Chocolate that's "Something between chocolate and orange juice."

When I read articles like this one I get really confused. And frustrated. And disheartened.

This is innovation? Making couverture that tastes kinda-like fresh juice, because why?

Let's step back for a moment and see what this is all about. For the past 10 years, apparently, Valrhona has been experimenting with fermentation by adding flavorings (fruit juices and who knows what else) to the fermentation box to see what happens. In this new process, they are adding fruit juices to a fermentation pile after a time period where the beans could be considered to be fully fermented.

The pile is then "doubly fermented" and the beans absorb the flavor of the juice.

Well, duh. Soak warm, wet, cocoa beans in any flavored liquid and they will absorb that flavor. Fermentation is all about liquids (helped by heat) entering the bean and transforming the chemicals inside the bean. 

Valrhona does state that the fruit flavor is not "nature identical" (my term) as the sugars in the fruit juice ferment, creating different flavors than if fresh juice were into a ganache for example. I would be interested in seeing a careful analysis of normally-fermented beans and "doubly-fermented" beans to see what the quantifiable chemical differences are.

In any event, this is what Valrhona has been choosing to spend R&D monies and efforts on. Maybe it's as a result of pushback on how Dulcey gets made (but I doubt it). The inspiration for Dulcey was caramelized white chocolate. Instead of actually caramelizing white chocolate, Dulcey is white chocolate flavored to taste like caramelized white chocolate. Adding flavorings to the fermentation pile could be seen as being "more natural" than adding an oil during manufacturing. Or something like that.

I can see why Dulcey is popular. It's tasty, it created a new market category (blonde chocolate), and it saved chefs time and labor when compared with actually caramelizing chocolate. Buying Dulcey also means a consistent flavor profile, and any chef who has caramelized chocolate can probably attest to at least one burned batch. I don't see these new fruity chocolates as filling the same need, or any needs a chocolatier has.

Flavoring couverture, IMO, reduces the flavor options a chef has because the chocolate comes with a specific amount and type of, well, orange-ness in this case. But not an orange-ness (or some other fruiti-ness) we know, it's a new kind of orange-ness.

I liken buying most flavored couvertures to one of the only drinks I get at Starbucks in winter - brewed chai tea bags with a shot of espresso added. I get to add milk and sugar. I loathe Starbucks' chai tea lattes because they are nastily milky-sweet for my taste. By ordering as I do, I get to control the sweetness and the milkiness of my beverage, and -- when you get right down to it -- that's one main reason why Starbucks has been successful; letting the customer tailor their drink order. This is not what Valrhona is doing, in fact, it's the opposite.

The process also raises the price of the chocolate, but Valrhona states that farmers benefit by the process. I don't see that there can be very much benefit as this double-fermentation technique is not one that can be done by smallholders fermenting what grows on their farms - it has to be done on a larger scale. That means at a centralized processing facility, which might be owned by a co-op, but it might not. If Valrhona is paying a co-op more to buy the doubly-fermented beans, then individual farmers may earn more.

The question is, how much more? Is the difference meaningful? 

So, my challenge to Valrhona — and, in fact to every chocolate company in the world who makes the claim that farmers earn more — is to step up and quantify exactly how much more. A couple of thousand bucks a year across a co-op of dozens of farmers with families totaling hundreds of people may not be meaningful.

If a company is not willing or able to quantify what the benefit the deliver to cocoa farmer actually is, then I think they should stop making the claim.

What say you?

[Edited on 11/21/2015 to correct typos.]