[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Chocolate Search

[P. Alexis Nguyen]

Magpie:
> I'm pretty sure this is literally true. I can't remember where I was
> reading this recently--I'll try to look it up. It wasn't the
> ingredients, but something about the process of actually making the
> stuff. Basically, there's a process for making chocolate out of the
> beans or whatever, and there were different ways that people tried to
> do it. Hershey was I believe the person who got it to work in the US,
> but his method is different--and inferior--to whatever was discovered
> elsewhere. And that's why US chocolate has a sort of waxiness that's
> inferior to the way chocolate tastes outside of the US.

You're talking about the history of industrializing the chocolate
industry. Before Milton Hershey, chocolate was a very boutique,
small-scale production item, making it mostly unavailable to the
masses. Hershey did perfect, though I don't know that he invented it,
the chocolate mass production process, and thus chocolate was given to
the masses (like fire from Prometheus ^_^).

I'm going to sound like a broken record for this one, but I'll repeat
it.  Good US chocolates can rival good European chocolates, though the
former is a rather rare breed - example: Scharfenberger.  Also, places
like Max Brenner and Jacques Torres, both in New York City, conches
chocolate in-house, and despite certain facts, like that Jacques
Torres is clearly French, it remains that this is all US-made stuff -
much of the cacao beans are still foreign, though I think some do come
from Hawaii.

~Ali, who does not make/eat chocolates for a living