Food & Wine
Chocolate Craving
by ELLISE PIERCE
We were not a family of huggers. We didn’t express how we felt verbally, either. But we showed our love in other ways — namely, with chocolate.
When I was in grade school in Denton, Texas, I’d spend afternoons making rich, chocolaty fudge, which I’d deliver to my mom, still warm and on her favorite strawberry plates, as a surprise while she was upstairs sewing. I’d try to time the fudgemaking to when Daddy would come home, too, because even though he was a dentist, he had the biggest sweet tooth in the family. He was known to hide a stash of miniature Hershey’s chocolate bars and Reese’s candies high in the cabinets where (he thought) no one could reach them.
As a treat for all of us, my dad often made homemade fudge sauce for ice cream sundaes. My favorite birthday cake is still my mother’s chocolate cake with seven-minute icing and delicate chocolate shavings on top. A few years ago at Easter, my brother made an amazing flourless chocolate tart, which we all swooned over. Every time I visit him, I bring a box of his favorite chocolates. In other words, my family’s obsession is long-standing.
But I’m hardly the first to discover chocolate’s magic. Chocolate was first cultivated, some believe, as many as 4,000 years ago in the tropical rainforests of what is now Mexico and Central America by the Olmec Indians, but the Maya are credited with putting chocolate on the world’s culinary map.
Around A.D. 600, when the Maya discovered the cacao trees’ football-shaped pods, they knew they’d stumbled onto something special. They figured out how to split open the pods, then harvest, ferment, and roast the beans. Grinding the seeds into a paste, they’d mix in water, chile peppers, and cornmeal for a thick, spicy drink known as xocoatl (which means “bitter water”). When the Aztecs discovered the sacred Maya drink, they began trading for the precious cacao beans, which they could not get in the more arid north where they lived. Like the Maya, the Aztecs ground the beans by hand, with a mano and a metate, and sipped xocoatl only on special occasions and for religious ceremonies. With its requisite foamy top, made by pouring the brown liquid back and forth from cup to cup, this pre-Columbian chocolate drink may have also been the inspiration for today’s latte. Double tall xocoatl, with an extra shot of chile, please.
But cacao beans were no mere commodity: They had such value that the Aztecs began using them as a form of currency. One cacao bean could buy a tamale and 100 would fetch a good turkey hen. With such a high value placed on the bean, only the richest — rulers, priests, and decorated warriors — could afford to drink chocolate. Considered by the Aztecs to be a holy food brought to earth by the god Quetzalcoatl, cacao beans were both precious and divine, and they were often given as offerings to the gods.
Xocoatl may have been the world’s first luxury drink. The Aztec king Montezuma loved chocolate so much that he is said to have drunk 50 cups of the stuff a day. But his life as a chocoholic ended when the Spaniard conquistador Hernán Cortés appeared in his court in 1519. Montezuma offered him a mug of chocolate because he thought that Cortés was a god. Not even close. Cortés was all about the booty — gold and chocolate were among the treasures he plundered. Cortés brought tons of chocolate back to Spain, and for the next 100 years or so, the Spaniards kept it to themselves. You can hardly blame them. Drinking chocolate — with sugar, vanilla, nutmeg, allspice, and cinnamon added — became fashionable among the royal set. When Ann of Austria, daughter of Phillip III of Spain, introduced the new drink to her husband, Louis XIII of France, in 1615, chocolate’s noble status was once again affirmed. The French actually passed a law restricting access to chocolate to royals alone.
But some things can’t be kept secret, no matter how hard you try. Word spread faster than Nutella melting on hot toast, and by the end of the 17th century, chocolate shops were popping up all over Europe. Chocolate was considered both a nutritious drink and an aphrodisiac, and chocolate shops were places to meet, gossip, and hang out (no word on whether there was a mixed jazz soundtrack playing in the background).
