The Art and Craft of Chocolate: An enthusiast's guide to selecting, preparing and enjoying artisan chocolate at home
160
The Art and Craft of Chocolate: An enthusiast's guide to selecting, preparing and enjoying artisan chocolate at home
160eBook
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Overview
The Art and Craft of Chocolate opens with the very basics, beginning with the cacao tree, and explains the process of growing cacao and the many hands it takes to process it.
For centuries, chocolate has been used for many purposes all over the world: from a currency during the Mayan empire, to homemade beverages consumed by farm workers in Central America for energy, as well as in moles and other dishes in Mexican cuisine. The Art and Craft of Chocolate covers the cultural history of chocolate, as well as the birth of the chocolate bar.
The co-founder and head chocolate maker of Raaka Chocolate, Nathan Hodge, then shows you how to hack the basic principles of chocolate-making at home using tools as simple as a food processor, a hair dryer, and a double boiler. In addition, he offers recipes for traditional moles from different regions of Mexico; traditional Mayan chocolate drinks; cocoa as a meat rub; and various baked goods.
An expert in the bean-to-bar movement and a leader in sustainable chocolate sourcing, Hodge introduces the concept of bean to bar chocolate—a process that starts with whole cocoa beans, which are roasted, ground, and smoothed into chocolate—and discusses sustainability and social consciousness, along with his own chocolate making philosophy.
The Art and Craft of Chocolate is your resource on all topics chocolate.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781631594670 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quarry Books |
| Publication date: | 08/21/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Sales rank: | 966,209 |
| File size: | 28 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Nathan Hodge is the co-founder and Head Chocolate Maker of Raaka Chocolate, a nationally distributed bean-to-bar chocolate company in Brooklyn, New York, founded in 2010.
Hodge appears as a featured subject in the film, Setting the Bar (2017), a documentary that focuses on the leading role Raaka has taken in the craft chocolate movement’s focus on sustainable cocoa sourcing.
Hodge is a five‑time presenter at the Northwest Chocolate Show, the premier US chocolate conference, and has fostered connections with USDA cacao researchers and academics at the Guiltinan Cacao Research Lab at Penn State and the University of Hawaii.
Raaka’s First Nibs Subscription program has become the gold standard for chocolate innovation. Every year, Raaka releases 24 unique chocolate bars inspired by recipes from all over the world, and in collaboration with local chefs and artisans.
Nathan Hodge is the co-founder and Head Chocolate Maker of Raaka Chocolate, a nationally distributed bean-to-bar chocolate company in Brooklyn, New York, founded in 2010. Hodge appears as a featured subject in the film, Setting the Bar (2017), a documentary that focuses on the leading role Raaka has taken in the craft chocolate movement's focus on sustainable cocoa sourcing. Hodge is a five‑time presenter at the Northwest Chocolate Show, the premier US chocolate conference, and has fostered connections with USDA cacao researchers and academics at the Guiltinan Cacao Research Lab at Penn State and the University of Hawaii. Raaka's First Nibs Subscription program has become the gold standard for chocolate innovation. Every year, Raaka releases 24 unique chocolate bars inspired by recipes from all over the world, and in collaboration with local chefs and artisans.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The agricultural and culinary landscape of human existence is full of mystery; it's what has always drawn me to it. Think about the way kimchi and sauerkraut are fermented cabbage dishes that two very different cultures tens of thousands of miles away from each other discovered and used as a major source of nutrients in cold weather, or contemplate that there are 4,000 different types of potatoes native to the Andes — these are the mysteries and bits of human ingenuity that make the world of food so inspiring.
Chocolate is no different. It begins as a finicky fruit that grows only in certain climates and only within a specific belt around the equator. The cocoa bean has ancient roots in the Amazon basin and made its way up through Mesoamerica. As an agricultural product, cocoa beans' roots are deeply imbedded in the ancient practice of agroforestry. The cocoa bean itself contains many compounds and minerals that have been sought after for millennia. Getting from a fruit on a tree to a chocolate bar is a long and tedious journey, but one full of intrigue. Let's discover how a brightly colored, football-shaped pod makes its way from a flower to a seed to a chocolate bar.
WHERE DOES THE CACAO TREE GROW?
