AW and I went to a terrific chocolate workshop yesterday at CocoaNymph. We got a lesson about the origins and history of chocolate and then got to make our own truffles:

(A good portion of them had already been consumed when I took this photo.)

Most chocolate we eat is made from a blend of beans around the world. We got to do a tasting of four types of single-origin chocolate. The one from Mexico was 66% cocoa, and it was a bit more acidic than the rest. I found it bright, with a deep, wine-like flavour. It was my favourite. The one from the Dominican Republic (70% cocoa) tasted a bit lighter. The one from Cuba (70%) was quick to melt, indicating that it has a higher proportion of cocoa butter to solids, whereas the last one, from Tanzania (75%) melted the slowest, indicating a higher proportion of solids. That one was AW's favourite.

Some other stuff I learned:
•You can learn how to be a chocolatier through an online school called École Chocolat.
•Cacao trees are understorey trees that grow usually within 10 degrees of the equator, although there is one specimen at the Vancouver Aquarium.
•The pods grow on the trunk of the tree. The pods are full of cacao beans that are surrounded by fruit—said to taste like nectarines or melon. The beans have a bitter husk like peanuts do.
•Once the pods are harvested (usually by machete—and the harvester has to be careful not to cut too close to the tree; otherwise the fruit will not grow back from that place again), the beans are fermented for a week, then dried and packed to receiving houses.
•The beans are roasted twice; the first is a flash roast at high temperature. This kills all the pathogens, after which cacao beans are among the most food-safe foods in the world. The second roast develops flavour (much like roasting coffee).
•Beans then go through winnowing, to remove the bitter skin. The beans are crushed into nibs for refining. (We got to taste nibs, too. AW thought they were too bitter, but I liked their nuttiness.)
•If the beans are processed by hydraulic press, the cocoa butter can be separated from the cocoa powder. The former is used to make chocolate, of course, but also can be sold to make cosmetics, etc. You can tell cheap chocolate is cheap if you read on the list of ingredients that they've used vegetable oil instead of cocoa butter.
•The separation allows for control in chocolate making—being able to vary the proportion of cocoa butter to solids for flavour and effect.
• Rodolphe Lindt developed conching, which releases the bitter essences from the chocolate. Too much conching, however, diminishes the chocolate's desirable flavours as well.
•Chocolate then has to be tempered—the process of inducing crystals to allow it to set and give the chocolate structure.
•Chocolate originated in Central America, where ancient civilizations drank it as a hot drink. Archaeological evidence shows that chocolate has been consumed since at least 1950 BCE. Hernan Cortes popularized the drink back in Spain, which was used like an energy drink to get people through Mass. It spread through Europe through the church.
•Sugar was first added in Oaxaca, where nuns wanted to encourage consumption of the sweet chocolate beverage as opposed to alcohol.
•Once Europeans found that chocolate was big business, they introduced cacao plantations in their tropical colonies.
•Milton Hershey figured out how to make milk chocolate (by adding dry milk powder, as water and chocolate don't mix). Only in 1849 was a bar of chocolate as we know it (sort of) available to the public for the first time, at a trade fair.


So yeah. We each got our own slab of ganache (three parts chocolate to two parts heavy cream), from which we cut out shapes with cutters or rolled balls with our hands. Then we threw each piece into the melted chocolate, coated it, and fished it out with a truffle fork. The trick is to tap the bottom of the fork on the chocolate surface a few times to draw off the excess chocolate. Then we put each piece on parchment paper and decorated it. We got a choice of four toppings: cocoa powder, chocolate sprinkles, strawberry curls, or cocoa nibs. We also got to play around with contact sheets, which have designs printed in coloured chocolate on plastic. You place the sheet, chocolate-side down, on the just-dipped truffle, and then, once it sets, you peel it off, leaving your design on the top.

We started off with high-quality ingredients, so the end product is incredibly tasty. I can't believe we only paid $30 for the workshop, including the chocolates (it was a Groupon). It was a lot of fun and beyond worth it.