Please excuse this post: it really is just an intellectual excursion as I can’t find any way to link it to Israel! I’m reading The Lions of Lucerne by Brad Thor on my Kindle at the moment. It was his first thriller in the Scot Harvath series and I decided to go back and fill in as I seem to have read the most recent four in the series. And like all the others of his I’ve read, it’s a rip roaring read.
Without giving any spoilers, and with the word Lucerne in the title, it shouldn’t come as a shock that Switzerland comes into the story. Specifically Brad mentions Swiss chocolate and the fact that some versions of Swiss Nestlé chocolate are never sold in the US.
A long time ago, when I was studying for my PhD in the UK, we had a lecture on the physics of chocolate given by one of the materials scientists for Rowntree (a major chocolate manufacturer in York) who were bought by Swiss Nestlé in 1988. At the time, Rowntree manufactured the Kit-Kat in York. This is one of the names that Nestlé uses internationally. The following is my rendering of a talk I heard 15 years ago so maybe it’s all wrong, but I can’t find this story on the web!
Nestlé tried to consolidate worldwide Kit-Kat production and chose York. But, try as hard as they might, they could never get Kit-Kats made in York to be accepted in the US. No matter what they tried to do with the chemistry and the physical processing of the chocolate, they could never replicate the distinctive Hershey chocolate taste that is used in the US versions of the product.
So here, if my memory serves me, is the reason why!
Milk chocolate has never been made with liquid milk. In fact, the history of milk chocolate starts in Switzerland in 1843 as a collaboration between Daniel Peter, who was making non-milk chocolate, and Henry Nestlé, who had recently invented a process to make baby food: what he called “milky flour”. This is basically dried milk that can be stored for a very long time before being re-hydrated and used (as every non-breastfeeding parent knows).
After years of work Peter came up with the correct, stable mix of cocoa, sugar and milk. There are significant differences in where the fat is between baby food and the milk used in milk chocolate, but essentially the process of drying the milk is similar. The chemistry of this mix is fascinating and the impact that the relative sizes of the grains and fat globules in the mix have on the taste and texture are amazing.
For readers in the UK, the difference between Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and Mars’s Galaxy chocolate, for instance, comes down to an almost infinitesimally small difference in the grain sizes of sugars and other solids in those two chocolates. Under a microscope it’s hard to see, pop a cube in the mouth and any 5 year old can tell you which is smoother and has the smaller grain size.
But what about America? As milk chocolate became more popular, and coupled with the rise in formula baby food, plants to dry milk sprang up all over the world. In geographically small Europe, this generally meant they were built near the cows. In America, just as the vast west was expanding, the distances from cows to milk condensing plants were larger. Refrigerated transport wasn’t really an option yet.
So the milk that was used for milk chocolate in the US was nearly always slightly soured by the time it was processed. I’m not having a dig; there was never any health implication to this, its just a difference.
This slight souring of the milk made a crucial difference to the taste of the chocolate. For generations of American kids, the taste of chocolate is Hershey’s. This taste of chocolate is completely different to the mass chocolate of the UK or most of Europe. I’m not talking about fine, high cocoa chocolates, I’m talking about the cheap, comforting stuff that we learn to love as children.
It turns out that the taste of chocolate we acquire as kids stays with us for the rest of our lives. Adults raised on the European taste often report the US Hershey taste as being unpalatable: I personally can’t eat it! American adults raised on Hershey have the same thing. That’s not to say you can’t learn to appreciate the other: people learn to love fine dark chocolates or things they weren’t brought up on. But give a US 5 year old a bar of UK Dairy Milk and he’ll notice the difference: he’ll probably eat it though!
And this was why (at that time, I’ve no idea what happened since) Nestlé just couldn’t make Kit-Kats in the UK that were suitable for the US market.
So Brad, if you’re reading this, you either did some excellent research or you hit on something most people feel instinctively but don’t know the reason for.
