‘Snap’ decision gives Easter egg its taste
To judge by the piles of Easter eggs stacked to the roofs of supermarkets, this generation of ‘little treasures’ fares better than we did.
Only the most disciplined of these children will be able to eat their Sunday lunch.
As one who is inclined to view health shops as places frequented by people on harsh, spartan diets, I was surprised to see Easter eggs on the shelves of the Evergreen health shop, in Galway city.
Even more surprising, they were advertised as organic Easter eggs.
However, the notion of organic chocolate is not so strange, considering that the main constituent is the cocoa bean.
A UK company, Green and Black, manufactures these organic eggs.
“There are a lot of pesticides used in growing conventional cocoa,” says Micah Carr-Hill, of Green and Black.
“In the warm climate of Central America, where the cocoa is grown, there are many insects that attack the crop,” Ms Carr-Hill says.
As well as the danger from pests, too much sun can destroy the quality of the cocoa bean. Traditionally, the crop is planted in the shade of banana trees to protect the pods from the sun.
The banana trees have a dual function, as their leaves are used during harvesting. When the beans are removed from the pod, they are fermented under banana leaves for five days, before they are laid out to dry in the sun.
“The beans are allowed to sweat, to encourage the fermentation process”, says Ms Carr-Hill.
“Then, the beans are dried until their moisture content is reduced to about 9%. Otherwise, the cocoa would go bad,” she says.
Once dried, the cocoa is separated from its shell, and slowly roasted to develop the rich flavour, and characteristic colour, of chocolate. It is ground and mixed with raw sugar cane. The mixture is heated, and stirred for a day.
The chocolate is then tempered, to give it a gloss and a good ‘snap.’
‘Snap’ refers to the sound the chocolate makes when broken. Just as wine experts know a good wine by sniffing it, so chocolate connoisseurs can tell a good chocolate by its ‘snap’.
The taste and quality of the cocoa crop is determined by the variety of the plant grown by the farmer.
As with all modern varieties of fruit and vegetables, there are many hybrid strains of cocoa which give farmers a high yield, but which are short on taste.
The cocoa farmers who belong to the organic co-operative in Belize, which supplies the UK company, grow traditional, indigenous varieties, such as trinitario and criollo.
Twice a year, each cocoa plant produces a pod as big as a rugby ball, with 40 beans inside.
The average-sized bar of chocolate needs the cocoa of 60 beans. The quality of the chocolate depends on how much cocoa the manufacturers use.
“Our dairy milk chocolate uses 34% cocoa solids”, says Ms Carr-Hill. “This compares with Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, which has 20%”.
One fact, which I learned from the manufacturers of the organic Easter eggs, I find difficult to digest. “The better the quality of chocolate, the less you are inclined to eat of it”, says Carr-Hill.
On your behalf, and in the interests of accurate reporting, I plan to put this doubtful theory to the test.
I have persuaded the company to part with some samples. Easter Sunday will be a welcome return to childhood, after all.