Before sumptuous melted chocolate becomes a chocolate bar, chocolate begins with a tree. The Theobroma cacao tree loves the tropics, absolutely loves them. If fact, this tree loves the tropics so much that it refuses to grow outside of 20 degrees north or south of the equator. Given that 70 percent of the planet is made up of water, 20 degrees north or south of the equator isn't very much of the planet. Additionally, less than 28 percent of the world's total landmass sits within this latitude. We're talking about only around 8 percent of the globe that even qualifies for growing cacao.
However, cacao also has other conditions it prefers. Cacao doesn't like to grow anywhere above 1,000 meters, and never below 65°F (18°C). Cacao needs humidity and a lot of rainfall to thrive as well. If we inspect the belt of 20 degrees north and south of the equator a little closer, we'll find half of the Andes Mountains in South America and mountain ranges and highlands in Mexico, Guatemala, India, Myanmar, Indonesia, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and others. In addition to mountains, we'll find about a third of the Sahara Desert, half of Australia's Gibson Desert, as well as deserts in Peru, Chile, Kenya, Ethiopia, and many arid climates elsewhere. If we add it all up, we're looking at less than 4 percent of the planet that can be a habitat for the cacao tree.
New cacao trees are planted two different ways. The first is the most traditional. A cacao seed is selected and allowed to germinate in a bag of nutrient-rich soil. After it grows to be about a foot-and-a-half tall and forms branches, it is taken from its small nutrient-rich home and placed in a new spot among the other cacao trees. Cacao trees need to be planted about 5 feet (1.5 m) apart so as not to crowd each other. The second way to grow a new cacao tree is by using parts of two older cacao trees. This method is called grafting. To graft a cacao tree, you select budwood, or a small branch, off a large branch of a productive tree. Then you slice a v-shaped cut into the base of an existing tree that is getting too large or is no longer as productive as you'd like. You insert a whittled end of the budwood into the v-shape cut of the existing tree and wrap it with plastic wrap to prevent the cut from drying out and killing your budwood. If your graft takes, the budwood you've grafted on to your existing tree should start to flourish after a few days.
Trees that are planted from seeds are often grafted as well. For getting the most possible and easy-to-reach production out of a cacao tree, it is best for the tree to bifurcate, or split into two, as close as possible to the ground. To aid in this process, seedlings, or new trees, will be grafted so that they grow out into two equal sections that feed off the tree's roots. Once a grafted branch starts to flower, in one to two years, the existing low-yielding tree is cut down so that the baby tree can spread its wings. In the third year, the tree will start to fruit, and usually by the fourth or fifth year, you'll get your first harvest from a cacao tree.
THE CACAO FLOWER AND A SMALL FLY
In addition to how finicky cacao trees are about their environment, they are also very particular about how they want to be pollinated. Cacao flowers are tiny, funny-looking white flowers that dangle off the branch of the tree ever so delicately. A strong gust of wind can send cacao flowers flying from the tree they're meant to give life to. These tiny flowers also have a tiny protective shield that hides their pollen-producing anthers. Because of this shield, the cacao tree cannot be pollinated by a bee, like a normal plant, but instead relies on a tiny fly called a midge to pollinate its flowers. Midges range from just one to three millimeters in size. To complicate things, only the flies that grow larger than two millimeters are large enough to carry the pollen. The cacao midge is related to the mosquito and biting midges are common. Their bites can be quite nasty and plentiful when they're in season.
Complicating things even further, the cacao flower only lives for about two days, and each midge can barely carry enough pollen to pollinate one flower. These complications mean that it's quite a miracle for a tree to ever fruit to begin with. Only about 1 in every 300 cacao flowers will fruit. Of those fruits, only about half of them fruits will ever come to maturity. In the twenty-year lifespan of a cacao tree, it might produce around 150,000 flowers. Only about fifteen years of that lifespan will produce well for the farmer. One cacao pod represents about one 70 percent dark chocolate bar. So that means that in its life cycle, a healthy, average cacao tree will only produce about 250 chocolate bars. To put this into perspective, my small company produces about 350,000 chocolate bars a year in addition to producing baking chocolate for restaurants. This means that if I were to grow my own cocoa beans, I would have to start with a minimum of 1,400 trees to get the amount I needed for an average year of bar production.
