People who discovered chocolate covered coffee
Do you plan to buy or make chocolate covered coffee beans
When you plan to buy chocolate covered coffee beans you need to be careful so that you get the best that money can buy. There are three very critical aspects to which you should pay attention when you buy this type of coffee, i.e. the quality of the coffee beans, the quality of the chocolate and the quality of cooking.
The Quality of the Coffee Beans
If you want the best possible chocolate covered coffee beans; you need to start from scratch. The basic ingredient is coffee; unless the quality of the coffee beans you choose is high you cannot expect the end product to be qualitative. The best would be to choose the type of coffee beans you normally use for this purpose. In case you have no preference, take a few beans of whatever coffee is available and test each type separately with the chocolate to find out which one gives you the most delightful taste.
The Quality of the Chocolate
Milk chocolate is the most popular choice for chocolate covered coffee beans today, but you could experiment with other types of chocolate such as white chocolate, dark chocolate, bitter chocolate and so on. Whatever type you choose ensure that you get the best quality there is for best results.
The Quality of Cooking
You have the best beans and the best chocolate and now all you need to do is cook it. A lot depends on the way you cook it, so be careful. The temperature of the chocolate should be just right so it would not get stuck to the bottom and burn for which purpose you need to be very vigilant when you cook it, especially when you do it in a microwave oven. Your aim should be to get the chocolate just soft enough so you could roll the beans in it.
If you are doing it for the first time, take care that you do not burn your hands when you roll the beans in chocolate. This is another reason why the cooking temperature should be just right.
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For a tree grown in over 70 countries, from Indonesia to Brazil, it’s curious how narrow a range of conditions is required to produce quality ‘beans’ and how relatively small the total output is.
The word ‘beans’ is deliberately in single-quote marks, since the thing that gets roasted and ground to make the drink isn’t really a bean at all, it’s a seed.
In particular, it’s the seed of a fruit that grows on trees that can easily reach twenty feet or more. Some wild varieties grow to over 45 feet or 15m. Most of those seeds come in a pair, though there is a variety that produces only one (the peaberry). The berry resembles a cranberry, with a sweet pulp covered by a membrane called a silverskin.
In a band around the equator from approximately 25 degrees north or south, comes the overwhelming majority of the world’s coffee
Loamy, good-draining soil is needed and also helpful is high humidity – plenty of mist and cloud at the high elevations, over 3000 ft (915m) for the good stuff. At these elevations the oxygen content is lower, so the trees take longer to mature.
The robusta, or coffea canephora, goes into making the majority of coffee because it can be grown at lower altitudes and is more disease resistant. But it’s the high-altitude coffea arabica that forms the base of a gourmet cup.
Diffuse light and moderate winds are helpful, both of which are sometimes produced by deliberately growing in the shelter and shade. By contrast, wine grapes like hot sun and lots of it.
Once planted, the tree takes about five years to mature to first crop and even then a single tree will only make enough for about two pounds (1 kilogram) of coffee.
Those two pounds equal about 2,000 beans, (correct or not, it’s the standard term), usually hand-picked by manual laborers. Manual they may be, but ignorant they are not. Coffee bean harvesting is a skill developed over time, where the picker learns to select good beans and discard the bad. Bean by individual bean. That’s only one reason coffee is high priced.
The trees have broad, dark green leaves and produce a flower that resembles Jasmine. Some – in Brazil and Mexico, for example, – blossom over a six to eight week period. In countries that lie along the equator such as Kenya and Colombia, though, a tree can have mature berries growing alongside still ripening ones. That’s part of what makes picking such a specialty.
Blossom to harvest may cover a period of up to nine months depending on the weather and other factors and the cycle will be carried out for the life of the tree – about 20-25 years. With the best cultivation technology, a good harvest will be between 6,600 lbs (3,000 kg) and 8,800 lbs (4,000 kg) per hectare. (One hectare is about 2.47 acres.)
From these inaccessible regions, where conditions are harsh, the berries are brought down and processed to make up the world’s second largest commodity (by annual dollar volume).
So, the next time you savor that brew, give a thought to the long journey it traveled to reach your cup. It might make that high price seem less steep.
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