Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophes, where one man tries to drink his pain away with Hot Cocoa and Warm Apple Cider. I’m your Diabetic Dipsomaniac, Jon O’Guin, and today, we’re tackling a distinction we made in Monday’s post, as well as some Southern sipping variants of seasonal drinks, and maybe a little blood sacrifice.

“Cacao” Sounds A Little Like a Batman Sound-Effect

“Biff!” “Wapoosh!” “Cacao!” Moving on. Today, we’re going to talk about cocoa powder, which means we have to talk about cacao and chocolate, and how none of those three things are the same, while also…kind of being the same.

Like how these are all Batman, but none of them are the same Batman.
And I only know like, 4 of them.

So, the basics: Cacao is a plant that grows in sub-tropical regions. It grows pods that honestly look weirdly like the seeds Rick has Morty put up his butthole in the first episode. Inside those pods are white, slime-covered beans. These beans apparently taste like sweet lemons, which is something I was not expecting to learn today. You crack the pods open, and slop the beans and pulp into boxes to ferment under leaves or burlap.

Sometimes translucent plastic. Look, I don’t make the rules.

Once the beans have fermented to remove some of that acidity and tannic astringency, the cacao is dried in the sun, and ready for storage and transport to roasting facilities. At the roasting facility, the chocolate is, well, roasted, and then winnowed: the outer fibrous hull is cracked off along with the interior of the beans, and separated out. The resulting bits of roasted cacao beans are what’s called “cacao nibs”, which you might see for sale at health food shops or organic food sections. This is because they have basically all of the upsides of chocolate (antioxidants, minerals, etc), with none of the high sugar content. And if you’re cool with darker chocolates, you should have a fairly fine time with them.

Twist it Up Baby, Now

What happens next depends on whether you’re making cocoa powder or chocolate: see, these nibs currently hold the cocoa solids and cocoa butter, two ingredients necessary to make chocolate…but only one of which is desired for cocoa. Which makes sense, when you think about it: Cocoa BUTTER is, pretty clearly, a fat/oil. And if you’re making hot cocoa with water, it’s going to be pretty hard to mix this oil with the hot water. This is why older hot cocoa recipes from like, the Aztecs would be pretty disgusting to modern sensibilities: they’d be roughly ground, bitter cups with a layer of oil on top; like trying to drink coffee grounds mixed with lard. Modern hot cocoa needs something nicer, and it starts with making cocoa powder, which means removing cocoa butter.

Making chocolate has the opposite issue: when ground, the cacao nibs become a paste referred to as “chocolate liquor” (Meaning “the liquid from cooking/distilling/extracting something”, not meaning it’s alcoholic) And in base cacao, there’s more solids than butter, making a gritty and somewhat bitter product. But if you want to sell something as REAL chocolate, you can only make it out of a base of cocoa solids and cocoa butter…this used to be a real conundrum: for smoother chocolate, you want more cocoa butter, but you only GET cocoa butter from making chocolate. So you have to waste some of it to make the rest better. Until the Dutch.

Oh, how the windmill blades have turned.

Specifically, a chemist named…goddamnit The Netherlands, can’t you spell things like a normal damn country? Sigh. “Coenraad Johannes van Houten”. Which I hope is a fairly common last name, because otherwise, he’s somehow related to the Red Woman from Game of Thrones’ actress Carice van Houten, and for mocking her great-great-great-grandfather/uncle, I am going to get Shadow-demoned. (It probably is: the name literally translates to “Of Houten”, a town/municipality in Switzerland. I especially hope so because Coenraad ended up marrying a woman named Hermina van Houten, which is either a coincidence or incestuous)

Coenraad discovered that you can extract the cocoa butter from ground beans, and treat the remaining powder with alkali materials such as baking soda. This changes the pH of the powder, altering its chemical composition, and it ends up making it easier to mix with water, and making it a gentler-tasting mixture that can more easily be added to baked goods and other dishes. THIS is what “Dutch Processed” cocoa is, and it’s the core component of modern hot chocolate mixes.

Note I said “core component” and not “main ingredient”. While, yes, cocoa powder is an important part of hot cocoa (it’s in the flipping NAME, after all), hot cocoa mix uses several other important ingredients. Like Sugar, and milk powder. The milk powder is particularly important, since it helps the remaining cocoa butter emulsify in the drink.

Gotta fit that cream in.

And this was an amazing discovery in terms of raw chocolate production. NOW you have a WAY to get more cocoa butter without wasting chocolate: you just use the butter from the cocoa-making process to make the chocolate better. (Or use it to make skin-care products/pharmaceuticals) Which is a great bit of synergy: making cocoa powder makes making chocolate easier. And trust me, this was important. My research indicates there was ONE company in existence mass-producing chocolate before the Dutch powder system was invented: Cailler, a company that still exists today. Every other name you know in Chocolate? Not only came afterward, but was likely in direct concert with these guys. Nestlé, another Swiss man, had his milk powder mixed into chocolate paste by his friend Daniel Peter, inventing Milk Chocolate. Rudolphe Lindt invented the conching machine to more smoothly mix butter and solids. All of them started in the decades following the Dutching process’s discovery.

But, while it was a huge discovery for making sweeter, smoother chocolate in Switzerland, and simpler, creamier Cocoa, it’s not the only way to go about it. I bring this up, because there’s another way to make hot chocolate. One I used recently, and feel like sharing. Because it’s culturally…Look, it’s because this post is too short and I don’t have time to come up with something more clever. I meant to use this back in the Smoked Peppers post, but forgot.

Spicy Little Secrets

So, the OTHER way to make Chocolate is to skip a couple steps. As I mentioned, the difficulty with making hot cocoa drinks with water is that oil doesn’t mix with it. Well, the thing about that is, it made more sense back when things were hard to grind finely. The modern processes are much more robust, which is how we get products like Taza.

Don’t Taza me, bro!

Taza is a stone-ground chocolate, which means…exactly what it says: the grinding of the cacao nibs is done via stone tools. Specifically, it uses molinas, the Mexican style of grindstone. (“Molina” translates to “Mill”, in English), which produces a chocolate that’s definitely grittier than most, but in a strangely appealing way. The product is heavily inspired by Latin American traditions (“taza” is also Spanish for “Cup”), and thus incorporate more Latin flavors, such as the Guajillo above, or Chipotle, or Vanilla (Vanilla, as I don’t think I’ve had the opportunity to mention yet on the site, is a New World crop. While now grown in multiple areas, it first grew in Mesoamerica).

The process for making it is fairly simple: you chop up the chocolate

Chopped Chocolate is always kinda cool to look at.

And you mix it into heated liquid. Preferably a milk of some variety: Cow, almond, soy, whatever. The important thing about the milk is that milk is naturally an emulsion of fat and water, and therefore will allow the chocolate to more readily dissolve into the liquid. You can do it with water, but it’ll be easier and more homogeneous with a milk or milk substitute.

Maybe you’re worried about the idea of mixing smoked chiles and chocolate: first of all, don’t be a wuss. Secondly, and more gently: I can tell you that this one at least isn’t particularly potent. I personally have a great affection for Cinnamon/Spiced Chocolate, after a Thai/Vietnamese restaurant near my home served me some “Mexican Chocolate” ice cream. Which, sure, is a weird path, but hasn’t this whole post been a bit of a weird path? Let’s just enjoy our cocoa, and call it a day, eh?