Chocolate: How is it made?
Common chocolate types and varieties.
Chocolate is one of the most famous foods and ingredients in the world. But have you ever wondered about how chocolate is made? well, chocolate is made from the cacao bean. A number of you may know this from movies like Charlie and The Chocolate factory or from video games like Minecraft, which hint at how chocolate comes from the cocoa beans.
Cocoa beans are actually fruit because the Theobroma cacao trees pods or fruit can be opened to eat. Eating raw cacao beans, like as a fruit, is fine, as the cacao beans has a sweet or tangy white pulp, tasting like pineapple or mango. A mature Theobroma cacao tree can reach to about 15 to 25 feet tall but can reach 60 feet or more in some cases. These pods or “fruits” are seed shaped and are about 8 to 14 inches long and each can carry from up to 20 to 60 seeds.
Fermentation though is where chocolate’s flavors is driven from. The system transforms the taste to what we partner with cocoa and chocolate. The cacao beans are dried on plantations, then fermented. The drying process takes about two weeks, and at that point, the seeds changes from reddish brown to darkish brown like the chocolate bar you eat and love.
After roasting the beans, they are “winnowed” or blown by large fans to dispose of the shells on the bean, leaving only small, clumped up cocoa pieces called “nibs.” After roasting and winnowing, the cocoa nibs are thrown right into a paste called “cocoa mass” or chocolate liquid. Cocoa without sweeteners, like sugar, is made from ground up cocoa butter without chocolate liquid. This is what dark chocolate and bitter chocolate use. On the other hand there is milk chocolate which contains no chocolate liquor and is made by combining cocoa butter with sugar and or milk, meaning it does not “truly” count as chocolate. Still tasty nonetheless.
When the roasting and winnowing is finally finished, “conching” begins. Conches today have blades that move and kneed the chocolate in a back to back motion. Chocolate starts out as a “doughy or powdery mass, but ends up as a thick fluid” as said in sallys-place.com. Conching is also where the chocolate is mixed more thoroughly and the manufacturer adds their ingredients or food items like milk and sugar or more different flavoring like fruits. The most known versions of chocolate like milk, dark and Every chocolate has a different conching time, whereas some manufactures do it for a few hours, others do it for a few days. Conching is important to chocolate making because before conching, chocolate has a tough, rough texture, but after conching, the cocoa and sugar pieces are smaller than the tongue can feel, giving the chocolate a smooth feel in the mouth.
You can tell what is good chocolate if the chocolate has a glossy shine, strong aroma, smooth and sleek texture, and snap, but have you wondered why chocolate snaps instead of crumble in your mouth? Well, the final step to making chocolate is called tempering.
Tempering is when random crystal formations appear in the chocolate, giving the chocolate its snapping affect instead of crumbling. Chocolate tempering can be controlled by machines. Different methods of chocolate tempering can also be used.
After all the steps to chocolate making, the chocolate is cooled, wrapped, packaged, and then is either sent to other companies to be used in products or sent to stores or factory’s around the world to be sold. This is where you find chocolate in stores and purchase it!
My evidence for this article come from:
http://ww.scienceofcooking.com/chocolate/how-is-chocolate-ma
https://www.bhg.com/recipes/desserts/chocolate/chocolate-types-selection-storage/
These Youtube videos can show you how chocolate goes from a pod to a bar!
kevin • Aug 29, 2023 at 12:44 pm
I didn’t know that milk chocolate is not truly chocolate thanks for the info!