Everything You Need to Know About Chocolate

Strictly speaking, all chocolate is bean-to-bar, just as all meals are essentially farm-to-table. But just like the chef who fanatically seeks out all her ingredients, down to the flakes of salt garnishing her sustainable line-caught crudo, bean-to-bar chocolate makers obsess over the character and ethical origins of their beans.

This is in marked contrast to mainstream industrial chocolate, in which the beans are a commodity product, bought in bulk for price, not quality.

“If there are infested, moldy, terrible-looking beans mixed in with the good ones” large chocolate companies will buy them anyway, said John Scharffenberger, a founder of Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker in San Francisco. That’s because big companies often mix in so many other ingredients that the consumer won’t taste any bad beans in the final product.

[Learn how to taste chocolate like a professional.]

The best bean-to-bar chocolate makers (also called craft or micro chocolate makers) choose beans the way chefs choose tomatoes — obsessively, often visiting the farms where the beans are grown. They roast and grind the beans themselves before making them into chocolate bars.

The pastry chef and author David Lebovitz, who wrote “The Great Book of Chocolate,” compares bean-to-bar chocolate to natural wine. “It’s exciting and alive in a way that even really great regular chocolate isn’t,” he said. “It can surprise you.”

Who started the bean-to-bar craze?

The new wave of craft chocolate began with Scharffen Berger, founded in 1996 by Mr. Scharffenberger, a winemaker, and Robert Steinberg, who had studied at the famous chocolate shop Bernachon, in Lyon, France.

“When we started, there were only nine companies grinding their own cacao in the United States and they were all huge, except for Guittard,” Mr. Scharffenberger said, referring to the Guittard Chocolate Company, also in San Francisco. “We were the first new chocolate maker on the scene in 150 years.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/dining/chocolate-bar.html?emc=rss&partner=rss