• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

All about Chocolate this week!

Occasionally you should indulge yourself with the rich, satisfying taste of chocolate. It melts so perfectly in your mouth, and warms your soul. Chocolate gives you a mild feeling of euphoria, similar to when you fall in love, because it contains PEA a substance which releases endorphins in your brain.

Chocolate is a favorite for kids and adults alike. Chocolate bars, chocolate fudge, chocolate cake, chocolate chip cookies, chocolate ice cream, chocolate milk, chocolate cereal, hot chocolate, chocolate sauce… There is something special about this substance — so special that the average person in the United States eats 10 pounds (4.5 kg) of chocolate every year!

Have you ever wondered where chocolate comes from? In this article, we’ll enter the amazing world of chocolate so you can understand exactly what you’re eating!

The Cocoa Bean
Chocolate starts with a tree called the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao). This tree grows in equatorial regions, especially in places such as South America, Africa and Indonesia.

The cacao tree produces a fruit about the size of a small pineapple. Inside the fruit are the tree’s seeds, also known as cocoa beans.

The beans are fermented for about a week, dried in the sun and then shipped to the chocolate maker. In the next sections, we’ll look at how the chocolate maker turns these raw beans into luscious chocolate.­

There are three basic things that must be done by the chocolate maker to make a chocolate bar:

* Adding ingredients – The chocolate that we eat contains sugar, other flavors (like vanilla) and often milk (in milk chocolate). The chocolate maker adds these ingredients according to his or her secret recipe.

* Conching – A special machine is used to massage the chocolate in order to blend the ingredients together and smooth it out. Conching can take anywhere from two to six days.

* Tempering – Tempering is a carefully controlled heating process. According to this Chocolate FAQ, tempering is “a process where the chocolate is slowly heated, then slowly cooled, allowing the cocoa butter molecules to solidify in an orderly fashion.” Without tempering, the chocolate does not harden properly or the cocoa butter separates out (as cream separates from milk).

Types of Chocolate:

Baking Chocolate
Pure cocoa liquor with nothing added

Cocoa Powder
Cocoa bean solids; cocoa liquor pressed to remove the cocoa butter

Semisweet Chocolate
Pure cocoa liquor with extra cocoa butter and some sugar

Milk Chocolate
Pure cocoa liquor with extra cocoa butter, sugar and milk solids; more milk than chocolate liquor

White Chocolate
Cocoa butter with sugar and milk; no cocoa bean solids

This week:

Take the Chocolate Challenge

Chocolate

Mousse Recipe

Ingredients:

• 2 cups heavy cream
• 4 egg yolks
• 3 tablespoons granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 7 oz bittersweet chocolate, melted and kept lukewarm

Preparation:

Heat 2/3 cup of cream in small saucepan until it just begins to steam. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg yolks and sugar, and then add ½ hot cream, whisking constantly, until the mixture is thoroughly combined. Add the warm egg-cream blend back into the hot cream in the saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture reaches 165 F degrees on a digital candy thermometer. Remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla extract and melted chocolate. Chill the chocolate custard thoroughly.

Beat remaining 1 1/3 cups of cream in a separate bowl until stiff peaks form. Thoroughly stir ½ cup of the whipped cream into the chilled chocolate custard, and then gently fold in the remaining cream. The chocolate mousse is ready when the chocolate custard is thoroughly incorporated into the whipped cream, and no marbling shows. Serve chilled.