The glory of chocolate

Evocations of the chocolate of my childhood have flooded my mind while pondering this introduction. Even when I was very small I much preferred the dark, sophisticated adult-tasting chocolate to the over-sweet milky version. I had a favourite brand – no longer available, unfortunately – called Nestlé Superfine, which was always given to me on birthdays. Sometimes it was a straight chocolate bar; sometimes it contained clusters of dark, highly roasted almonds. Either way, it was always an enormous treat, not only to be anticipated but to be savoured right down to the very last square.

Those were the days of sweet rationing in the early years after the war, and I sometimes think it's sad that the special-ness of chocolate has faded. Now it's available everywhere from kiosks, tobacconists and vending machines and so has become just an ordinary, everyday item. Worse than that, the mass marketing of chocolate has brought an inevitable downgrading in quality, and the nation's increasing addiction to sugar and sugar substitutes has meant that chocolate is not always eaten for itself but as a backdrop, more to satisfy a craving for sweetness, so much so that if you're addicted to sweet substances like diet cola and so on the true glory of chocolate will probably escape you.

What, then, is the true glory? To discover it we need to consider how much _actual _chocolate is in a chocolate bar. It is a moot point. Close examination of the packaging will reveal that it can be as high as 75 or as low as 20 per cent. For chocolate lovers – and particularly for the cook – these variations need explaining.

What is chocolate?
Chocolate comes from the cocoa bean, the fruit of the cacao tree, which grows in Africa, South America and the West Indies, and the beans vary in quality and flavour. After roasting and crushing, the beans become a thick paste called chocolate mass, and this is composed of cocoa solids and cocoa butter, which is chocolate's natural oil. Cocoa solids, once they are crushed again and sieved, become cocoa powder. For chocolate, however, cocoa butter is essential, as this is what gives it its melting qualities, and the higher the proportion, the better the chocolate. We need not concern ourselves here with the complexities of how the beans are transformed into the silky-textured ingredient known as chocolate; what we do need to know is how much actual cocoa the chocolate contains. My advice is not to worry about technical words such as cocoa mass, cocoa butter or cocoa solids, but to look fairly and squarely at the word cocoa on the packet. How much does it have? Manufacturers usually use the words 'cocoa solids', and we need 75 per cent if we want an intensely chocolatey flavour, and if we are cooking with it and adding it to other ingredients (which will dilute it somewhat), it's essential to get the highest-possible cocoa-solid content.

What is not chocolate?
If only 20 per cent of the essential component, cocoa solids, is present in a chocolate bar, this means 80 per cent of it comprises something else. This can be vegetable fat or butterfat, emulsifiers, milk solids, flavourings and, worst of all, sugar – so much of it that the small quantity of cocoa solid is killed. The reason for this is that mass marketing is always about price. Real chocolate costs more money, so the higher the cocoa content, the higher the price. But here we are concerned with how to cook, and with chocolate that means getting the best you can afford.