Although chocolate may represent less than half of the weight of many confectionary products, it is nevertheless the key component that gives such products their special appeal.
Chocolate is unique in that – unlike most other foods, where there is always a degree of taste polarization – it is vary rare indeed to find anyone who claims to dislike it.
Cocoa was first discovered by Europeans in South America. The Aztecs traditionally itself the seeds of the Theobroma cacao to make a drink by extracting the seeds from the cocoa pod and fermenting, drying and grinding them; the powder was then mixed with water.
It was cocoa as a drink that was imported by the Spaniards into Europe in the seventeenth century.
Later, Van Houten developed a process for pressing a proportion of the fat from the dried powder in order to make it more palatable: at about 50% fat, the drink made from untreated cocoa must have been very heavy. Modern drinking cocoas, by contrast, contain only 20% or less of fat.At first, the expressed cocoa butter must have been a troublesome by product with relatively low value. But by mixing the cocoa butter back with unpressed cocoa and sugar, it was possible to make an entirely new product, namely solid chocolate for eating.
Now it is the partially defatted cocoa for drinking and cooking that is the cheaper by product.
The very broad appeal of chocolate as a food is difficult to explain. Part of its attraction is related to the particular melting characteristics of cocoa butter with its very sharp melting point at just below body temperatures; this give a very clean residual impression on the palate at the end of mastication.
But added to this is the characteristics flavor of cocoa which, as well as being attractive in its own right, seems to further eliminate any sensation of fatty after taste.
The origin of Chocolate
