Chocolate

This delicious delectable dessert can be done up and dished out in diverse ways. It comes in a vast range of varieties and flavors, from bold and bitter to sickly sweet. Some folks with a sweet tooth are downright addicted to this timeless tasty treat. Join me as we check out chocolate on this week’s episode of FYI!

Transcript

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foreign this delicious delectable dessert can be done up and dished out in diverse ways it comes in a vast range of varieties and flavors from Bold and bitter to sickly sweet some folks with a sweet tooth are downright addicted to this Timeless tasty treat join me as we check out chocolate on this week's episode of f why ah welcome to for your info English you got it you got it[Music] foreign edition of FYI and this one is dedicated to all the chocolate lovers out there and I am not one of them nope I am not a chocolate lover I have to admit it I don't want to be a party pooper un agua fiestas but it isn't my cup of tea noise now that doesn't mean you won't catch me eating a chocolate bar but I'm not this kind of person who craves chocolate and we've already started off with some really good vocabulary to Crave denier and a craving is now remember if you want to learn about chocolate or any other topic there are so many episodes of FYI available all you have to do is subscribe or as they say now follow wherever you get your podcasts we're on Spotify Apple podcasts ivox Stitcher Deezer You Name It We Are there and if you haven't raided the show give us a five star rating leave a comment because as you know it makes it more visible and the more people that discover this show the better because remember in the end it's just me it's a one-man show I produce it I get some help with the editing with the post-production but in the end the Final Cut is mine so it's made with TLC tender loving care and always remember you can get a bonus episode so instead of just getting one episode of FYI every week you can get an additional episode plus you can be in class with me when we review the key vocabulary in each episode plus we have monthly master classes we have all kinds of things all kinds of benefits or advantages another way to say it perks for our patrons so I want to send a shout out to all my patrons especially my super duper students Marta candy Lina Javier Roberto David Jose Maria Mila Alex Edgar and Aina and don't forget about my Interstellar students Issa Paco Diego and Carmen what a wonderful Community we have if you guys want to find out more go over to patreon.com Alberto Alonso and you'll get so much more than just a bonus episode as I said depending on what level you're in you can have classes with me every week and you can ask my students we are all making progress well me as a teacher I hope I'm still making progress I hope I'm not done growing if you want more information go over to patreon.com Alberto Alonso and find out about the bonus episodes the accompanying vocabulary sheets and classes and so much more it's all at patreon.com Alberto Alonso all right well today we're going to start with dessert a teacher taught me how to remember this dessert not like desert desierto quit so he said he's going to Desert the military and be a dessert Chef is desert but always remember because who doesn't want a second helping of dessert let's take a look at our intro and extract all the interesting vocabulary in the beginning I said delicious I'm sure you know that word just be careful you don't say delicios because it's delicious repeat it with me delicious if that's difficult that ending you know you can just say delish we say it all the time this delicious delicious acceptable dessert can be done up and to be done up is another way of saying to be made or to be prepared and dished out and to Dish something out is to serve it the word dish is Plato it can be dished out in diverse ways it reminds me of an expression the word to dish out oh you can dish it out but you can't take it it's about somebody who likes to pick on other people meters you know it I think we all know people like that so you can dish it out but you can't take it but today we're talking about dishing out some dessert and the word diverse you can pronounce it diverse or diverse both are okay then I said it comes in a vast range a vast range or a wide range of varieties let's pronounce that word varieties and flavors from bold and boldest Fuerte it's another way of saying strong and bitter bitter you know from bitter Cass amargo to sickly sweet which is then I said some folks with a sweet tooth and are you one of those folks are you one of those people that has a sweet tooth queris goloso well some people are downright addicted to this Timeless tasty treat Timeless at temporal tasty delicioso treat and the word downright is total absoluto some people are downright addicted to this Timeless treat and we call those people chocoholics that's right oh and before we go on we've got to get something out of the way did I say chocolate three silver bubbles no I said chocolate chalk like ditha no chocolate chocolate it's lit chocolate just like family I imagine this Omission happens because we're used to saying these words very often and very quickly then we heard somebody munching come on to munch that's another way of saying to eat but usually it means pretty loudly yeah I don't like people who chew too loud mastikar in Alto but we're not here to talk about my pet peeves las cosas although I did say before that I'm