How should chocolate be stored?
Chocolate is best kept between 16-18° C, in dry conditions.

How long will chocolate last?
Assuming it is stored satisfactorily, it should keep for about a year (slightly less for white chocolate).

Can I freeze chocolate?
Keeping chocolate in the 'fridge or the freezer is not recommended, as it gets slightly damp when it warms up, which can lead to it 'blooming'.

What is 'blooming'?
If it has suffered extremes of hot or cold temperatures, the cocoa butter can separate from the cocoa solids, causing a white film to appear on the chocolate.

Where does chocolate come from?
House of Dorchester gets Cocoa beans from Ghana and Nigeria, although cacao trees are also found in other parts of West Africa, such as the Ivory Coast.

How is chocolate made?
After fermentation, the beans are roasted and cracked to release the cocoa nibs, which are then crushed between heated rollers to produce cocoa mass - which consists of cocoa butter and cocoa powder in roughly equal quantities. Cocoa mass is a dark, bitter, chocolate-like substance, from which cocoa butter can be expressed at high temperature.

Plain chocolate is made by refining a mix of sugar and cocoa mass. This dry paste is conched with additional cocoa butter to produce the desired flavour and viscosity.

Milk chocolate is made in two ways:
The English way is to dry a mix of cocoa mass and sweetened condensed milk under vacuum, and to combine the resulting "crumb" with cocoa butter. The paste is then refined and conched, as with plain chocolate.

The Continental method is to mix spray-dried milk powder with cocoa mass, sugar and cocoa butter, and to conche after refining. In either case the viscosity is adjusted after conching.

What is the first recorded mention of chocolate?
Hernando Cortez is reputed to have partaken of 'chocolatl' in his dealings with Montezuma in Mexico around 1519. This was a frothy drink, prepared from cacao beans, spices and water, reputed to have aphrodisiac properties. For more information, see the section on the History of Chocolate.

When was chocolate first produced in the form we now know?
For some time, chocolate was only available as a drink, with chocolate houses in London being set up in the latter part of the 17th century. The first chocolate factory in the USA was established in Dorchester, Massachusetts some hundred years later.

Where is House of Dorchester chocolate made?
House of Dorchester began as Dorchester Chocolates in 1963 in the Dorset market town of Dorchester (surprise, surprise!). It was started by a Master Chocolatier - Richard Ungaretti - whose home-made confections have delighted customers for more than thirty years. For further details, see the history of House of Dorchester.

Who eats the most chocolate in the world?
Average annual US consumption of chocolate is now more than 5kg per person, which compares with around 8.6kg in the UK. The Swiss eat the most chocolate per capita (around 10kg annually), closely followed by the Belgiums, German and Denmark, with Japan trailing at only around 3kg per person each year. In the UK, the chocolate market is worth more than £5bn annually, with the USA - who are 10th in the world consumption figures - spending more than $13bn in a year.