CACAO GENETICS
Some people will try and tell you that cacao is full of genetic diversity just like apples and grapes used to make wine. With apples you get different flavors and textures from Gala and Pink Lady, and with wine you get different flavors, colors, and mouthfeel from Pinot Noir than you do from Sauvignon Blanc. Technically, this genetic diversity exists in cacao as well. I have used this comparison to briefly explain genetic diversity before. It's a useful tool to paint a picture when it comes to describing how and why different cocoa beans taste, smell, and look different. Unfortunately, it is only really a half-truth. The whole truth is quite convoluted.
Cacao is widely talked about as having four types of genetic varieties: Forastero, Criollo, Trinitario, and Nacional. This is an oversimplification. These aren't necessarily cacao varieties as much as they are signifiers for cacao from certain regions. I'll describe what these four names represent for the purposes of context. It is almost pointless to talk about the flavor variation in these four types of cacao, and you'll see why soon.
FORASTERO: The name of this cacao comes from a Spanish word whose literal translation is "stranger." It got this name because it referenced cacao that was not native to the Spanish empire. As a result, the cacao that grew in Brazil, and later in Africa, got this name. In a general sense, this cacao is very different from the cacao grown in Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, and so on, so the name does make some sense. However, it's become a blanket term used to describe cacao from Africa, some of which did not comefrom Brazil, but came from Central America or the Caribbean. There are also several different types of cacao that originate from Brazil, though they all tend to get lumped into the category of Forastero.
CRIOLLO: This is a variety of cacao native to Meso-america, more specifically the Yucatan and parts of Belize. Criollo is a specific genotype found in those areas. It is quite rare and very susceptible to disease, but you will find it and it is quite special. However, criollo is also a slang term used in Peru to describe anything wild or potentially native to specific regions. Also, because this type of cacao generally garners a higher price, in countries all over Central America people will use this term to describe cacao that predates an individual's knowledge of their land and the crops that are grown on it. If it is originally from an old tree and looks different than the hybridized modern varieties a farmer is growing, chances are they will call it Criollo or try to sell it as Criollo. That's not to say that the strange cacao they have may or may not be special; it's just that it might not be a true Criollo.
TRINITARIO: The Spanish brought true Criollo cacao to the island of Trinidad in the seventeenth century after they realized that it couldn't be grown back home in Spain. In 1727, a hurricane destroyed most of the Criollo cacao in Trinidad. Thirty years later, the Spanish brought heartier Forastero trees from Venezuela to Trinidad. These trees were likely a slightly more specific type of cacao, amelonado, or "that which looks like a melon." The Forastero mixed with the remaining Criollo trees and a new type of cacao was born, the Trinitario, or "that which is from Trinidad" (sense a theme?). Trinitario was brought back to the Spanish colonies and became prevalent as the global cacao trade grew. This is what most of the cacao grown in Latin America and the Caribbean is referred to as today.
NACIONALs A fourth type of cacao was "discovered" in Ecuador in the 1970s and called Nacional. This cacao is essentially the Criollo of Ecuador. It is a specialized cacao that is susceptible to disease, like Criollo, and only really takes hold in the rainforests in Ecuador, Colombia, and northeastern Peru. As with Criollo, anyone who has anything otherthan the hybrid cacaos prevalent in Ecuador is likely to refer to what they have as Nacional.
Okay, so let's unpack this a little. Not a lot of research was done concerning the genetics of cacao varietals until the twen- ty-first century. Even in this century, most of the research being done is being done not to solve the puzzle of cacao genetics, but to determine where the most disease-resistant varieties are and whether they have the same level of heartiness and durability in different regions and on different continents. In 2008, a paper was published naming ten different types of cacao, and since then several others have been identified, but again, we're talking about very recent history. So much is still unknown, and giant swaths of the map of Amazonia have yet to be studied and data mapped, but what we do know is that the identification of cacao types from a single farm can be very difficult.
Some cacao varieties are self-incompatible (they need pollen from a different plant) and some are self-compatible (they can pollinate with two flowers from the same tree). Grapes, on the other hand, are almost all self-compatible, while apples are self-incompatible. With grapes, unintended genetic mutations rarely occur and thus varietal purity is common and celebrated. Farmers who grow apples almost always use the pollen from a crabapple tree to pollinate the apple blossoms of the variety of apple they're trying to grow. When you manage an apple farm, you go to great lengths to ensure that your different varieties of apple groves are separated and that crabapple trees are evenly dispersed to encourage pollination with those trees. Using the crabapple maintains the relative genetic purity of the particular apple and ensures that the phenotypes (the shape, color, texture, flavor, and so forth) of that type of apple remain consistent.
