http://www.cheerychocolate.com/chocolate/swiss.html Swiss chocolate - The Swiss have taken many pains to make their chocolate some of the best produced in the world, Swiss chocolate continues to set the standard for fine, gourmet chocolate. en-us Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:54:49 EDT Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:54:49 EDT Weblog Editor 2.0 The smoothness of Swiss chocolate Chocolate used to be a much granier and less sweet confection. Of course it was popular long before the Swiss came into the chocolate picture, so to speak, but not nearly as popular as it was soon to be. Even Belgian chocolate could not compare to what was in store from the Swiss, but they did take a few pointers from Swiss chocolate production, which inevitably made all European chocolate much more in line with the fine, gourmet chocolate that we enjoy today. It was all the way back in the late 19th century when two men, whose last names have become household ones in much of the world, came up with a process that came to be called "conching". Those men were Henri Nestle and Rodolphe Lindt. We now know the Nestle company as one of the world's largest food manufacturing conglomerates and the Lindt company as one of the formost producers of chocolate confections. Conching served to make both the texture and the flavor much more agreeable to a wider range of people, particularily the Swiss. The process resultes in a very smooth chocolate, which when combined with condensed milk, made milk chocolate. The Swiss preferred a sweeter confection and milk chocolate made Swiss chocolate much more popular there. Swiss chocolate became so popular in it's native land that the Swiss now comsume more chocolate per capita then any other nation! Each person consumes about 22 pounds of Swiss chocolate, as well as that from other countires, per year! that adds up to almost twice as much chocolate per person as the United Sates consumes. (No wonder the Swiss Miss looks so happy all the time!) The secrets of many of the recipes for making Swiss chocolates are so coveted that in 1980 a man working for the Tobler company tried to sell them! He was caught and his attempts to sell the secrets to such countries as Russia and saudi Arabia were thwarted. This story just goes to show how sought after Swiss chocolate really is - even more so (maybe) than French chocolate, but definitely more so than German chocolate! Tue, 19 Jun 2007 12:54:49 EDT