Even Catholic monks loved chocolate and drank it to aid religious practices. The Spanish kept chocolate quiet for a very long time. It was nearly a century before the treat reached neighboring France, and then the rest of Europe. To celebrate the union, she brought samples of chocolate to the royal courts of France. As the trend spread through Europe, many nations set up their own cacao plantations in countries along the equator. Chocolate remained immensely popular among European aristocracy.
Royals and the upper classes consumed chocolate for its health benefits as well as its decadence. Chocolate was still being produced by hand, which was a slow and laborious process. But with the Industrial Revolution around the corner, things were about to change.
In , the invention of the chocolate press revolutionized chocolate making. This innovative device could squeeze cocoa butter from roasted cacao beans, leaving a fine cocoa powder behind.
The powder was then mixed with liquids and poured into a mold, where it solidified into an edible bar of chocolate. And just like that, the modern era of chocolate was born. Different forms and flavours of chocolate are produced by varying the quantities of the different ingredients. Other flavours can be obtained by varying the time and temperature when roasting the beans. Milk chocolate is solid chocolate made with milk added in the form of powdered milk, liquid milk, or condensed milk.
Such chocolate is labelled as "family milk chocolate" elsewhere in the European Union. The Hershey Company is the largest producer in the US. The actual Hershey process is a trade secret, but experts speculate that the milk is partially lipolyzed, producing butyric acid, and then the milk is pasteurized, stabilizing it for use. This process gives the product a particular taste, to which the US public has developed an affinity, to the extent that some rival manufacturers now add butyric acid to their milk chocolates.
Dark chocolate , also known as "plain chocolate", is produced using a higher percentage of cocoa with all fat content coming from cocoa butter instead of milk, but there are also "dark milk" chocolates and many degrees of hybrids. Baking chocolate containing no added sugar may be labeled "unsweetened chocolate". White chocolate is made of sugar, milk, and cocoa butter, without the cocoa solids.
It is pale ivory colour, and lacks many of the compounds found in milk and dark chocolates. A cacao seed can give us a few things. One of them is cocoa powder, which is the dry part of the seed. Then there is the cocoa butter, which is the wet part of the seed.
The chemist Coenraad van Houten had the idea to make a cocoa press. His press took a lot of fat out of cocoa beans and created a paste like cake batter that could then be made into cocoa powder. This press also made it possible to remix the powder with cocoa butter. When the powder is processed, heat and friction can activate the cocoa butter and help produce chocolate liquor, a thick, chocolatey liquid.
In , Joseph Fry figured out how to use these different ingredients to create a chocolate paste that he could mold into a rectangle. You can still buy it today. By the 17th century, chocolate was a fashionable drink throughout Europe, believed to have nutritious, medicinal and even aphrodisiac properties it's rumored that Casanova was especially fond of the stuff.
But it remained largely a privilege of the rich until the invention of the steam engine made mass production possible in the late s. In , a Dutch chemist found a way to make powdered chocolate by removing about half the natural fat cacao butter from chocolate liquor, pulverizing what remained and treating the mixture with alkaline salts to cut the bitter taste.
His product became known as "Dutch cocoa," and it soon led to the creation of solid chocolate. The creation of the first modern chocolate bar is credited to Joseph Fry, who in discovered that he could make a moldable chocolate paste by adding melted cacao butter back into Dutch cocoa.
By , a little company called Cadbury was marketing boxes of chocolate candies in England. Milk chocolate hit the market a few years later, pioneered by another name that may ring a bell — Nestle.
In America, chocolate was so valued during the Revolutionary War that it was included in soldiers' rations and used in lieu of wages. While most of us probably wouldn't settle for a chocolate paycheck these days, statistics show that the humble cacao bean is still a powerful economic force.
Chocolate manufacturing is a more than 4-billion-dollar industry in the United States, and the average American eats at least half a pound of the stuff per month. In the 20th century, the word "chocolate" expanded to include a range of affordable treats with more sugar and additives than actual cacao in them, often made from the hardiest but least flavorful of the bean varieties forastero.
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