American Chocolate?!
American Chocolate?
I remember vaguely being told there was a legal reason why American chocolate tastes different from European stuff... something possibly to do with cocoa content, or having to use domestically grown cocoa due to some protecitonist policies? Anyone know definitively if there is a reason? Or just a matter of national tastes?
Answers:
In the European Union chocolate must contain a minimum of cocoa solids and cocoa butter and may contain milk, sugar, whey and added vegetable oil (up to 5%).
In the US the standards for the cocoa solids and cocoa butter is lower and it may also contain sugar and milk but MAY NOT contain whey or added vegetable oil. (Those are both fillers.)
Europe has a longer history of milk chocolate which is made with dried milk. When Hershey (the first large-scale milk chocolate maker in the US) wanted to make milk chocolate, no one in Europe would help him with a recipe. So he invented his own, which has lead to the different caramelized/sour taste of American chocolate. Hershey's also supplied all the chocolate for M&Ms and Mars candies until the 60s, so when they started making their own chocolate, but with a similar taste so as not to shock their customers with the switch.
Just because European chocolate is allowed to use fillers, that doesn't mean that the better brands do ... but this may account for some of the difference between the Cadbury Bars produced in England over the ones produced in the United States.
Many people think that milk also tastes different in the different parts of the world, which may account for the different taste for the higher end stuff.
There are low-end varieties of European chocolate and low-end varieties of American chocolate, just as both places also produce high-quality chocolate, you just have to know where to look and what to ask for.
Very little cocoa is grown in the United States (it can be cultivated on the Hawaiian Islands and a few other very limited spots). For the most part cocoa is produced in Africa, parts of Central and South America and some newer plantations in Indonesia and parts of Australia. The US has some protectionist policies about sugar, but they don't really have much to do with production of chocolate, just the price.