The Art of Chocolate: A Journey from Bean to Bar

I had tasted all these other chocolates. I thought I'd just give them some lint chocolate to taste without telling them what it was or where it was from and this was their reaction... that one was quite dark and a bit sweet but then also when I swallowed it was a little bit acidic at the back of my throat. There was no complex flavors in it completely boring. Oh I don't like that at all. This one doesn't taste like dark chocolate it's quite bland flavorless.

So how did the lint chocolate and most other dark chocolates that you buy at the shop end up tasting so bland and boring? Well once the chocolate makers get the beans they need to sort them to get rid of any that look shrivelled or like there's something wrong with them and then roast them this kills any of the bacteria and it also helps to develop the flavors that are in the beans. Then you need to take off the thin hull that's on the outside of the bean and inside this this is the cocoa, it's hard and it feels a bit like the texture of wood.

Then that gets chopped up into smaller bits called cocoa nibs and then the nibs get rolled between two stone rollers to break them down into smaller particles and at this stage the sugar is added and it's left to keep grinding between the rollers. Now our tongues are very clever they can detect particles that are so small our eyes can't even see them so even though the chocolate looks smooth at this stage if you were to taste it you would say that it tasted a bit gritty and that's the way chocolate used to be and until one day back in 1878 Rudolph Flint went home on the weekend and left the machines running, it's unclear whether that was accidental or a deliberate move but when he came back on Monday there was this super smooth silky dreamy chocolatey mixture that had a really amazing chocolatey smell and that's where we get the smooth chocolate that we're used to now.

Now conching is great don't get me wrong it's wonderful because it reduces that particle size and separates out the particles so that we get that really nice melt on your tongue and smooth texture but if you leave it to conch for too long you get rid of all of the amazing flavors so why not just crunch it until the particles are is just right and then stop will the advantage of conching for longer as it also gets rid of a lot of the acetic acid it's evaporating off as it keeps going because the chocolate's slightly warm so it's also getting rid of some of those not so good flavors. So if you have beans that are 100 percent good beans good quality beans have been fermented well have been dried well everything's great along the process you can conch for just enough time and keep all those fruity flavors but if you also have some not so good beans in there and some not great flavors you'd want to keep conching for longer to get rid of the undesirable flavors but that means at the same time you're getting rid of the good flavors which gives you a bland boring but consistent product that most of us think is what chocolate tastes like but really we've just missed out on all those amazing flavors.

If you enjoyed this episode do make sure you like comment share and let the algorithm know so it shows it to other people. With thanks to my amazing patrons for all your support that allows me to do all the research involved in making these sort of videos make it a great week by being kind to others and I'll see you on Friday

