Wind Rises in North America 1625

Chapter 105: Luxury Food in the 17th Century

"chocolate!"

Just when the time travelers were racking their brains to figure out how to create some high value-added goods in order to expand the types of trade goods with the Ming Dynasty and thus reduce the output of gold and silver, someone came up with a very constructive plan at the right time.

"There are large-scale cocoa plantations in areas like Peru and Venezuela in Spanish America, and thousands of tons are exported to Europe every year for consumption." Former naval cadet Xiong Zeqian looked at the stunned travelers present and said softly, "The Spanish smuggler we're working with is a cocoa merchant. So, why don't we buy a large quantity of cocoa beans from him, make them into chocolate, and sell them in Spanish America and the Ming Dynasty to generate the necessary funds for immigration."

"Chocolate is light, doesn't take up much space, and has a sweet, rich, and alluring aroma. Its value is undoubtedly much higher than sugar. If introduced to the market, it will undoubtedly fetch a high price. Whether in Spanish America or within the Ming Dynasty, there are undoubtedly many people who can afford this product. This way, we will definitely make a lot of money."

"You can make...chocolate?" Li Xianqing was moved and looked at him with hope.

"My sister is an inspector at a chocolate factory. She's often told me about the chocolate manufacturing process," Xiong Zeqian said. "Also, I've been to the chocolate factory's assembly line a few times and have a general understanding of the specific production process."

"Well, the chocolate factory's production lines are all equipped with modern equipment and machines. So, under our current conditions, can we produce simple chocolate?"

"That should be possible," Xiong Zeqian said uncertainly. "To make chocolate, you grind the cocoa beans, then use a grinder to grind them into cocoa pulp, separating the oil and fiber inside the cocoa beans to form cocoa butter and cocoa cake. Then you heat and melt the cocoa butter, mix it with the finely ground cocoa powder, and add some sugar, or even milk, to form chocolate pulp."

"Finally, the refined and tempered chocolate paste is poured into molds, where it cools and solidifies, gradually turning into slightly harder chocolate blocks."

“So how do you grind the cocoa beans to turn them into cocoa liquor?”

"Can't we grind soy milk?"

"Hey!..." After hearing this, everyone present immediately touched their foreheads with an expression of sudden realization.

Yes, since we can grind soybeans into soy milk, we can naturally grind cocoa beans into cocoa milk!

"Don't we have some cocoa beans in the warehouse?" Luo Zhenhui said with a pleased look on his face. "Why don't we try making some chocolate in the next few days and see how it tastes?"

"Well, I'll give it a try," Xiong Zeqian agreed with a nod, then raised another question, "Now that the chocolate is made, what should we use to package it? We can't just use some ordinary paper or a wooden barrel, right? If we do that, we won't be able to highlight the high-end status of the chocolate, and we won't be able to sell it at a high price."

"With our current industrial level, I'm afraid we can't produce high-end packaging materials." After hearing this, some people couldn't help but shake their heads and laugh.

"Actually, in the early days, we didn't need to package chocolate too elaborately to highlight its uniqueness and high-end nature," Li Liang interjected. "During that period, apart from a few luxury goods like jewelry and diamonds that required exquisite packaging, most commodities didn't have any decent packaging. For example, the Dutch, who shipped spices from Southeast Asia to Europe and sold them for ten times the price, also packaged them in wooden barrels or sacks."

"The British and Spanish purchased tea from the Ming Dynasty and shipped it to Europe or Spanish America in the form of tea bricks for cheaper prices and easier transportation. As long as we can create this unique chocolate flavor, with its rarity and special taste, it can't be sold cheaper than spices!"

"Of course, another important reason for not doing exquisite packaging for the time being is that we don't have the extra manpower to package the chocolates."

When everyone heard this, they all nodded in agreement.

With a population of more than a thousand, there is almost no manpower left for industrial construction except for growing crops and some hunting and fishing.

A few days ago, Li Xianqing proposed to carry out deep processing of the hunted furs, but after carefully calculating the human resources, he found that there were not too many "idle" people to engage in the service trade industry, so he had no choice but to give up.

In the earliest period, some people proposed to go to the Fraser River Basin or California to pan for gold in order to accumulate initial capital and even use it to pay for the corresponding immigration expenses.

But in the end, due to lack of manpower, they gave up.

Because, whether it is the current 17th century or the future 21st century, gold mining development is considered a semi-human resource intensive industry, which requires a large amount of manpower and material resources to carry out many processes such as mining, ore dressing, and refining.

In addition to the supply of various materials, including food, tools, and daily necessities, the assistance of relevant industrial and agricultural industries is also needed to successfully mine the gold buried underground (in the river channel) and turn it into lovely gold coins (gold bars).

