Less than a quarter of a century after van Houten’s cocoa press had made drinking chocolate available to the masses, the inflated price of cacao butter once again created a social divide. The cost of manufacturing eating chocolate priced the product out of the reach of most people. Drinking chocolate, once the exclusive indulgence of the privileged, was now considered common.
Still, refinements to chocolate making continued. Swiss chocolatier Philippe Suchard invented the world’s first mélangeur, or mixing machine, in 1826. In 1879, another Swiss chocolatier, Rodolphe Lindt, invented the process of continuously stirring chocolate in its final product stages, creating the first melting chocolate. The process was known as conching.
Conching puts the chocolate through a kneading action and takes its name from the shell-like shape of the containers originally employed. The “conches,” as the machines are called, are equipped with heavy rollers that plow back and forth through the chocolate mass for anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Under regulated speeds, these rollers can produce different degrees of agitation and aeration in developing and modifying the chocolate flavours.
In some manufacturing setups, there is an emulsifying operation that either takes the place of conching or else supplements it. A machine works like an eggbeater to break up sugar crystals and other particles in the chocolate mixture to give it a fine, velvety smoothness.
After the emulsifying or conching machines, the mixture goes through a tempering interval—heating, cooling, and reheating—and then at last into moulds to be formed into the shape of the complete product. The moulds take a variety of shapes and sizes, from the popular individual bars available to consumers to the ten-pound blocks used by confectionery manufacturers.
The creation of milk chocolate did not occur until 1867, although the first blending of chocolate liquor with hot milk to create a creamy chocolate drink dates back to 1727. The difficulty in marrying milk with chocolate is easy to understand. Chocolate is 80 percent fat, while milk is 89 percent water. As was the case with cacao butter separating from chocolate drink, fat and water do not mix.
In 1867, Henri Nestlé, a Swiss chemist, discovered a process to make condensed milk through evaporation. David Peter, a Swiss chocolatier, took the process one step further. By adding cocoa powder and sugar to condensed milk and kneading it, Peter created the chocolate crumb essential in the manufacture of today’s chocolate bars.
The dry chocolate crumb was mixed with additional cacao butter, chocolate liquor, and other ingredients, then turned into a paste and ground until smooth. Early Nestlé milk chocolate raised the standard of making chocolate in Europe, but it was time-consuming to make and expensive to buy. It took Nestlé close to a week to produce a single batch. Meanwhile, manufacturers elsewhere in Europe tried to work around Nestlé’s closely guarded secret with formulas of their own.
Secrecy is as much the lifeblood of the confectionery industry as the veins of cocoa butter and syrup that flow into the making of chocolate and candies.
Where methods of manufacturing are concerned, manufacturers have developed individual variations from the pattern. Each manufacturer seeks to protect his methods by conducting certain operations under an atmosphere of secrecy. Modern technology, in this respect, is reminiscent of the day of the Spanish monopoly.
Today’s secrets, unlike those of old, include many small but important details, which centre on key manufacturing operations. Consequently, no chef guards his favourite recipes more zealously than the chocolate manufacturer guards his formulas for blending beans or the time intervals he gives to his conching. Time intervals, temperatures, and proportions of ingredients are three critical factors that no company wants to divulge.
Chocolate viscosity tests are important in the stabilization and control of chocolate coatings.
3
Chocolate Arrives in Canada
It is well documented that J.S. Fry & Sons marketed the world’s first edible chocolate, showcasing its gritty concoction to the delight of those attending a trade fair in Birmingham, England, in 1849. But who invented the world’s first mass-produced, mass-marketed, low-cost chocolate bar?
Tagged in North America as the five-cent bar, this particular wrapped tablet of chocolate would become a staple on candy store shelves until (in Canada at least) confectioners first tried to bury the product in 1947 under the burden of a 60 percent price increase. The bar would eventually become the victim of runaway inflation by the 1970s, when manufacturers also abandoned the practice of stamping the price on each candy wrapper before it left the factory.
As for who invented the five-cent chocolate bar, that depends on who is telling the story. The Hershey bar—that quintessential piece of modern day Americana, popularized in no small measure by American GIs in the Second World War—is commonly credited to be the first of what we today consider to be a milk chocolate bar. And with good cause. Still, history points to a Canadian connection.
Milton Hershey, philanthropist, candy enthusiast, and chocolate pioneer, was certainly a visionary. A successful caramel manufacturer from Pennsylvania, Hershey is reported to have realized the enormous potential of chocolate during a visit to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 (missing the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in America by one year).
While in Chicago, Hershey became fascinated by the operation of German chocolate-making machinery, waiting until closing of the exposition to purchase the equipment. He originally wanted to manufacture a chocolate coating for his caramels.
One year later, Hershey sold his first milk chocolate bar. He continued producing small quantities of the chocolate while focusing on the bigger picture: a process to mass-produce a milk chocolate bar that would be consistent and have a shelf life of weeks, rather than the quick-to-spoil bar he was currently selling.
The stumbling block for Hershey, as it was for all pretenders and refiners of Henri Nestlé’s breakthrough, was a recipe that would blend a batch of milk with the other ingredients necessary to manufacture chocolate. At the same time that Hershey was trying to create the “great American chocolate bar,” Arthur Ganong, the fourth son and sixth child of Canadian candy pioneer James Ganong, was running the company he inherited from his father in 1888.
By the time Arthur Ganong took the reins, the company his father and uncle founded had grown from a struggling up-market grocery that outsourced the manufacture of its brand-name candy to a bustling candy factory churning out a wide variety of confections.
Like Hershey, the Ganongs had been selling bars of chocolate since before the turn of the century. An 1898 price list of Ganong products includes bars made with coconut and cream fillings.
courtesy of Ganong Bros., Ltd.
A Ganong ad, 1893.
In 1910, Arthur and George Ensor, one of Ganong’s candymakers, began experimenting with their own brand of milk chocolate using fresh milk from Jersey cows grazing on Arthur’s property in St. Stephen, New Brunswick. The two developed a recipe for milk chocolate sprinkled with nuts and shaped into long, narrow pieces.
So pleased were Arthur and George with the finished product that they took the bars to snack on during fishing trips. Ganong began mass-producing and selling their first nickel bar that same year, and continued production until shortly after the breakout of the Second World War.
courtesy of Ganong Bros., Ltd.
Wash drawing of the original Ganong candy factory in St.