Why Belgian Chocolate is so good
Belgian chocolate is widely renowned as the best chocolate in the world, a statement usually confirmed by anyone’s taste as soon as the rich and velvety chocolate hits their lips. Part of Belgium’s legendary status comes from its rich history, alongside processes honed by generations and unique ingredients that make each shop different to the last.
Although the Belgians aren’t the only famous chocolatiers, many others such as the Swiss learnt a lot of their techniques from the Belgians.
How has Belgian Chocolate become so famous?
Belgium developed a gateway into the cocoa industry before many other countries and quickly began developing techniques and methods to work the cocoa beans into the luxury treat we eat today. Their understanding of the processes needed to develop the chocolate combined with their extensive history of engineering lead to them becoming one of the first countries that were able to use machinery to mix the cocoa bean, allowing them to create a really thin consistency.
Belgium is also located quite central in Western Europe making it a hub for tourism and travelling Europeans, the high footfall has led to nearly every village housing a small chocolate shop. As people travel through the villages, they pass stunning little shops filled with chocolate and can’t help but to pick up some amazing chocolates for their families, just one of the ways belgian chocolate has solidified itself as a household name.
What makes Belgian Chocolate so unique?
Belgium quickly realised that they had a gift for crafting chocolate, resulting in a huge number of chocolate shops, so expect to find one in every place you visit.
Each shop will contain its very own family recipes, kept secret as they are passed down through generations. One of the things that makes Belgian chocolate recipes so unique is that due to being a small shop, they’ll use a lot of quality ingredients and take extra care towards each part of the process, unlike mass-produced chocolate that we are all more familiar with.
Each chocolate is produced in small shops using unique family recipes which not only ensures amazing flavour but it also helps make the chocolate that bit more desirable. Local Belgian chocolate truly is leagues ahead of your everyday chocolate brands, it easily beats any highstreet chocolate in quality, taste and even smell.
If you have ever had the pleasure of tasting any Belgian chocolate you will recognise that the rich chocolate flavour lasts so much longer while also withstanding warmer temperatures taking much longer to melt, allowing you to cling on to that luxury experience. Why is this? Well one of the reasons is due to the fact that Belgian chocolates are almost always made using 100% cocoa butter unlike store brands such as Cadburys. When you remove cocoa butter, you have to replace it with vegetable fats and oils, and this small change affects much of the defining characteristics of the chocolate.
Companies then often compensate for this by then removing cocoa masses and replacing it with more sugars in an attempt to improve the taste of their chocolates. All of these changes are just one of many attributes that make Belgian chocolate so unmatchable when it comes to quality.
Why is Belgian Chocolate so creamy?
Each Belgian chocolate has a very refined recipe, passed through generations honed and improved until each recipe is well and truly perfect. This combined with the extra cocoa butter used in their chocolate sets each piece leagues ahead of any alternative. Instead of using cocoa butter many mainstream chocolatiers use vegetable fats, leading to a limit of up to 5% of vegetable fats to be implemented in 2003. Although this often helps companies to save on price, it ruins the best qualities of the chocolate. That’s why at Yummycomb we use chocolate with 100% cocoa butter ensuring that all of our chocolates are the best quality chocolate around.
Though some Belgian chocolate manufacturers use soy lecithin instead of using cocoa butter to make the chocolate cheaper to purchase, we believe it is always better to make chocolate that uses 100% cocoa butter so we can guarantee the best quality every time. Belgian chocolate is finely milled to 18 microns, helping to enhance flavour and to remove any graininess so that the chocolates melt on the tongue ensuring that it is of the highest quality possible. The Belgians also have an extra trick up their sleeve when it comes to ensuring their chocolate remains as tasty as possible and that is that their chocolatiers don’t use processed sugar, but often use cane sugar to create their treats instead.
To ensure only the best results our Belgian chocolatiers use the highest quality ingredients available, right down to selecting the finest beans and using pure cocoa butter in all products.
Which means that we can guarantee the best tasting chocolate around every time.
What are the benefits of Belgian Chocolate?
Everyone loves a good bit of chocolate, but not many people know of its ability to make you happy, and we aren’t just saying this because we sell it, there’s tons of research behind it!
With Belgium being one of the leaders when it comes to producing chocolate, because of this in recent years they have conducted research in all areas of chocolate, from improving every flavour and texture but also to work out exactly what it is that makes it so great.
According to Nature Neuroscience, chocolate has been found to reduce blood pressure and reduce the risks of strokes, chocolate contains theobromine which stimulates the nervous system, meaning that chocolate has so many benefits other than tasting great, which lets be honest, is a good enough reason in itself!
And that’s not all! Chocolate can also be great for your body by providing quick energy boosts as well as the cocoa butter providing a further slow energy boost throughout the day. Chocolate also can be healthy, as long as you switch to dark chocolate with at least 70% cocoa solids, chocolate in general can be healthy but it’s high sugar content works against it, due to having a much lower amount of sugars than other types of chocolate dark chocolate gets all of the benefits without the downside of too much sugar.
Finally chocolate also contains a lot of mineral salts, oligo elements and vitamins, which can be great regenerative food for the brain which is a great way to boost concentration.
Why Belgian Chocolate is the best for our products?
Belgian chocolates allow us to ensure the absolute best quality when it comes to our honeycomb chocolate, its creamy texture perfectly contrasts with the honeycomb, bringing an absolutely mouthwatering taste. Although it can be more expensive to source, it highlights the quality in all of our products.
The stunning taste brought to our products by the Belgian chocolate emphasises the level of hard work and quality we put in which truly sets us apart from our competition, which is essential for a business like ours being located in a city with one of the richest histories for chocolate in the UK.
Although Swiss chocolate is also known to create honeycomb chocolates, similar to our delicious products we know that after one taste of our chocolate honeycomb you will have no doubts that Belgian chocolate is the only way
This chocolate also means our products align with our values of sustainability, the 100% cocoa butter guarantee means there is no palm oil used to diminishing our quality. No palm oil in our products matches the sustainable values that we achieve when sourcing the cocoa beans, by using cocoa horizons scheme we can guarantee ethically sourced cocoa to make our products as sustainable as possible.
