Tastings held at La Maison du Chocolat's Madison Avenue boutique include samplings of artisanal couvertures, ganaches, pralines, truffles, mousses and more. At $70 a pop, the sessions aren't for the casual dabbler, but they are proof that even amidst our economic woes, chocolate—and premium chocolate, in particular—remains a non-negotiable luxury.
A breed apart
What bumps one chocolate into the premium ranks while leaving others behind? It boils down to this: "Ingredients must be top quality," says Richard Benson, director of research and development, North America Innovation, Barry Callebaut USA, Chicago.
That means pure vanilla and sweeteners that consumers read as "real."
"A baking chip can have dextrose in it to help stop it from smearing," notes Michelle Frame, director of confectionery R&D, Kerry Ingredients & Flavors, Elk Grove Village, IL. "But that's one of the ingredients that, if someone's looking for a premium bar, they're not going to want to see." Instead, old-fashioned sugar is the most common choice, along with evaporated cane juice, which "can add additional brown notes that blend nicely with chocolate's flavor," she says.
For other flavorings, natural is obligatory. Natural flavors often require higher use levels and have a shorter shelf life, and they have a certain transparency that leaves little cover for any faults in the chocolate itself. "You've got nothing but the cocoa beans for the flavor profile," Frame says. That means the beans had better be good.
"Bean quality is based on the growing area, the harvesting practice, the fermentation, the drying practices—all are significant influences on the flavor profile, and hence the chocolate's quality," says Benson. "Then the roasting practices, the production of the chocolate liquor, and the processing, refining, and conching of the chocolate itself come into play."
Conching—agitation of the refined chocolate mass in a heated vessel—is crucial to a finished chocolate's quality. It drives remaining moisture from the chocolate mass, aerates the mass and distributes cocoa butter throughout the cocoa solids. And it develops chocolate flavor, generating important Maillard reaction products, allowing some phenolics to oxidize, and driving off undesirable volatiles, such as organic acids.
"Before conching," Frame explains, "the flavor components stick out like jagged edges. Conching rounds all that out, files down the astringency, and blends all the flavors together so there are no dead spots and no sharp peaks." Conching also reduces the chocolate's particle size, although most of that reduction takes place during refining. Nevertheless, the finer particles are another indicator of quality, with sizes of 20 microns or smaller yielding a smooth and creamy mouthfeel.