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enWelcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and this episode is all about  chocolate. It's chocolate chocolate I love chocolateThis block of chocolate tastes amazing it's got some really interesting flavors in it  it's won Awards it's just um. This chocolate by comparison tastes well bland and boring  and I want to know why? Why can't I buy chocolate that tastes like this at the local store and what  have they done to this one to make it so bland? Well in order to figure that out I'm gonna need  some volunteers who love tasting chocolate ... yeah there's a very certain mood where  I just really like chocolate but most of the time I take it or leave it. Chocolate is okay,  maybe a little bit overrated 😯 Are you in the mood for chocolate? No. Clearly I'm going to need some  extra helpers for this one. I love chocolate. I love chocolate especially dark chocolate. Really  love chocolate. That's more like it now I've purchased some blocks of chocolate just a few I've  picked these bars specifically because they're all made from just two ingredients and they're  about 30% sugar and 70% cocoa beans cocoa beans are actually the seed inside the fruit that grows  on cacao trees. Now even though as humans this year we will consume 7.5 million tons of chocolate  most of us know very little about cocoa beans and cacao trees. If I was to ask my volunteers  to name some different varieties of apples ... Golden Delicious pink lady Granny Smith they  can do that super easily but now if I ask them can you name any different varieties of cocoa beans...Probably not. Absolutely not. Cadbury Nestle Lindt. I I have no idea. So even our chocolate  lovers can't name any types of cocoa beans there are lots of different cacao trees and the fruits  are all different colors and they used to be split into three main varieties with lots of  sub-variants off that and more recently it's been split into 10 different varieties they keep doing  more DNA testing on trees and trying to figure out which species are related to which ones and how it  all fits in together obviously we can't taste all of the different cocoa beans but I have bars made  from three different beans so we're going to try those today the first one is the chuncho  chancho? tell me if I'm pronouncing that wrong I have no idea I think it's chuncho Bean which is  one of the forest Aero varieties which is one of the most common. Very creamy it's a little  bit more I'm going to say acidic almost tasted slightly alcoholic but not quite. When you first  bit into it it was sort of quite rich and creamy but then it went bitter afterwards now let's try  the ragusa beans which are from the Trinitario variety. Quite toffee a little bit of a Sultana  flavor almost sugary and more milky. I quite like that one which is saying something and now to see  if the more expensive beans taste better these are the rare Chihuahua beans from the Creole variety  that's fruity tastes a strong berry taste in that I like that one it was a like sherbet almost like  dried fruit apricot flavor cherry flavor you know I said the last one had a Sultana flavor  I mean that one's got a Sultana flavor as well just a different type of saltana. So  the variety of cocoa bean does change the flavor of the chocolate bar but as any chocolate maker  will tell you it's not just the type of bean it's where the bean is growing in the world  and because of that there's been an explosion of single origin chocolate bars or bars that are made  from beans from just one location so let's do a quick world trip and see how that affects the  flavor we're going to start in Bolivia. That one's got like a fruity cherry flavor maybe a little bit  woody my favorite so far I thought it was lovely. Moving North to Venezuela I like that one it was  um it was lemony interesting very different very intense like it just like hits you. It's not  for me. Next let's take a trip to Uganda very fruity ripe banana and butterscotch I like it  pretty different to the other ones I can't say it's my favorite. now for Madagascar  stronger flavor. Woody. Some dirt off the floor and then mixed it with like some grass like a  purslane flower that was nice next for beans that were growing in the southern part of India tasted  a bit like those fruity lollies you might get that has a bit of a bitter aftertaste almost a little  bit chemically at the end there fruity but bitter unusual. Let's fly across to Vietnam ... crunchyit was hard to get it to melt in my mouth an unpleasant sort of nothing it tasted like cheap  Easter egg chocolate and now for beans growing in Indonesia this one's lovely it was like an orange  rind the flavor of chilies without the the actual heat. It's a bit earthy as well that was creamy  and citrusy and delicious next we're off to the islands of the Philippines my favorite so far  that's really different I really liked that one it's got something I don't know if it's  coconut or vanilla maybe like cinnamon but sweet cinnamon like cinnamon sugar. Hazelnut hazelnut  Philippines. Hazelnut and from the Philippines over to Papua New Guinea. This one definitely  has a smokier hit than the other ones tobacco Woody maybe a banana flavor there. I have no  idea! And finally beans grown in the Solomon Islands interesting quite fruity apricot taste a  sour raspberry Cherry Citrus uh like an undertone of bark it was really bold you know very acidic  as well I really liked that one. You can see the cocoa Cocoa's growing in what's called the cocoa  belt right across the middle either side of the Equator there in fact the majority of the world's  cocoa is grown in the Ivory Coast and Ghana. Cacao trees like high humidity and lots of rainfall they  don't like cold temperatures they won't tolerate under three degrees and they don't like full sun  they like being shade dwellers under bigger trees. If you live outside of that cocoa belt area and  you want to have a go at growing cocoa then you will need to plant your tree in a pot indoors,  I have one that is growing this one's only about a year and a half old it won't bear fruit until  it's about four or five years old so it's a bit of a long journey. My taste testers definitely did  seem to notice a difference though between beans that were grown in different parts of the world  and scientists are trying to figure out why that is at first it was thought maybe it was different  soil conditions different rainfall all of those different things and now it seems like it could  be a bit of that but also linked to what happens to the beans after they are harvested on the farm.  Once the cacao pods are picked they get cut open right there on the farm and inside is this white  gummy fruity flesh that surrounds each of the cocoa beans that all gets scooped out and at  this stage the cocoa beans taste so bitter that you can't eat them if you were to try and make  chocolate out of them like this no one would like chocolate it just wouldn't get eaten to make it  taste like the cocoa that we know the beans have to be fermented and that usually happens nowadays  in big wooden boxes the beans are piled into the boxes and packed down and covered and they're  left for several days, then once they reach the right temperature which lets them know that that  fermenting has taken place they're then turned or stirred or moved into a different box and  this just introduces air into the mix and allows different bacterias to start to work and they're  left for a couple more days. Now this is a crucial stage because it allows the yeast and the lactic  acid bacterias and the acetic acid bacterias and some enzymes to all start developing the flavors  in the cocoa beans and it changes them from looking like this at the start to looking like  this at the end now I have here two Cocoa bars that are made from beans from the same farm from  the same country everything's the same except one of them has been left to ferment for five days and  one of them has been left to ferment for six days so let's see if that makes a difference ... so the  one on my right was like sweet and florally. A bitter taste. Very strong fruity flavor.  