This method for farming apples is generally not applied to cacao, and therefore the mixing that happens from one type of cacao to another is rarely done in a controlled manner. The world is mostly full of cacao varieties that have been haphazardly mixed over thousands of years. As cacao seeds and plants traveled up and down the Amazon, up to Central America from South America, brought to the Caribbean and over to Africa and Asia by the French, Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Dutch, the varieties got all cross-pollinated and mixed up. What you'll find on a cacao farm is beautiful: many shapes, colors, sizes, and textures of cacao pods. It's truly breathtaking, but it's a sign of confused phenotypes, and not a good indication of being able to determine simply what genetic type of cacao exists on a given farm. One of the main reasons why the separation of cacao varieties has been deprioritized on cacao farms is because the land management of these farms can be extremely difficult.
MANAGING A CACAO FARM
Cacao is a finicky shade crop and needs a partial canopy to protect its flowers and subsequent fruits from the hot sun of the subtropics. Too much shade, however, and the Theobroma cacao tree can become susceptible to harmful fungus and disease. Cacao trees must be regularly pruned to ensure the leaves of the tree aren't locking in too much humidity in the grove where the trees are. This humidity can cause a fungal disease called black pod. Black pod causes the cacao fruit to rot and produce spores that can spread to other trees with the mere presence of a light breeze. The cacao tree also makes the soil it is grown in very acidic. The acidity in the soil of a cacao farm is combated by growing the cacao among trees that are nitrogen fixers. These are trees that increase the pH in the soil, causing it to even out from the acidity of the cacao tree. Limestone can also be applied to the soil around cacao trees to ensure that the acidity of the soil doesn't get too high.
Cacao pods are difficult to harvest because they need to be harvested by hand. Pods need to be cut off close to the branch, but not so close that you damage the branch, causing it to not flower during the next harvest. Cacao trees are generally kept less than 20 feet (6 m) tall to make them easier to harvest. When they grow taller than that, they need to be grafted with a productive piece of branch from a different tree at the base of the old tree. When this branch begins to mature, the old tree is cut down to right above the new branch so that its old rootstockcan be used for the beginnings of the new tree.
These are the things that need to be done in addition to the normal land maintenance, like maintaining paths through the fields, raking leaves, and removing fallen branches and debris. The harvesting and processing after you get a good crop is also labor-intensive and difficult work.
HARVESTING CACAO
After cacao pods are cut from the trees, they're gathered and put into sacks. They are then carried to either a central clearing or back to a shed or dwelling where they are put in a large pile for opening. These sacks are very heavy and are carried by hand, sometimes up and down hills and for many yards ata time. When they are in a pile, they are cut down the middle with a machete, using care not to slice through any seed. When the white fruit is revealed, it is scooped out by hand with the seeds and tossed into a bucket. This mixture of wet fruit and cacao seeds is called baba. It generally takes five to seven people working two full days to harvest the cacao from a twenty-acre farm.
The buckets of baba are then carried or transported to a road where they're either loaded into a truck or placed to await the pickup of a fermentary or cooperative where they will be fermented and dried for export. The process of harvesting cacao needs to happen in a relatively short timeframe. Once cacao pods are cut from the trees, the fruit and seeds need to be removed within 5 days so that the fruit doesn't start to dry out and lose its robust sugar content. Once the fruit and seeds are removed from the pods, they need to get to a fermentary or into fermentation boxes within eight hours. This time crunch makes efficiency and an all-hands-on-deck attitude necessary for completing the job. In small rural or indigenous communities, it is common for the community to take turns harvesting each other's cacao farm over seven to ten days during the harvest season.
FERMENTING CACAO
The cacao seed is made up of knots, so to speak, of complex amino acids. The flavor of these amino acids is so strong that the human palate can only identify their flavor as intense bitterness. To break down these intense and complex knots of concentrated flavor into strands of flavor that the human senses can handle, the cacao seed needs to go through a transformation. This transformation takes place during the process of fermentation.
Cacao fermentation is a very important step in the process of making chocolate. I firmly believe that to make great chocolate, you need cocoa beans that are properly fermented. I spend most of my summer every year visiting my cacao suppliers, inspecting their fermentation facilities and monitoring their fermentation process. It is crucial to the quality of my chocolate.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Art And Craft of Chocolate"
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