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When I was a child, I found chocolate fascinating: Where did it come from? How was it made? What magic was behind this sweet and creamy goodness?
The truth is I'm not sure I ever found exactly the answers I was looking for. So, as I endeavor to add a bit of learning into this Christmas for my boys, I went straight to a professional – Bryan Graham, the chocolatier who founded Fruition Chocolate (part of the team behind the Chocolate Space Invaders).
"When I was a child, I had no idea where chocolate came from," Graham told Wired.com. "I certainly never suspected that it came from a tree, otherwise I probably would have lumped it into the category of fruits and vegetables and other inedible and revolting grown-up food!"
Now he's an expert, creating small-batch confections in his "bean-to-bar chocolate workshop" in New York's Catskill Mountains. Graham talked me through why chocolate is so special and how it goes from harvest to the delightful goodness we know and love, especially around the holidays (when many children's chocolate consumption rises).
Wired.com: Chocolate is a special confectionary, what is it about chocolate that has inspired you to create Fruition and what do you want to share with others?
Bryan Graham: My background is in pastry and baking. I've worked for many years as a pastry chef, bread baker and confectioner. I always had an affinity for working with chocolate and eventually began focusing on it exclusively.
After diving in and learning all I could about elaborating chocolate into confections, bars and sculptures, the next logical step (for me at least) was to learn how to make the chocolate itself. After months of poring over dense technical texts and speaking to every expert I could find, I finally put together a small chocolate laboratory in my home kitchen and began churning out small batches of chocolate. Three years later, after countless batches, tweaking and experimentation, I was confident enough to release my chocolate to the world, using my business, Fruition Chocolate, as the vehicle.
The flexibility of chocolate is what I love most about it. It can be incredibly satisfying to simply taste a little piece of great, unadulterated chocolate and let the flavors wash over your palate. It can be equally satisfying to taste an elaborate and boldly decorated confection full of ganaches, preserves or fondants, in which chocolate takes on a complementary role.
Chocolate is also extremely democratic. You don't need to have studied and tasted every great chocolate in the world to appreciate it. Nobody should tell you how to experience it. If you want to just pop it in your mouth and munch away, great! If you care to taste the same piece and experience the flavor release, and all the subtlety and complexity, it's there for the taking.
Wired.com: Children eat a lot of chocolate; how can we inspire them to think beyond the wrapping and its contents?
Graham: I think we need to help our children make the distinction between chocolate and candy. Certainly children eat a lot of candy, but many of the treats that we call chocolate bars – Snickers, Cadbury Dairy Milk, etc. – contain just about everything but chocolate.
Talking to kids about chocolate is an opportunity to take a subject that they are notoriously excitable about and expand on it in so many ways. Botany, geography, farming, international import, processing and tasting are all key components in transforming the humble seed of the tree Theobroma cacao into chocolate and confections, and a great springboard into a conversation about where chocolate – and all of our food – actually comes from.
Wired.com: Can you explain some of the science of chocolate for us? It looks a lot like chemistry. How do you know a good cacao bean? How do you treat it before is becomes chocolate?
Graham: The journey of producing chocolate begins with the small, bitter seeds of a tropical fruit. Tasting the seed, commonly called a bean for some inexplicable reason, right out of the fruit, you would have a hard time detecting any of the flavors we associate with chocolate. It has a long road ahead to develop those flavors.
Once the ripe fruit, or pod, is harvested, they are hacked open to reveal about 50 seeds surrounded by a white, mucilaginous pulp. Depending on the variety, [the] desired result and the inclination of the farmer or co-op, the beans and pulp are removed and fermented for up to seven days. During this time, the heat and acid generated by fermentation kills the bean, preventing germination. It is during this time that the flavor precursors that will eventually give the chocolate its characteristic flavor are developed.
Once fermented, the beans are dried, usually in the sun, but in some places, fire or another heat source is employed. Once dried, the beans are bagged up and shipped out to chocolate makers around the world.
Roasting the beans is the first real opportunity for most chocolate makers to begin putting their stamp on the chocolate. Roasting, through the Maillard reaction, turns those flavor precursors developed during fermentation into what we know as chocolatey flavors. This is the first time in the process that you'll start to smell that familiar chocolate aroma. It, I must say, is heavenly.
After roasting, the beans are cracked and the papery shell is removed, leaving the nib, or usable portion of the bean. This process, called winnowing, can be accomplished in a few different ways, but the tricky part is removing all of the shell without losing any of the nibs. If some stubborn shell winds up in the batch of chocolate, it can bring some funky off-flavors along with it.
