Notas del episodio
Order a mocha today and you expect chocolate, but the word once had nothing to do with it. Between the 15th and 17th centuries, Mokha on Yemen's Red Sea coast was the bottleneck of the world coffee trade, shipping beans grown in the nearby mountains. European buyers began calling any Arabian coffee mocha, and then merchants stretched the label further: Ethiopian beans mixed with a few Yemeni ones, coffee from India's Malabar coast, and eventually beans from the West Indies were all sold as mocha. The authentic Yemeni beans carried natural earthy, chocolate-like notes, and drinkers began linking the word to that taste.
The chocolate itself arrived from the other direction. As drinking chocolate from the Americas reached 17th century Italy, cafes in Turin combined it with coffee and cream in a drink called the bavareisa, which by the 18th century became the bicerin, served in a clear glass with distinct layers of espresso, chocolate, and cream. Cookbooks of the early 1900s started labeling coffee-chocolate cakes and frostings as mocha, and a 1920 recipe for a chilled mocha listing only milk, coffee, and cocoa sealed the new meaning. The episode then maps the modern family tree, from cocoa powder versus pump syrup to the white mocha and the mochaccino.
- Many cafes still serve a mocha in a tall clear glass, echoing the bicerin.
- White chocolate has no cocoa solids, so a white mocha softens the espresso's acidic bite instead of adding bitterness.
- A half-dark, half-white mocha goes by black and white, marble, tan, tuxedo, or zebra mocha depending on the shop.
- A French white mocha is a white chocolate mochaccino that must be served without cinnamon.
- A standard 12 ounce espresso-based cafe mocha delivers about 152 milligrams of caffeine.