taste of the alkali refined chocolate that they confuse it with the flavour of chocolate itself.
Well, I'll be off to do some exercise now. I need to get a grip on this situation and learn to distinguish the taste of real chocolate from the alkali-tasting one. Hard work, I tell ya!

Comments

[Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey]

Just out of curiosity, in what manner did the Esperanto group you met with disappoint or appall you?

--
"Orangha Michjo"
membro-dumviva, Esperanto-Ligo por Norda Ameriko

[johanna]

mike, i hope i did not offend you there - i am sure the north-american esperanto league is very different from the European ones! the people i met were all a bit strange... the kind where you immediately sense that they're so caught up in their own world that they find it difficult to socialise with other people. and the average age in the room must have been 75, pretty deterring for a 20 year-old student ;-))