Raw Chocolate
Posted in: Make Mine Raw ... (Read-Only)
Steve:I have to respectfully disagree with you on your first statement - unless you can point me to an external, credible, and definitive source (i.e., not your web site) that makes the distinction between "raw" and "True Raw" - especially as it refers to chocolate. Beans fresh out of the pod are technically seeds (as they are still viable) and so "Fresh Cacao Seeds" is what they should be called. Calling them "Truly Raw Chocolate" is, in my opinion, sloppy and inaccurate marketing lingo that does the raw community a disservice as it lessens its credibility.Lacking any external support, the only "standard" to go by is the "standard" that the raw community as a whole agrees to. By that "standard," the maximum temperature to which food can be subjected without loss of enzyme activity (and related nutritional aspects of a food) is 118F -- despite the fact that there is no firm scientific evidence to back the claims made for this specific temperature.According to my research, there is no magic temperature for all foods in all conditions.A lot depends on the structure and density of the food itself (e.g., lettuces are a lot more delicate than are seeds), whether the food in question is wet or dry, contact time (i.e., the length of time the food is subjected to a source of heat), the nature of the heat source (e.g., you can set a dehydrator to 125F and evaporative cooling - water escaping the food - will keep the temperature of the food below 118F until the water is removed), and the specific heat transfer profile of the food in question (e.g., it should be okay to subject the outside of a nut covered by a thick shell to very high temperatures for surprisingly extended periods of time to kill pathogens on the outside of the food - with little or no heat not transferred through the shell to the nutmeat inside.It is actually easy to fully and completely ferment cacao and keep the pile under 118F - thereby satisfying the most widely accepted definition for the maximum temperature to which a food can be subjected and still be called raw. The "trick" is to control the size of the pile. There are a number of fermentation boxes I have personally seen that make it possible to do this.It is somewhat harder to dry the beans and keep the temp under 118F - if the beans are dried in direct sun, and especially if they are dried on a concrete pad. Temperatures can easily reach 140F - at least at the surface of the pad. It is possible to dry beans at low temp, it just takes a lot more care, takes longer - and therefore costs more.On the other hand.I have eaten a lot of so-called raw (as some sources have now been discredited) chocolate from a lot of different vendors in the past two years or so that I've been researching this. When the rest of my diet is clean enough, I do notice a difference in the way my body responds and the way I feel after eating some raw chocolates, but that may be due as much to other "superfood" ingredients that have been added as the cacao itself.I don't question that there is a difference, I only question the absolute cutoff temperature of 118F - knowing that there are ways to process cacao into chocolate that minimize the loss of all manner of nutrients and keeping the resultant chocolate a relatively whole food.That's the key. If the temp hits 125F for 10 seconds or even 10 minutes, it doesn't really matter because the amount of chocolate you have to eat to reap meaningful benefits is actually quite small. New studies suggest that as little as 1/4 oz (~7 grams) of "cooked" dark (i.e., no dairy) chocolate is enough, when eaten consistently, to deliver measurable benefits even without any other changes to a person's diet. Here's one of the few cases where food combining actually makes scientific sense. Eating a 100% raw chocolate with a glass of raw milk reduces the antioxidant benefits of the chocolate because some of the proteins in the milk will bind to some of the antioxidants thereby reducing the bioavailability of the antioxidants.I have a stone grinder and make a variety of foods for personal consumption. One is a nut and seed butter that consists of a combination of almonds, pecans, and cashews with sunflower, sesame, flax, and chia seed. I happen to like roasty, toasty flavors. A lot. So what I do is dehydrate, at a relatively high temp, a small amount of some of the ingredients. I find that this approach gives me the toasty flavors I crave while delivering virtually all of the benefits of the foods in the raw state. While it's not "100% raw" I can't see that it makes any meaningful difference, dietarily.All raw chocolate makers face this problem when it comes to the sweetener they choose. Agave syrup is subjected to high temperatures to reduce moisture content - as are coconut palm sugar, maple syrup, and most of the other options (I don't know the processing steps for any of the sugar alcohols - xylitol, erythritol, etc.- so I can't speak authoritatively on the temps used). So - even though the cacao in a product may be "raw" the sweetener is almost certainly not.In the end, the question is, "Where do you choose to draw the line?" 100% raw chocolate is difficult to do and comparatively very expensive. One of the clues that the chocolate you might be eating is not even close to 100% raw is the price. If it's anywhere near close to the price of a commodity "cooked" chocolate - then it's not 100% raw.
