During the first three centuries in which chocolate was drunken in the Old World, it was a thick, strong and oily drink. Fifty percent of the cacao grain is very greasy and, although part of the fat would go up to the surface and could be taken out with a spoon, most of it remained inside the cup. In order to counteract the fat, several floury substances such as flour itself, oatmeal, ground acorn and Irish lichen. Although adulterating cacao was prohibited by a decree during the reign of Jorge III, these practices continued on until the middle or even end of the XIX century, simply because they made the drink more tasty.
Without a doubt, the most decisive moment of the history of chocolate was when in 1828 Coenraad J. Van Houten came up with and built a hydraulic press that was capable of bereaving the cacao up to two thirds of its fat, leaving a solid substance that had a pasty texture, the power of cacao, or essence of cacao as it was called before. He also discovered that the acid the cacao had in it could be neutralized, making it more digestible, by adding potash; a process that is till done to this day and in the business of chocolate it is called “dutching”.
Although John Cadbury had made what he called a “French chocolate made to eat” in 1842, actually it was only made of ground toasted grains and mixed with sugar and vanilla, and bars of chocolate looked like they were being produced at the same time all around Europe. The success of Van Houten’s press that was destined to fabricating powder cacao that prepared the way for Joseph Fry to experiment with the new sub product – cacao butter – Twenty years after Van Houten’s intervention, Fry produced the first high quality chocolate bar by mixing the cacao grains with sugar and added a supplement of cacao butter to it.
At first all of the chocolate that was produced was simply and pure chocolate but in 1875, Henri Nestle, a pharmacist, was investigating about the possible food alternatives for babies that were allergic to breast milk. A sub product of this investigation was condensed milk, and this caught the attention of a Swiss chocolate manufacturer, Daniel Pieter, who used Nestle to experiment in the fabrication of chocolate with milk. Today, the production of milk chocolate outweighs, by far, chocolate on its own.
Only about five years later another civilian of his, Rodolphe Lindt, made another important contribution with his discovery that was named “conching”. He found that when he left he chocolate for several days that were then slowly moved and fluttered, he was able to eliminate a lot of the bitterness and roughness from it. This was called “conching” because the original container in which Lindt did this process had the shape of a conch. “Conching” is still one of the most importing processes in the fabrication of chocolate and, in 1899, the house of Sprungli of Zurich considered Lindt’s equipment so valuable that they paid one and a half million gold francs for his factory in Bern and founded the world wide famous company of Sprungli and Lindt.
Desserts Recipes Evolution of the Fabrication of Chocolate
