Cioccolato di Modica

Modica's chocolate is a legacy of Spain in Sicily. From the sixteenth century the town was the seat of the County of Modica, the largest and most autonomous feudal state in the south, and it was under Spanish rule that the cold way of working cocoa reached it. The Spanish had taken the method from the Aztecs, who ground cacao seeds on a stone metate into a paste called xocoatl; the Aztecs, however, kept no solid bars and knew no sugar, so the Modica bar as we know it is a Sicilian remaking of that technique rather than a straight Aztec recipe. Long a luxury of the aristocracy and the convents, it was traditionally worked by hand on a warmed lava stone. A consortium of producers formed in 2003, and the chocolate won its IGP protection on 8 October 2018.

It snaps with a dry, matte break and never a clean gloss, then crumbles on the tongue with an unmistakable grit, the tiny sugar crystals grinding pleasantly against a dense, dark cocoa. The flavour is deep and only lightly sweet, the cocoa almost savoury, lifted by whatever it is scented with, warm cinnamon most often, or vanilla, chilli or citrus. It is more rustic and grainy than any smooth industrial chocolate, and meant to be.

Smoothness in ordinary chocolate comes from two steps Modica leaves out: refining, which grinds the sugar to particles too small for the tongue to feel, and conching, a long warm working that films each particle in cocoa butter. Here the cocoa mass is kept below about 40°C and only briefly worked, so the coarse sugar is neither ground fine, melted, nor fully coated. The sucrose stays as distinct crystals suspended in the cocoa fat and solids, which is the sandy grit you feel. With no added milk or extra cocoa butter and a high share of cocoa mass, the bar sets firm rather than silky, and because the fat is barely tempered the surface stays matte, the break dry and crumbly, often veiled with the pale bloom of cocoa butter risen to the top.