Like a bowl of smoked fruit and the one on the left was like coffee and a bit darker there's  a little bit more creamier nice and sweet a bit of coffee it's like the flavors were a bit more  muted and demure. Which did you prefer? I think I'd have to say the five day just because it had  more flavors to offer so even a minor change on the farm like an extra day of fermentation makes a  big difference to what the end product tastes like and what my taste is discovered was exactly the  same as what's been reported in scientific studies which is that the intensity of the cocoa flavor is  decreased with longer fermentation. Scientists are also really interested in starting to study the  difference in the bacterias in those fermentation boxes in different farms all over the world and  they've found there's quite a vast difference in what bacterias are doing the fermentation are  affecting the end product and the end flavor so it may not just be the soil that it's growing in  in different countries affecting it but rather the bacterias that are going into the fermentation box  and that's really interesting because if they can start to narrow down which bacterias contribute to  which flavors in the beans they could take beans from one area that didn't have a very interesting  flavor profile and add that bacteria in at the fermentation stage and really lift the quality  and the money that the farmers are going to get for those beans there's hundreds of different  bacterias and enzymes so figuring out which ones are contributing to what is going to take  some time but it's certainly very interesting. once the beans have been fermented they are then  spread out to dry and even this affects what the chocolate tastes like. drying the beans slowly  results in beans that have a fuller more fruity flavor and drying them quickly you lose some of  the flavor of the beans after they've been dried the beans are then packed up into bags and sent  off to chocolate makers so you can see before the chocolate maker even gets the beans a lot  of the flavor has already been predetermined by what happened to it on the farm. Now it sounds  like yep just standardise process of what happens on the farm to make sure you get the best beans  but there's actually five million cocoa Farmers around the world. Ninety percent of the cocoa that  is consumed in the world comes from small holder farmers they have three hectares or less and most  of those farmers have never had the opportunity to taste chocolate that was made from just their  beans let alone their beans at different stages of fermentation or the different process variations  along the way, so they don't actually know the flavor difference that it's going to make if they  treat it in different ways and that's where the smaller chocolate manufacturers that are  making relationships with the actual farmers have an advantage because they can actually  send them chocolate and feed them that information back so that they can make a better product. The  bigger chocolate manufacturers though need so much chocolate they can run education programs  but working with every individual farmer is just such a huge task that they're just going to end  up with a lot of beans, some good quality and some not so good quality. So at the beginning  before we started all this I asked my toasters if they liked dark Lindt chocolate and they all did  apart from Dave who doesn't love chocolate it doesn't dislike it just didn't love it  and then after they'd tasted all these other chocolates. I thought I'd just give them some  lint chocolate to taste without telling them what it was or where it was from and this was  their reaction ... that one was quite dark and a bit sweet but then also when I swallowed it was a  little bit acidic at the back of my throat. There was no complex flavors in it completely boring.  Oh I don't like that at all. This one doesn't taste like dark chocolate it's quite bland  flavorless. So how did the lint chocolate and most other dark chocolates that you buy at the  shop end up tasting so bland and boring? Well once the chocolate makers get the beans they need to  sort them to get rid of any that look shrivelled or like there's something wrong with them and then  they roast them this kills any of the bacteria and it also helps to develop the flavors that are in  the beans. Then you need to take off the thin hull that's on the outside of the bean and inside this  this is the cocoa, it's hard and it feels a bit like the texture of wood. Then that gets chopped  up into smaller bits called cocoa nibs and then the nibs get rolled between two stone rollers to  break them down into smaller particles and at this stage the sugar is added and it's left to keep  grinding between the rollers. Now our tongues are very clever they can detect particles that are so  small our eyes can't even see them so even though the chocolate looks smooth at this stage if you  were to taste it you would say that it tasted a bit gritty and that's the way chocolate used to be  and until one day back in 1878 Rudolph Flint went home on the weekend and left the machines running,  it's unclear whether that was accidental or a deliberate move but when he came back  on Monday there was this super smooth silky dreamy chocolatey mixture that had a really  amazing chocolatey smell and that's where we get the smooth chocolate that we're used to now and  that process of leaving it to keep going and keep churning and keep churning is now called conching.  Now conching is great don't get me wrong it's wonderful because it reduces that particle size  and separates out the particles so that we get that really nice melt on your tongue and smooth  texture but if you leave it to conch for too long you get rid of all of the amazing flavors so why  not just crunch it until the particles are is just right and then stop will the advantage of conching  for longer as it also gets rid of a lot of the acetic acid it's evaporating off as it keeps going  because the chocolate's slightly warm so it's also getting rid of some of those not so good  flavors. So if you have beans that are a hundred percent good beans good quality beans have been  fermented well have been dried well everything's great along the process you can conch for just  enough time and keep all those fruity flavors but if you also have some not so good beans in there  and some not great flavors you'd want to keep conching for longer to get rid of the undesirable  flavors but that means at the same time you're getting rid of the good flavors which gives you  a bland boring but consistent product that most of us think is what chocolate tastes like but  really we've just missed out on all those amazing flavors. If you enjoyed this episode do make sure  you like comment share and let the algorithm know so it shows it to other people. With thanks to my  amazing patrons for all your support that allows me to do all the research involved in making these  sort of videos make it a great week by being kind to others and I'll see you on Friday 😊\n"