not a huge chocolate fan I am gonna tell you about some of my favorite candy bars in the United States and we're going to learn a lot of vocabulary there too but this is not about me this is bigger than me this is about chocolate chocolate is huge how huge is it well World chocolate day is July 7th that's right July 7th because supposedly that was when it was first brought to Europe July 7th 1550 but like with many origin stories we'll see that chocolate can be traced back to a lot of different civilizations but that's not it we've got July 28th which is National milk chocolate day and we'll talk about that when we talk about the different kinds of chocolate September 13th is International Chocolate Day chocolate lovers are you marking your calendars then you've got National bittersweet chocolate with almonds day wow that's very specific that's on November 7th or at falls on November 7th sip with a thief oh and don't forget about January 31st the last day of the year I thought you couldn't share holidays but I guess it's New Year's Eve but it's also national hot chocolate day so as you can see chocolate is all the rage is La Moda and it's always been since it began so let's go back to the origins of chocolate I guess we should start off by saying that chocolate was originally prepared as a drink it didn't become hard or it didn't get its candy bar form until much later so when we talk about chocolate in the early days we are talking specifically about liquid chocolate there was a vessel a vessels that was found at an Olmec archaeological site this was on the Gulf Coast of Veracruz Mexico and this dates back to are you ready for this 1750 BC technos de Cristo also on the Pacific coast of Chiapas Mexico a mokaya archaeological site provided evidence of cocoa beverages dating even earlier to 90 500 BC so as I said it can be traced back to a lot of different civilizations but it's been around since the beginning of recorded history I mean think about that 1900 BC and they found residue this kind of residue that was on this vessel and there was cocoa and this is interesting we're going to talk about the ingredients what's the difference between cocoa and cacao well I guess it depends on where you live and originally it was an alcoholic drink what they did is they would take the white pulp that's around the cocoa beans and they used it as a source of fermentable sugars fermented same thing fermentable sugars and of course you leave that you let it sit for a while and you've got yourself an alcoholic beverage and we still see that today nowadays you can get chocolate beers they're very common in fact even the hieroglyphs of the Maya people stated that chocolate was used for ceremonial purposes so it was part of their ceremonies of their traditions and even their everyday life the Maya people grew cacao trees in their backyards like Americans with apple trees and they used the cocoa seeds the seeds are La semias that the trees produced to make a frothy bitter drink again very different from the chocolate we know today it was extremely bitter and it was very frothy and frothy is like a beer muchas puma and the mesoamericans you want to talk about taking this stuff seriously they used it as currency and then as with every thing it made it over to Europe and what did the Europeans think they weren't big fans of it yeah they didn't like it at first they said it was too bitter they said you know this is it's got potential but maybe we've got to sweeten it up we've got to sweeten it up because sweet is Dulce so the verb is to sweeten so some Spanish Friars frailas these religious figures they decided that they were going to sweeten it up a little bit you know to make it a little bit more tasty more marketable I guess and they were responsible for introducing it around the European continent what they did is they would take it to different monasteries and since they added sugar people started to like it more and we know the rest the rest is history but we're going to talk about other significant milestones in the chalk [ __ ] verse the chocolate verse the chocolate Universe a few important people in the timeline there was a guy named Van Houten his last name Van Houten a Dutch guy and Duchess Orlando and in 1828 he was the first one to press the bean it's interesting we call it a cocoa bean just like we call it a coffee bean we don't say semiya seed at least not in this case so he was the first one to press the bean and to make butter and powder from this Bean but separately he was able to separate this butter and this powder and also just like many other Europeans he sweetened it up a bit and this was very very important for the process being able to separate that butter from that powder then Along Came Joseph Ryan with JS Frye and Sons and him and his candy shop concocted what they called eating chocolate we know it today as our modern chocolate bar or candy bar and this was in 1847 so as you see 1828 1847 this was a big boom also Daniel Peter in 1875 what he did was he added condensed milk and created what we know as milk chocolate so so many Milestones right on top of each other 1828 we separate the butter in the powder 1847 Joseph Ryan and his sons I guess find a way to turn it into a bar and call it eating chocolate and they do that by combining the cocoa butter the sugar and the chocolate liqueur now it's a little bit different than what we know today this was a little bit grainier but it was solid it was the first solid candy bar then as I said Daniel Peter 1875. he said