Chocolate's dark mood is lightening at last.
Until recently, midnight-black, bittersweet bars with punishing percentages of cacao were, like coffee and wine, on a quest for brooding intensity. Milk chocolate was left behind, dismissed as child's play, an indulgence in sweetness and nostalgia.
Chloe Doutre-Roussel, a Paris-based expert and former chocolate buyer for Fortnum & Mason in London, says that in a snobbish phase of her youth, she even turned down milk chocolate made by the legendary Robert Linxe of La Maison du Chocolat.
"I was in his shop in Paris," she recalled, "and he offered me a taste of anything, and I put my nose in the air and said, `Of course, I only eat dark.' And he said: `Really? Why?' And I had no idea."
Doutre-Roussel said that she, like other purists, believed that the lean amalgamation of cacao and sugar that is dark chocolate did not need the addition of a fatty, bland element like milk.
Now, some chocolatiers are fighting back, with expensive, suave "dark milk" chocolates that reinvent milk chocolate by increasing its cacao content, reducing its sweetness and carefully refining it to give it the snap and velvet of dark.
Some of the resulting bars are trying too hard to be grown up, like a third-grader in lipstick. But the best have all the creamy pleasure of that after-school candy bar -- stripped and devoured right in the store - plus a hit of straight chocolate that leaves you craving more.
"Personally, if I had to choose one or the other, I prefer dark chocolate," said Joseph Whinney, founder of Theo Chocolate, a small producer based in Seattle.
"But there is no product on the planet that can match that lush, melted-chocolate mouth-feel of milk chocolate," he said.
The Dining section of the New York Times recently tasted more than 30 milk chocolates and found a surprising range of flavors, undertones, aromas and colors, from butterscotch to near-black. Some pleased no one with their combinations of bitter and milky flavors. But at their best, dark milk chocolates have a combination of silky texture and coffee-caramel creaminess, with a slight bitterness that pulls them back from the edge of too-sweet.
We liked several US products, especially those from Guittard, Theo and Scharffen Berger. From Europe, unsurprisingly, Michel Cluizel and Valrhona were popular. All of these made fabulous hot chocolate when simply melted and stirred with hot milk.
But those with the highest percentages of cacao were not necessarily the favorites.
"Percentages tell us nothing, but nothing, about the taste or the quality of chocolate," Doutre-Roussel said.
The percentage tells how much of the bar is cacao solids -- the pure, unsweetened content of the cacao pod. But the flavor and quality are determined by many other factors: how the pods are fermented, how long they are roasted, how the cacao is ground. Two milk chocolates, both with 45 percent cacao solids, might have utterly different levels of sugar and dairy content.
"Seventy percent of bad cacao is still 70 percent," Doutre-Roussel said. "It is all about the producer and the recipe, especially when you are talking about milk chocolate."
"Producing milk chocolate is much more complicated than producing dark chocolate, as you can see in the marketplace: There are far more good dark chocolates available. At each step, we have to work to keep the clean taste of milk and not overwhelm it with the strength of the cocoa mass, then balance them both with sweetness," said Andrea Slitti, a chocolate maker in Tuscany.
Slitti is one of several serious chocolatiers -- including Pralus, Bernachon and Amedei -- that have forged new hybrids that, at their best, can please partisans on both sides of the dark-versus-milk divide.
"Nothing has been done for milk chocolate in the past 10 years," he said. "In our tastings, I found that lovers of milk chocolate felt a little bit uncomfortable in admitting that they prefer it to plain chocolate."
In response, he spent more than a year developing Lattenero, one of the first "dark milk" chocolates. Instantly popular, it is the only milk chocolate available in five cacao levels, from 45 percent to 70 percent.
Top chocolatiers frequently experiment by making chocolate with pods from a single region or plantation. Such refinement has usually been reserved for dark chocolate. But Bonnat, a producer in Voiron, near the French Alps, makes a trinity of excellent milk chocolates. Each contains 65 percent cacao solids that come from a different Indonesian plantation.