The Industrial Revolution led to the mechanization of chocolate production, and in 1847 Englishman Joseph Fry created the first chocolate bar. Fry discovered a way to separate powdered cocoa and mix it with cocoa butter and sugar to make a moldable paste. With these developments, chocolate became democratized. Soon it was available to most everyone. It’s still a favorite in its homeland of Mesoamerica. Today in Mexico, a long wooden swizzle stick called a molinillo froths up a Maya-like foam on top of hot chocolate. Often served with churros (long fried donuts covered in cinnamon and sugar), Mexican hot chocolate, with its hint of cinnamon, is indeed an ancient treat. Thankfully, the human sacrifice ritual that was once accompanied by drinking chocolate has become passé.
From rustic ranches in the West to jet-set beaches on the Riviera, we satisfy our chocolate cravings with bonbons and bars, with or without nuts, along with brownies, mousses, cookies, and cupcakes with fluffy icing swirls on top. We put chocolate in our cereals, add it to our trail mix, make ice cream out of it, infuse it in tea, and stir it into our coffee. Some perfumes even have notes of chocolate.
There is chocolate that is bitter, and there is chocolate that, like most love stories, is bittersweet. There’s milk chocolate; dark chocolate; and white chocolate, which is not technically chocolate at all, because it’s made from cocoa butter (not solids from the cacao bean). To most palates, it’s all delicious, but the dark stuff is also really good for you. Research shows that dark chocolate is loaded with antioxidants — it has even more than red wine — so for health reasons, I eat bittersweet chocolate (66 percent cocoa solids or more) every day. When I travel, whether it’s an afternoon trail ride in Texas or a transcontinental flight, you can bet I’ve got chocolate in my saddlebag. And to this day, my mom still talks about her fudge-surprise afternoons the same way I remember my chocolate cake birthdays. I once had a boyfriend who figured out the way to my heart was to always bring my favorite bars of French chocolate whenever he’d visit.
Boyfriends come and go. But a love affair with chocolate? That’s forever.
Ellise Pierce is the Cowgirl Chef. For more recipes, go to www.cowboysindians.com/food-wine/recipes/ and www.cowgirlchef.com; follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/cowgirlchef.
Baking with Chocolate
Milk, semi-, bitter-, and unsweetened -- when do you use which kind of chocolate? And what’s the difference?
The Cowgirl Chef hunts down former Chez Panisse pastry chef David Lebovitz, author of The Great Book of Chocolate (Ten Speed Press) and The Sweet Life in Paris (Broadway), for answers to some of the great chocolate questions.
Cowboys & Indians: If both semi- and bitter-sweet chocolates must have a minimum of 35 percent cacao solids, how do we distinguish between the two?
David Lebovitz: Basically, it all comes down to flavor. Whatever tastes best to you is the best chocolate to use.
C&I: Does one work better than the other in certain recipes, or is it a matter of personal taste?
Lebovitz: Since the designations are arbitrary, according to the FDA [Food and Drug Administration], I recommend people use what’s recommended by the recipe that they’re following if they’re unsure.
C&I: Some recipes call for a mix of unsweetened chocolate and bitter- or semisweet. Why?
Lebovitz: The unsweetened chocolate can add a certain bitter chocolate note that you can’t get with bittersweet or semisweet chocolate. However, since unsweetened chocolate has no sugar, it can be crumbly and more acidic, so sometimes a mix of both is called for.
C&I: What’s the best cacao percentage to shoot for with chips for chocolate chip cookies, or is there one?
Lebovitz: I don’t really think there is one. Once again, it all comes down to taste.
C&I: Can some chocolate be too bitter to use on its own for chocolate chips, brownies, and cakes? What’s the percentage to try to stay within or under?
Lebovitz: Yes. Some cooks have trouble with the high-percentage chocolates in recipes like ganache, where the acidity can cause the mixture to break, or for melting in general. Once again, check to see what the author of the recipe recommends, but in general, I try to keep the percentage of the chocolate I’m using at under 70 percent.
— E.P.
