Cooking With the Food of the Gods

Whether you munch on a bar, sip it from a hot cup, bake it in a luscious dessert, or melt it into chili, chocolate is heavenly.

If the Aztecs could see us now, they’d no doubt be shaking their heads, wondering why it took us so long to find out what they knew millennia ago: Chocolate is a food—and a divine one at that.

Known by scientists as Theobroma cacao, chocolate means “food of the gods.” Cocoa, which comes from the seeds (or cocoa beans) of the Theobroma cacao tree, got its name as early as 1500 BC by the first Mesoamerican civilization, the Olmec. Their cultural progeny, the Maya, used the beans of the cacao tree to make a bitter water drink known as xocoatl. They added chilies, corn meal, spices, and water to a cacao paste and poured the potion from vessel to vessel to make it frothy.

The Aztecs also used xocoatl, which they believed to be divine, in rituals and ceremonies from weddings to human sacrifices. The Aztec emperor Montezuma II, perhaps the world’s first and most notorious chocoholic, offered xocoatl to the Spanish conquistador Cortés who, after conquering the Aztec capital, took cacao—the spoils of war—back to the royal court in Spain. The Spaniards, however, didn’t share the Aztecs’ passion for the bitter drink, so they added sugar and vanilla to make it more palatable. Ever since, the world has been in love with chocolate. It wasn’t long before the expression sinfully delicious entered the lexicon, and chocolate came to be linked to the word decadent.

But times have changed for the sweeter. If you’re looking for a guilty pleasure, look elsewhere. No longer can this dreamy delight be called sinful. Its reputation has been rescued by science, which has rendered the phrase death by chocolate wonderfully obsolete.

Why? Turning inside out the adage that anything that tastes good can’t be good for you, researchers keep stumbling onto more ways that chocolate does a body good. Like wine, tea, and many fruits and vegetables, cocoa contains healthful compounds called polyphenols, a class of antioxidants that includes flavonoids, which are known to be health-promoting. The darker the chocolate, the more cocoa solids it contains, and more cocoa means more of these antioxidant flavonoids.

And the good news only gets better. According to the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) scale, a measure of the antioxidant power of various foods, dark chocolate has more antioxidants per 100 grams than any other food. And next in line is milk chocolate, with more antioxidants than blueberries or red wine! While antioxidants are known to help counter disease-promoting free radicals, it appears that the health benefits of chocolate are not limited to these antioxidants alone.

If it strikes you as odd that something most people think of as candy is at the top of the ORAC scale, remember that cocoa, the base of chocolate products, is a plant-based food. Although science has only recently confirmed its health-promoting qualities, it’s been used for millennia as a medicinal plant.

In some of the happiest medical news, researchers have found that consumption of dark chocolate appears to lower blood pressure, reduce the formation of plaque in the arteries, inhibit the formation of blood clots, reverse blood vessel impairment, reduce inflammation, improve insulin resistance (good news for people with diabetes), reduce the risks of cancer, and even improve the skin.

Chocolate has even been shown to reduce blood cholesterol, raising good cholesterol and reducing the bad. How’s that possible when chocolate is typically loaded with saturated fat? It turns out that much of the saturated fat in chocolate is in the form of stearic acid, which doesn’t raise blood cholesterol. Another portion of chocolate’s fat comes from oleic acid, a monounsaturated, heart-healthy fat. According to The Hershey Center for Health and Nutrition, consumption of even 10 ounces of chocolate a day (milk or dark) does not cause an increase in cholesterol levels.

What’s more, chocolate isn’t to blame for all the ills it’s long been thought to cause, such as acne, migraines, and dental cavities. And, counter to conventional wisdom, chocolate rarely causes allergic reactions, and it doesn’t have enormous amounts of caffeine.

Before you become too enraptured by this delicious news, remember that most cocoa products are married to sugar and fat and, thus, while they may do wonders for your heart, too much will find its way to your hips, thighs, and waistline and send the numbers on your scale soaring, setting the stage for obesity and its health-busting consequences. Furthermore, the health rewards of chocolate and cocoa products are directly linked to the amount of polyphenol those products contain. Dark chocolate has the most, white chocolate has none, and milk chocolate falls somewhere in between. What’s more, processing—particularly “dutching,” or alkalinization—can deplete chocolate of much of its flavanol content.

So what’s a chocolate lover to do? According to experts, savor an ounce of good dark chocolate with at least 70% cocoa content each day, at the same time being mindful of your total daily fat and sugar intake. That’s as easy as popping a square or two of a chocolate bar and making sure you adjust your diet so your daily calories and intake of fat remain the same.

Another way to get your delicious, heart-healthy chocolate is to make it a star ingredient in your pantry. No doubt you’ve baked with chocolate and used it to create sweet treats, but small touches of chocolate yield equally delicious results in savory dishes. Don’t worry about it sweetening your soups or stews. “People associate chocolate with sugar,” says Maxine Clark, a food writer, a cooking teacher, and the author of Chocolate: Deliciously Indulgent Recipes for Chocolate Lovers. She’s quick to point out, however, that chocolate originally was used as a bitter, stimulating drink. Even chefs, she says, are sometimes reluctant to create with chocolate, especially when they don’t understand that less is more. “Adding small amounts of chocolate to dishes is part of Italian, Spanish, and South American cuisines,” she says, and their recipes “have ancient roots and were made with unsweetened chocolate or even cocoa powder.”

Small amounts of chocolate, says Clark, enliven rich meat, game stews, spicy Mexican dishes containing chile, as well as venison, wild boar, pork, hare, and rabbit. “A little chocolate adds richness and depth to the sauce or stew without tasting principally of chocolate,” Clark explains. Take care not to overdo it, though, since too much chocolate can ruin a savory dish. “It shouldn’t overpower, only subtly enhance the dish.”

What kind of chocolate should you use for savory dishes? In general, choose a chocolate with a high cacao content. That way, says Clark, you’ll need less chocolate because it won’t be diluted by excess sugar or added hydrogenated vegetable fats. For savory cooking, she suggests selecting a chocolate with 80% or more cocoa solids, which will give the correct subtle hint of cacao without the sweetness. When baking or candy making, however, use a chocolate with 60% to 75% cacao. Anything much higher, she observes, can make your chocolate temperamental to work with.

Select the best ingredients you can afford. Cheap chocolate will deliver inferior results because it lacks flavor and can be filled with unwanted additives, according to Clark. “Chocolate is sourced and blended from different types of beans, some more expensive and finer-flavored than others, for example Criollo and Trinitario. Flavor depends on the whole process, from picking to roasting, grinding, and blending. The more careful the process, the better balanced the chocolate and hence the higher the premium price,” she explains. Clark favors Swiss Lindt for value and reliability, French Valrhona for well-balanced flavor, and Tuscan Amedei for superior quality and rare varieties.

If you want to cook with chocolate but are trying to cut back on sugar and fat, Clark advises experimenting with pure cocoa powder instead of chocolate. Some recipes, such as meringues and macaroons, she cautions, need sugar to perform properly. But she draws the line at using sugar substitutes. “You could cut the sugar by half and replace with a sugar substitute, but I’m not a fan as it never really works well.” The taste and texture, she says, are spoiled. Her suggestion? “Just eat less of the real thing and exercise a bit more.”

Clark acknowledges that her chocolate creations aren’t part of a calorie-controlled diet, adding that “a small hit every so often won’t hurt too much. It’s overindulgence that causes the problems.” To keep your consumption in check, try this strategy: “Always make a recipe to share with others,” she says. “It’s dangerous being left alone with a chocolate dessert!”

Kate Jackson is the editor of Today's Diet and Nutrition.