Chocolate, as the mostly confectionary product we know today, has come a long way in its historic lineage that encompasses at least three millennia of cultivation. Until a few hundred years ago, chocolate was prepared as a drink, most often for religious and spiritual rituals. Today, chocolate, which comes from the seeds of a cacao plant, and, as we know it, was originally native to Mexico and Central America, is a global commodity, beloved by the almost everyone. (There are a few chocolate haters out there, which means more chocolate for the rest of us!)
Christopher Columbus is generally credited with bringing cacao beans to Europe and introducing them to the Spanish royal court. But the appeal of the funny little bean with its bitter taste was lost on the Spaniards. It wasn’t until Spanish friars introduced chocolate as a sweetened beverage that cacao beans became a hot, in-demand item. The new sweetened concoction was an instant hit; it was as if chocolate and sugar were destined to be together. That magical combination sealed chocolate’s fate, and after that, Spain, as well as the rest of Europe, couldn’t get enough of it.
Despite the plant's origins in Mesoamerica, most of today’s cacao is grown in western Africa, particularly in Côte d’Ivoire. The beans are harvested, fermented, dried, cleaned, and roasted—a seemingly straightforward process that is anything but. Instead, it’s a laborious endeavor that takes months of meticulous manual labor. This might explain why quality chocolate is still, to this day, very much a luxury product.
There are four main types of chocolate: unsweetened, dark, milk, and white—with most of the chocolate we consume today being sweetened. Despite industrial processes, chocolate remains an expensive ingredient, and facing growing demand, many producers decrease production costs by reducing cocoa solids or by swapping out cocoa butter for another fat.
Since we’re talking all things chocolate, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the process of conching, a procedure that makes chocolate taste smoother and more luscious on the palate by breaking the cocoa and sugar particles up so that they are smaller than the tongue can detect. A conche is essentially a container filled with metal beads that act as grinders. The longer the conching takes, the smoother the final mouthfeel and the better the quality of the chocolate. High-quality chocolate is conched for about seventy-two hours, while the lesser grades are conched for four to six hours.
As you probably guessed, we at Van Leeuwen love our chocolate, and we took the time to find a chocolate we could love without reservations. In the end, we selected Michel Cluizel as our chocolate supplier. We made our decision after tasting products from many top chocolate producers; Michel Cluizel was the most extraordinary chocolate that we had ever tasted.
This small, family-run French company processes their cocoa without the use of soy lecithin, an emulsifier that can sometimes leave a waxy feeling in your mouth. Since 1997, Michel Cluizel has worked to develop enduring relationships with renowned growers. We loved that all Michel Cluizel’s chocolate was single plantation—meaning the cocoa beans for a particular bar or kind of chocolate are grown on one plantation (very rare!)—and not just single origin, meaning the geographic origin of the cocoa beans (Madagascar, for instance) is the same. Single-origin chocolate usually has cocoa beans from several different plantations, muddling their individual flavors, while single-plantation chocolate has very distinct terroir notes.
All this showed us that Michel Cluizel meticulously did their research on plantations, found the best in class, and made an exclusive commitment to source from those places. We also loved that their practices went even further than Fair Trade; they pay several times the commodity rate, far beyond that of Fair Trade stipulations. A few years ago, Pete took a trip to the Dominican Republic to look at one of Michel Cluizel’s plantations and their farming and processing practices, and he came back blown away by the company’s commitment to quality as well as its awareness of how its practices affect the community.
Michel Cluizel also takes time to process their cocoa beans post-harvest, air-drying the beans after fermentation. Most cocoa processors use an oven to dry the beans, as it greatly expedites the processing time, but this can result in a slightly burnt taste, diminishing the nuances in the intricate flavor components of the chocolate. Michel Cluizel insists that all of their plantations air-dry the beans; in wet climates like that of São Tomé, an island off western Africa, this can mean building special drying housing and having to wait for days. But, as with all great artisanal producers, quality cannot be sacrificed.
Unlike most cocoa processors, Michel Cluizel grinds whole vanilla beans into their mills along with the cocoa beans. This is a far superior practice than using an extract—a practice used by most chocolatiers, and one you can readily taste. The actual beans give the chocolate a more pure, less diluted flavor than extract, which is usually alcohol based.