Chocolate Cravings
Chocolate Deserves a Place In Your Heart
CHOCOLATE is supposedly derived from a Mayan word xocolātl, a word meaning ‘bitter water’. The seed of a tropical tree, cacao has been cultivated for about 3000 years in Mexico and areas further south. The inhabitants of these countries generally made a drink from the cacao bean which was also used as a currency.
The Spanish conquistadors took the drink back to Spain whence it spread across Europe. We are not talking chocolate candy bars here, this is still a drink. In a hundred years it had spread throughout Europe.
Demand was so high the Spanish used forced native labor to produce cacao, then imported enslaved Africans to work the plantations they created. The drink remained very expensive and exclusive.
Health Drinks
In England, things were more democratic, if still costly, with the first chocolate house opening in London in 1657. In 1689, a physician, Hans Sloane, developed a milk chocolate drink in Jamaica which was later acquired by the Cadbury brothers.
During the Industrial Revolution, different manufacturing processes arrived leading to different products including the solid chocolate bar. The English, Swiss, and Dutch had prominent roles in the development of modern chocolate.
Unsweetened chocolate contains mostly cocoa solids and cocoa butter in changeable percentages. It is pure chocolate, also called bitter or baking chocolate. It has a strength and depth of chocolate flavor. Most chocolate eaten today is sweetened with sugar.
Milk chocolate is sweetened chocolate with added powdered or condensed milk.
So-called ‘white chocolate’ contains only cocoa butter, sugar, and milk. Some countries do not classify this as chocolate since it contains no cocoa solids.
Dark chocolate is produced by adding fat and sugar to cocoa solids and cocoa butter.
Semi-sweet chocolate is a dark chocolate with a low sugar content.
Bittersweet chocolate is chocolate liquor to which sugar (commonly 33 per cent), more cocoa butter, and vanilla have been added. European food regulations specify levels of cocoa solids (35 per cent), in dark chocolate more than twice as high as American standards.
Excuses, excuses
Humanity loves chocolate – something to do with serotonin levels in the brain, by any chance? – but abhors the calories and their impact on human physiques, so when dark chocolate is said to contain high anti-oxidant levels which inhibit the formation of free radicals in the human body, and additional heart-benefical properties are claimed, one wonders if we are clutching at straws!
Regular, ‘small dose’ consumption of dark chocolate is said to lessen the risk of heart attack, so I’ll have a small dose now, purely for medicinal purposes, you understand. And later, I’ll have some dark anti-oxidant to combat those pesky free radicals!
You, too, should buy some anti-oxidant, cardio-protective chocolate. You may care to visit our online store and browse the selections there.
0 Responses to “Chocolate Cravings”