Three factors are important in describing chocolate: the bean variety, origin and the percentage of cacao. Most chocolate is made from a blend of cacao beans from all over the world. Forastero, the base bean of most blends, is grown in Africa, Brazil and Asia; it makes up 90 percent of the world's cocoa supply. Other varieties include Criollo, a prized bean from South and Central America and Southeast Asia; and Trinitario (a hybrid of Criollo and Forastero) from Trinidad, but nowadays grown in other regions, such as Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia.
Switzerland is recognized for its chocolate. Swiss chocolate dates back to 1819, when François-Louis Cailler opened a mechanized chocolate factory near Lake Geneva. At the time, chocolate was brittle, rough-surfaced and bitter. In 1867, the first milk chocolate was produced when Daniel Peter, a Swiss manufacturer, managed to combine chocolate with milk. The real breakthrough came in 1879, when Rodolphe Lindt hit upon the idea of adding cocoa butter to smooth out the texture in a shell-shaped machine called a conche, which churned and turned the mixture for three days.
The percentage of cacao specifies the amount of cocoa mass (or chocolate liquor) plus cocoa butter (natural fat in the cacao bean). The cocoa mass itself is made up of roughly half cocoa butter and half dry cocoa solids, but since the ratio varies amongst beans, two brands labeled 70 percent cacao may not have the same percentage of cocoa butter. One consistent factor is that most of the residual content is sugar, so the higher the cacao percentage, the less sugar in the chocolate. See also Mexican chocolate, phenylethylamine, tempering.
From The Food Encyclopedia by Jacques Rolland and Carol Sherman