In the final analysis, no matter what you want to do, one of the most important prerequisites is to have a certain scale of population resources, which is indispensable.
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In the dead of winter every December in Shixing Fort, the rich aroma of meat would waft through the air throughout the camp.

This made the stomachs of many residents who had just eaten start to move again, and their eyes involuntarily looked in the direction where the fragrance came from.

I can never get enough of this meat!
However, today, while the aroma of meat wafts through the air, there is also a faint sweet fragrance, giving people a smoky feeling.

I don’t know what delicious things the food processing factories there are making.

After swallowing a few times, the residents continued with their work under the arrangement of the steward, and planned what to prepare for the next meal.

In the brick houses where the aroma of meat was most pronounced, dozens of young women, under the guidance of two "foreign women," were making primitive "canned food." Jars of pork, fish, venison, and seal meat, heated to high temperatures, were corked and sealed again with dripping wax. They were then neatly stacked in a corner of the house. Once cooled, they would be loaded onto the ship, preparing food for the upcoming journey.

For hundreds and thousands of years, people have been trying to find ways to preserve food for a long time.

Drying, pickling, pickling, smoking, and so on are all very effective ways to preserve food for longer periods of time.

However, these processing methods often change the flavor of food and are not perfect at preserving nutrients.

Sometimes, food will become sour, smelly, or inedible after being stored for a long time.

For example, during voyages at sea during this period, all sailors had to eat rotten bacon, moldy biscuits, and black bread. Many foods were even infested with maggots, but to avoid starvation, the sailors could only pick out the maggots while swallowing the sour and smelly food with their eyes closed.

The method of stuffing food into sealed containers or ceramic jars and then heating it at high temperature to kill any existing microorganisms for long-term preservation was not invented until the early 19th century.

At that time, French Emperor Napoleon offered a high reward in order to solve the problem of food spoilage during the army's expedition.

Confectioner Nicolas Appert successfully solved this problem by using high-temperature sterilization and sealing methods, and was awarded a high bounty for it.

This invention not only solved the problem of military food supply, but also gradually spread to the civilian field and eventually became an important technology for modern food preservation.

In Chinese history, there are records of using sealed ceramic jars to preserve food as early as in "Qimin Yaoshu" written by Jia Sixie.

Two years ago, when the time travelers first went to Ming Dynasty, they used hundreds of small pottery jars looted from Mexico to try to make a primitive version of canned food, and brought them with them to eat on the road.

Although more than 40% of the pottery jars were breathable and cracked due to poor sealing, this still allowed the sailors on the ship to enjoy extremely delicious "canned food" during the more than several months of sea voyage.

Therefore, when the immigrant ship returned to Qiming Island, it specially bought nearly a thousand small pottery jars from Guangzhou, preparing to bring them back to make more "canned products".

Of course, the best canned packaging material should be glass bottles, but because the cost is too high, we can only settle for the second best and choose simpler packaging such as ceramic jars.

Coincidentally, more than two months ago, a potter in Guangfeng Fort also successfully fired a batch of qualified pottery, which made the time travelers overjoyed.

To this end, the decision-making committee specially equipped the potter with more than a dozen assistants to speed up the firing of pottery jars in order to produce more "canned" packaging materials.

Today, in addition to providing packaging for the "cans", these clay pots are also used as packaging materials for storing freshly baked chocolate products.

You should know that in addition to being very sensitive to temperature, chocolate will melt when exposed to high temperatures. It is also afraid of moisture and must be packaged in a sealed manner.

Since these ceramic pots can be used as canned food packaging materials to ensure that most of the food in the cans does not leak and is breathable, they must also play a certain role in protecting chocolate.

As for the deformation caused by the bumps and turbulence on the ship, there is really no way to solve it. It can only be softened and reshaped again when arriving at the port, which adds an additional processing step.

The experimental processing of this chocolate has been going on for four days, and more than 100 kilograms of cocoa beans and sugar have been wasted. Finally, before the end of the year, a batch of finished products that just meet the tastes of the public in later generations were produced.

After trying it, some immigrants felt that this food with a hint of bitterness and sourness, and a hint of sweetness, was strange, and because it was not mixed with milk (due to a shortage of dairy cows), it was not very smooth when chewed in the mouth. However, after slowly savoring it, the rich aroma flowed between the lips and teeth, and it seemed to have a unique flavor.

More importantly, in this era, sugar was still a luxury for most ordinary people and was rarely consumed.

But human beings are naturally unable to resist sweetness.

Not to mention that this food tastes strange, just because it has a rich sweet flavor, it is also an extremely rare delicacy for immigrants.

Mm, it’s delicious!

I guess those dignitaries would like this kind of rare and strange food more.

After all, rich people all have a strong curiosity.

(End of this chapter)