When it comes to buying chocolate, most people are essentially looking for something pleasant to eat, that represents good value for money. When it comes to buying fine chocolate, you should expect a little bit of excitement in the flavour department, and some extra mmmm in the mouthfeel. (Personally, I think ethical considerations are equally important - but the ethics of chocolate is a big subject, and I deal with it in detail elsewhere on the site).

The best way to discover what represents pleasure and value for you is to taste and compare every chocolate you can get your hands on. Tough job, I hear you say. Actually, we're not suffering from an over-abundance of fine chocolate with character in Australia, so the job of tasting it is not quite as demanding as you might hope.

The vast majority of people enjoy eating chocolate. A significant number of those people enjoy chocolate so much that they even refer to themselves as "chocoholic".

Here in Australia, an enormous array of chocolate is offered by every supermarket, service station, and corner store. In short, the chocolate market in Australia is totally saturated. Right? Well, not really. And that's where I come in.

I am a cocoa trader, budding chocolate manufacturer, and recovering chocoholic. My experience tells me that the average consumer of mass-produced chocolate doesn't really know what they're missing out on, nor what they're contributing to (most chocolate manufacturers are, at best, complacent about issues like child labour, Third World poverty, and ozone destruction. If you buy their products, you actively support their complacency).

Here's a challenge: examine the list of ingredients on any bar of fine chocolate. Cocoa solids are listed first, right? (Hint: if sugar and milk solids are listed first, meaning they're the main ingredients, then what you've got is a confection designed to appeal to children, not a fine chocolate).

"But wait!", you say. "The first ingredient listed on my bar of fine chocolate isn't cocoa solids, it's cacao [or cocoa mass, or just cocoa, or cocoa butter]". Well, OK. The point is that the one vital ingredient in all chocolate comes from the seed of the tree called Theobroma cacao, or, more commonly, cocoa. (The word Theobroma means "food of the gods" in Greek, while the word cacao is derived from the ancient Mesoamerican name for cocoa. Just to confuse matters, the common name cocoa is thought to be an Anglicised version of the word cacao). But what exactly are cocoa solids? How are they obtained from the cocoa tree, and how are they transformed into chocolate?