The Chocolate Party
Today was chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate! It was a busy day with a LOT of chaos happening.
The first thing we spoke about with our guest chef, Chef Ugo, was the difference between chocolate made with cocoa butter and chocolate made with vegetable fat. We tried the different types before we were told anything. The chocolate with the vegetable fat was very soft and had no snap or crunch at all. It also coated your mouth a little too much, leaving behind a film of fat. Chocolate made with this is considered very low quality. The other chocolate made with the cocoa butter had a nice crunch and snap. This is considered a high quality chocolate when it is made with cocoa butter, but of course, it is more expensive.
After class I felt I needed to further look into the history of chocolate. Here is what I discovered:
The history of chocolate dates back to Mesoamerica where they made a fermented chocolate beverage that was very bitter, spicy (they added spices to it), and they believed it gave them strength. The Aztecs thought that cacao seeds were a gift from Quetzalcoatl, the god of wisdom. Cacao seeds were used to trade goods, similar to money or a currency; the larger the cacao seed, the more you could trade it for.
Once it arrived to Europe by Herman Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, it was brought to the monasteries where they added sugar to the chocolate drink. This gave it a grainy texture because at the time there was no conching process. Unfortunately, Cortes killed the Mayan empire in the process of getting the chocolate.
When the craze for chocolate began in the 17th century, it brought with it also the slave market. Cocoa plantations became very important and was often worked by poor wage workers. The Mesoamerican workers who used to work the plantations were brought down by disease, therefore they were replaced with poor people and slaves.
During the Industrial Revolution new processes came to the forefront of the chocolate world. In 1815, a Dutch chemist, Coenraad van Houten, introduced salts to chocolate (an alkaline), which cut the amount of bitterness in the chocolate. Then in 1828, he also created a process to remove half of the cacao butter from the chocolate liquor, making it cheaper to produce and giving it a consistent quality. This began the modern era of chocolate!
The first thing we spoke about with our guest chef, Chef Ugo, was the difference between chocolate made with cocoa butter and chocolate made with vegetable fat. We tried the different types before we were told anything. The chocolate with the vegetable fat was very soft and had no snap or crunch at all. It also coated your mouth a little too much, leaving behind a film of fat. Chocolate made with this is considered very low quality. The other chocolate made with the cocoa butter had a nice crunch and snap. This is considered a high quality chocolate when it is made with cocoa butter, but of course, it is more expensive.
After class I felt I needed to further look into the history of chocolate. Here is what I discovered:
The history of chocolate dates back to Mesoamerica where they made a fermented chocolate beverage that was very bitter, spicy (they added spices to it), and they believed it gave them strength. The Aztecs thought that cacao seeds were a gift from Quetzalcoatl, the god of wisdom. Cacao seeds were used to trade goods, similar to money or a currency; the larger the cacao seed, the more you could trade it for.
Once it arrived to Europe by Herman Cortes, the Spanish conquistador, it was brought to the monasteries where they added sugar to the chocolate drink. This gave it a grainy texture because at the time there was no conching process. Unfortunately, Cortes killed the Mayan empire in the process of getting the chocolate.
When the craze for chocolate began in the 17th century, it brought with it also the slave market. Cocoa plantations became very important and was often worked by poor wage workers. The Mesoamerican workers who used to work the plantations were brought down by disease, therefore they were replaced with poor people and slaves.
During the Industrial Revolution new processes came to the forefront of the chocolate world. In 1815, a Dutch chemist, Coenraad van Houten, introduced salts to chocolate (an alkaline), which cut the amount of bitterness in the chocolate. Then in 1828, he also created a process to remove half of the cacao butter from the chocolate liquor, making it cheaper to produce and giving it a consistent quality. This began the modern era of chocolate!
Italian Word of the Day: Albero del cacao = "Cocoa Tree"
Cabosse = "cocoa"
This process today took us through a lot of ups and downs, but I tried to make the most out of it! I made a butter ganache, unlike any other I have ever made. The 3 ingredients were butter, powered sugar, and dark chocolate. The thought of adding powdered sugar to a ganache was very different to me, usually it is just butter, cream, chocolate, and maybe a liquor. This ingredient gave it a very grainy texture that was not very pleasant. If I was to make this again, I would try to whip the butter and powdered sugar together to make almost like a "frosting" (but not), then add the chocolate when it was warm, not at a cooler temperature. I believe this may help remove some of the grainy texture and make a smoother ganache.
I also glazed and decorated this petit gateaux! I glazed it with white glaze, then splattered some gold and rose gold color on it.
Fun Fact of the Day:
This one definitely does not fit today's class, but it's interesting!
Describe the special tools of an Italian kitchen
that vary from an American kitchen.
On pasta day, I made garganelli pasta, which in the states a gnocchi board is often used. Here, there is a specific board used that is hard to find, but is specifically for it. It is wooden and has sort of like a twine of lines going across it. This makes the perfect garganelli and is a very traditional tool here in Italy.
Another tool used on that day by another group was the chitarra, a pasta cutter believed to be invented in the city of Chieti, in the Abruzzo region of Italy. This is sort of like a double-sided harp that has strings nailed and tied tightly, allowing one to push pasta sheets through it creating tonnarelli pasta.
With Love,
Baylee
Comments
Post a Comment