we got to do something here we got to sweeten it up we've got a lot of milk and Switzerland why don't we add some condensed milk and that became as I said the key ingredient to what is I think the most popular chocolate I mean people love dark chocolate but milk chocolate I think is the king and people in Switzerland love their chocolate they're not just famous for it but they love it an average person in Switzerland a Swiss person eats over 22 pounds of chocolate per year that's 10 kilos oh man you're gonna get an upset stomach another breakthrough in the early 1900s Henry Nestle does that name ring a bell I mean I think when you hear the word Nestle you think of chocolate well in the bonus part we're going to find out that the word Nestle actually means something but it's not pronounced Nestle like this person's name or the brand and they also experimented with adding milk powder and they also found a way both Henry Nestle and Milton Hershey they were two people who were really Pioneers because they found a way to make it tasty inexpensive and available to everybody so that's why now the name's Nestle and Hershey are synonymous with chocolate and we're going to talk about Hershey a lot in the second part because Hershey is so popular that there's a town called Hershey Pennsylvania and they have their own theme park that's how big chocolate is also we couldn't talk about chocolate without talking about lint rodolf lint who was a Swiss chocolate make acre there's the Swiss again and he founded the lint brand of chocolate now that's okay what what's so special about that well he invented what is called the conching or conking I've actually heard it pronounced both ways don't worry it's not a very common word but it's the conking or conching machine and this is a machine that found a way to improve the quality of the chocolate and so all of these breakthroughs as I said they happened really in the same 20 years or so it was a huge moment for chocolate it was becoming Global but it's not easy to make chocolate I was taking a look at the process to share it with you guys here and I was like um how do I explain that if I can't even understand it myself so the process of making chocolate is a very elaborate great process let me try and sum it up without going into detail first you've got to clean it then you got to wrote well the the cocoa beans you gotta roast them twist it tostad you gotta roast them you gotta remove the shell then after that then you gotta grind them up moleros separate the butter as we said that was a huge uh step a huge breakthrough also you've got all your other ingredients you got to add after then you let it cool then you heat it then you let it cool again and it's got to be kept at the exact temperature it is a very painstaking process and we almost forgot to talk about the ingredients what's in chocolate well anything you can put anything you can put Chili Peppers in chocolate if you want and in fact that's actually getting very very popular spicy chocolate salty chocolate but the main ingredients to be able to call it chocolate is cacao beans cocoa butter sugar milk powder okay now this is used obviously in milk chocolate and also in white chocolate but white chocolate is an imposter what yeah well it doesn't contain cocoa solids or the chocolate liqueur we talked about before so sorry white chocolate you don't make the grade no that's lataya but in white chocolate's defense it does contain parts of the cacao bean and that's mainly from the cocoa butter other ingredients sugar of course honey vanilla yeah even some dark chocolate recipes that I looked at contained vanilla and then well maybe you're nuts about nuts maybe you're nuts about nuts Los frutosecos I think you say well you can add anything walnuts almonds I mean even fruit you can dip the fruit in chocolate oh how good are those cherries that are dipped in chocolate is anybody else getting hungry I told you before I wasn't a huge chocolate fan but I am getting hungry well let's talk about these cocoa or cacao beans the difference is people use them interchangeably but Coco would be the American way to say it and cacao would be the Spanish but a lot of Americans say cacao it's one of those things that has become as universal as the chocolate itself and you can't have chocolate without these beans and these beings come from the cacao tree which is very delicate very finicky we Tiki smikis Farmers lose on average 30 percent of their Cacao Tree crop every year the word crop is cosecha and some cacao trees are more than 200 years old but as I said they're finicky the only ones that produce the marketable cocoa beans are in the first 25 years of their life so after 25 years they're really not used to make chocolate also the farmer has to wait four or five years for a cacao tree to produce its first beans so let's put it this way if you're looking to plant something or to have a crop with a very fast yield yield is cocoa beans are not your thing oh and another fun fact we'll look at at some more in the bonus part but the theobroma cacao is the name of the tree that produces these and it means food of the Gods[Music] so as you can see a lot has to happen so that you can enjoy that candy bar but folks as they say life is like a box of chocolates you never know what you're gonna get but here on FYI you know exactly what you're gonna get you'll experience an interesting entertaining informative English class and I sure hope you'll join us in the bonus episode of today's F why foreign[Music]