Chocolate

About chocolate

People first used the cacao tree as food in what is now Ecuador, at least 5,300 years ago. Chocolate itself is a food made from roasted and ground cocoa beans, and it can be a liquid, a solid or a paste. The beans come from Theobroma cacao.

The flavour is built in stages. Fermentation takes up to seven days and produces several flavour precursors, which eventually provide the chocolate taste. Roasting then shifts the result, and a low roast gives a more acid, aromatic flavour, while a high roast is more intense and bitter and lacks complex notes. Rodolphe Lindt invented the conche, the machine for the long mixing step that follows, in Bern in 1879.

Cocoa grows in a belt between 10 degrees north and 10 degrees south of the Equator. Ivory Coast and Ghana contribute about 60% of the world's cocoa supply, and worldwide bean production has reached 5.8 million tonnes, with Ivory Coast leading at 38%.

Roasted and baked foods owe part of their smell to alkylpyrazines, a family of aroma compounds. The Good Scents Company lists a "chocolate pyrazine", a mixture of methoxy-methylpyrazines, as a fragrance and flavour ingredient, and gives its odour as chocolate, cocoa, roasted, almond, hazelnut, peanut and nutty. Sweetness comes from other materials. Ethyl maltol reads as sweet and caramellic, with jammy, berry and cotton candy facets, while ethyl vanillin is sweet and creamy, with vanilla and root beer. The same Good Scents entry for the pyrazine mixture recommends usage up to 0.1% in the fragrance concentrate.