The next step is particle reduction. At our workshop, we use a machine called a melangeur to break down the nibs and sugar into smaller and smaller particles. A melangeur is a stone grinder that utilizes two large granite wheels rotating constantly on a solid slab of granite. Once grinding begins and the nibs are introduced, they are quickly broken down and their cocoa butter is liberated.
The cocoa butter lubricates the particles of sugar and cocoa solids as they are reduced to ever smaller and smaller bits. Your palate is capable of distinguishing grittiness in a substance whose largest particles are about 20 microns or larger. Since we all love to nibble on an ultrasmooth and luxurious chocolate, we need to ensure that the particle size of the chocolate mass is below that threshold. Ultimately, we refine our chocolate below 20 microns. It takes four days of constant grinding to reach that point.
A process called conching is employed next. Developed by Rudolph Lindt (I'm sure most chocolate lovers know that name) in the late 1800s, and so called because of the shell-like shape of the apparatus. Chocolate is poured into the conch and is constantly agitated by rollers, and warm air is circulated around the mass of chocolate. Conching yields two results. The agitation smooths out the particles of cocoa and sugar, and evenly distributes cocoa butter around them, lowering the viscosity of the chocolate and ultimately making it easier to pour and mold. The introduction of warm air forces some of the volatile acids to evaporate, which mellows the flavor of the chocolate and allows other flavors to become more pronounced. I and many small chocolate manufacturers combine the refining and conching steps into one process that involves particle reduction and conching in one process.
Once finished, the chocolate is tempered and molded into bars or used in other confectionery pursuits.
Finding a good bean is tricky and depends on quite a few factors. The genetics and geographic region in which they're grown is extremely important, but that is only one piece of the puzzle. An excellent-quality bean can still make a poor-quality chocolate if mistakes are made in any of the processes that follow.
Wired.com: Why do chocolate makers I've talked to want to discuss tempering so much? What is it, and why is it important?
Graham: Tempering is the last step in production, and one that has a huge impact on how the customer ultimately experiences the chocolate bar. Have you ever tasted a bar of chocolate that was crumbly and had a dull, white film on the outside? It was either improperly tempered or mishandled somewhere along the supply chain.
To understand why this happens, you first need to know a little about the fat that's present in chocolate. Cocoa butter makes up between 48 and 57 percent of the weight of a cocoa bean and is what allows chocolate to set at room temperature and melt at just below body temperature. The experience of putting a piece of chocolate on your tongue and experiencing the slow melt in your mouth is one of chocolate's most alluring properties, and cocoa butter is to thank for it.
Cocoa butter is polymorphic, meaning that, depending on the manner in which it turns from a liquid to a solid, the fat forms different types of crystals, both stable and unstable. The stable crystals are tightly packed together and melt at a higher temperature than the unstable ones. We need to properly temper chocolate in order to ensure that it keeps the same shiny appearance and as smooth a texture as the day you molded it.
Tempering is the process by which chocolate is heated, cooled and then gently heated again to precise temperatures in order to propagate a type of stable cocoa butter crystals. This allows the chocolate to have a mirrorlike shine when set and results in the proper mouth feel and audible snap when you break off a piece.
Wired.com: What is the best way for GeekDads to teach their children about the processes of making chocolate?
Graham: Until very recently, making chocolate on a small scale was unheard of. All chocolate came from large industrial operations. As the DIY food movement took hold several years ago, some very clever tinkerers realized that with some repurposed equipment and handmade gadgetry, just about anybody could have the tools to make chocolate at home with a modest investment of time and money.
Making chocolate with your children could be a very rewarding experience that would begin with purchasing your own cocoa beans and sugar. You would first roast the beans and, when cool, peel them and use some method of grinding them to a smooth paste. A mortar and pestle works well for a small batch, and [the] reward is much sweeter after all the hard work of hand-grinding. With a little more investment, you can purchase a tabletop machine that will take most of the hard work out of the equation, and produce a very smooth chocolate.
In the United States, the best place to get a small quantity of cocoa beans is from John Nancy at Chocolate Alchemy.com. His website is a superstore for the DIY chocolate maker, complete with all the tools, ingredients and instruction to get started.
For a very readable book that helps clarify many of the finer points of chocolate production, I would recommend The Science of Chocolate, by Stephen T. Beckett.
Wired.com: What is your favorite chocolate, and where can we get some?
Graham: Well, mine, of course! My favorite chocolate is always the next one that I produce, spending many long days and nights striving to perfect the formula and process. In the U.S., you can find Fruition Chocolate here. Self-promotion aside, there are many small chocolate manufacturers out there like me who are incredible craftsmen (and women) that put so much effort into producing an exceptional chocolate. To get some of the best chocolate out there, skip the supermarket and try some of these outstanding chocolate makers:
Images in this story from Gabe Zimmer, used by permission.
