White and dark chocolate

The white chocolate here is a European bar that a friend gave me. 

The dark chocolate is el Rey couverture. Called couverture because it covers, coats, enrobes regular chocolate candy in manufacture, and it is also used to pour candy bars. These are discs common commercially, not chocolate chips which are altered for the purpose of keeping their kissie shape when they are squirted out.

Tonight they are dinner.

Since preparation and cleanup are minimal tonight there is time to relate a few things about chocolate now that chocolate and I have developed, you know, a thing. Skip if you like, I don't care. But this is what happens after awhile, one starts projecting oneself into all kind of strange chocolate situations, and by 'oneself,' I mean me.

The benefit that fermentation imparts to cocoa beans would have been a discovery made early. Picture it: You're out there in your little Mayan skirt and sandals under the shade of the cocoa trees to harvest cocoa pods. These patches of cocoa trees are unusual. It's kind of weird because the cocoa pod trees are scraggly trees that are themselves in the shade of larger trees that are also scraggly to let in sufficient light for the cocoa trees to live under them. Too much sun and the trees burn, and we're on the equator. Too much shade and the trees are choked of light. So there is a symbiosis of two tree species going on here creating a layered canopy. They're goofball trees too, actually. Very persnickety. They grow football-like pods right there on their trunks. Each pod contain about forty seeds, the cocoa beans, but the seeds are encased in a white mucilaginous material. It is hot out there even in the shade of the cocoa tree shaded by other taller trees. It is a veritable steam bath. The fallen pods crack open, the material encasing the seeds begins fermenting immediately. So then you come along to pick off the cocoa pods from the tree trunks and notice the easy ones on the ground ranging from freshly fallen to nearly rotten. You collect them for their seeds but you must decide how rotten is too rotten. Some of the pods are really bad sitting there on the ground broken open. The smell attracts insects. The goop inside is slimy, obviously necrotic and apparently enzymatically active in a deteriorative sort of way, and yet the beans are in there. You do it. You stick your hand right into the smelly bubbling goop and pull out the seeds to keep. You hold the seeds pulled from the fully rotten pods separate from the others still in their pods so they do not contaminate the good ones, but you're still trying to be economical here and salvage as much as you can. Upon drying the seeds and crushing them you are forced to notice that the fully fermented seeds are altogether better than the unfermented seeds. Therefore, henceforth fermentation it is. That would have happened on the first day of pod collection. Fermentation, then drying. Dried in the sun for a week. Then roasted. De-shelled. The cocoa is then ground to a paste. For reasons known to industry, the paste is renamed 'liquor' even though it is non-alcoholic. The paste is pressed to extract the fat. Really pressed. Pressed good and hard. The pressed liquor rid of its fat becomes a powder and the oil pressed out is renamed by industry to 'cocoa butter'. I find this industry penchant for renaming things along the way to be somewhat bothersome and unnecessary and I struggle to overlook it. For white chocolate, the pressed out oil, cocoa butter, drains away from the pressed powder, now a hockey puck of compacted powder. Most of the oil is retained to be mixed back with the powder for various products, but a portion of the oil is carried away from the world of dark chocolate and regarded as a separate product entirely for it has none of the spellbinding magical elements, the anti-oxidents, the caffeine, the splendid medicinal curing properties of cocoa solids that heal and mend and stabilize. Reportedly. For white chocolate, instead, the cocoa butter proceeds along its industrial conveyor to get fitted up with milk solids, milk fat and sugar. So what's not to like? Why the calumny against white chocolate? Is it the word, the apparent oxymoron? What? Is it the fake white substitutions ruin it for the real cocoa butter? Is it seen as eating a stick of butter? Is that bad? Is it the absence of the salubrious dry cocoa elements? You know for college graduates you sure ask a lot of stupid questions. White chocolate is not masquerading as a paler shade of regular chocolate, rather, it is a different thing, a byproduct of chocolate production, a simpler thing. Maybe it would better for you if they would stop calling it chocolate. Just drop the word chocolate. Call it 'white'. This is the cocoa fat that causes so much trouble for tempering. We're told the various fats in chocolate have varying melting points so the melting point of chocolate is expressed as range of temperatures. But here it is, a block, an apparent single fat separated out, and not a complex conglomeration of various different fats. What's up with that? The cocoa butter is all the same single fat molecule, yes, but the crystalline structure of cocoa butter molecule takes six different forms, each form has its own properties. Tempering attempts to attain the highest possible percentage of the best crystalized form, the fifth crystalline form specifically. In terms of completed structural rigidity, stability, and tensile strength, the sixth crystalline form goes too far for pleasing chocolate confections, and the first four forms do not go far enough.