Tasted side by side, they provide a good sense of the flavor range of cacao: The Java gives strong caramel, with a nice bitter edge; the Surabaya tastes of smoke, tobacco and old leather; the Asfarth, from northern Sumatra, is fresh and fruity, with a whiff of capsicum.
"These pure origins are because we chocolatiers want people to think that chocolate is serious and adult like wine, but underneath it is not," said Stephane Bonnat, whose family began making chocolate in 1884. "The first thing we have when we close our eyes and taste must be the pleasure we remember from being 10 years old." And that pleasure, almost invariably, was from milk chocolate.
Milk chocolate is the solid form of hot chocolate, popular in Europe for 200 years before a Swiss confectioner, Daniel Peter, managed to make it into a solid in the 1870s. After years of disastrous experiments with cheese, butter and goat's milk, he hit on using the condensed milk recently invented by his compatriot Henri Nestle to serve as infant formula.
Milk chocolate became one of the great cheap luxuries of the industrial age. Hershey's Kisses, Nestle Crunch, and Milky Way bars rely on a predictable formula of cacao, dairy, sugar and emulsifiers that stretch the expensive cacao solids as far as they can go. (Raw cacao is becoming only more expensive, rising by 150 percent in just the last two years.)
Eventually, milk chocolate also acquired the stigma of being an "industrial" product. Milk went from being an enrichment to just another filler: Condensed milk was gradually replaced by combinations of nonfat milk powder and even vegetable oil.
Although some makers dabble in dairy variations like yogurt powder and butter oil, most milk chocolate is made with dry milk. The bars we liked best were made with whole-milk powder, not nonfat or skimmed.
At seventypercent.com, the most erudite of the Internet's many chocolate-dedicated sites, long and intricate reviews of dark chocolate include observations like this: "Molasses storms in right away and sets the stage for an entirely blackened flavor of poignant fruit."
These cacao cultists (and new evidence that dark chocolate is somewhat healthful) have provoked chocolate makers to keep stripping chocolate down, eliminating distractions like emulsifiers, vanilla and sometimes even sugar. The 100 percent cacao bars that have arrived recently on the market are virtually inedible, but are no less joyfully greeted by connoisseurs who worship their intensity and purity.
However, some tasters have realized that percentages can go too high.
"The extremes of bitterness have been reached with dark chocolate," said Alex Landuyt, director of research and development for Barry Callebaut, one of the largest chocolate manufacturers in the world. "And as we move in that direction, the more we need the rounding of the milk to balance it out."
Everywhere but at home, US milk chocolate -- specifically Hershey's -- is known for its tangy or sour flavor, produced by the use of milk that Landuyt refers to as "acidified." Although Hershey's process has never been made public (and a spokeswoman declined to comment on its techniques), experts speculate that Hershey's puts its milk through controlled lipolysis, a process by which the fatty acids in the milk begin to break down.
This produces butyric acid, also found in Parmesan cheese and the spit-up of babies; other chocolate manufacturers now simply add butyric acid to their milk chocolates. It has a distinctive tang that Americans have grown accustomed to and now expect in chocolate.
"I can't think of any other reason why people would like it," said Whinney, of Theo Chocolate.
Hershey's regular milk chocolate tops out at about 30 percent cacao. By the standards of the US Food and Drug Administration, American milk chocolate can be as little as 10 percent cacao, and the agency is considering allowing manufacturers to replace cocoa butter with vegetable oil. That is already allowed in British milk chocolate, although elsewhere in the EU such chocolate must be labeled "family milk chocolate" instead.
Indignities like this do not help the image of milk chocolate, which deserves to be appreciated as its own beguiling blend of light and dark, sweet and bitter, chocolate and cream.
"Fundamentally, the problem is that milk chocolate does not have the respect it deserves," Whinney said. "When you have a brown, sweet commodity that people expect to buy for cheap, you are not automatically going to find interest in flavor nuances."
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