Chocolate and its Properties
Learn more about Chocolate and its properties. It is usually a sweet, brown food preparation of roasted and ground cacao seeds that is made in the form of a liquid, paste, or in a block, or used as a flavouring ingredient in other foods. Learn about the history of chocolate and how it is made.
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What is Chocolate?
Chocolate is the most popular sweet treat in the world. People around the world (but mostly in Europe and the United States) consume more than 3 million tons of cocoa beans a year, according to the World Cocoa Foundation. Cacao trees bear fruit that are about the same size and shape of a papaya. These bumpy, lumpy berries, or pods, are full of up to 50 sour seeds, or beans, covered in white pulp.
Cacao seeds are harvested by hand because machines could injure the trees. Workers remove the pods, which are orange when they are ripe, and open them with a machete. The seeds are placed in large fermentation trays that are stacked and covered in banana leaves, where they are left for two to seven days. Fermentation produces the chocolate flavour and aroma. It also destroys the seed's embryo, preventing unwanted germination, and causes the white pulp to fall away from the seeds.
After fermenting, the beans dry out on sunny platforms. Workers turn them several times a day for three to five days to complete drying. The beans can dry faster in rotary driers but sun-dried beans taste the best.
Next, the beans are taken to the chocolate factory, where they are cleaned and debris is removed. The beans are roasted in large, rotating ovens. The roasting draws out flavour and removes the beans from their hulls. Roasted beans go into a winnowing machine, which cracks the beans and removes hulls. The remaining part of the bean is called the nib. Nibs become chocolate.
The nibs are ground down under a series of rollers. This process results in a thick paste called chocolate liquor. It is the main source of unsweetened baking chocolate.
Production
Types of Chocolate
Fine chocolate falls into three categories: dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate, Williams said.
- Dark chocolate has chocolate liquor, cocoa butter, lecithin, sugar and vanilla.
- Milk chocolate has all of the above plus milk fats and milk solids.
- White chocolate contains everything milk chocolate does except chocolate liquor.
The History of Chocolate
The word chocolate can be traced back to the Aztec word "xocoatl," the name for a bitter drink made from cacao beans. This was the way chocolate was consumed until the Spanish conquistadors came to Central America.
Mayans and Aztecs believed the beans had mystical properties and used them during important rituals. When the Spanish arrived, sweetened chocolate came into existence. Legend has it that the Aztec king Montezuma gave conquistador Hernán Cortés a bitter chocolate drink, which he said was disgusting. But Cortés' men added cane sugar and honey to it and took it back to Spain, where it quickly became popular.
Chocolate was a fashionable drink for rich Europeans throughout the 18th century. The Industrial Revolution allowed chocolate to be mass-produced and brought the treat to the masses. The popularity led to the development of cacao tree plantations.
In 1847, a Bristol, England, chocolate company, Fry's, created the first mass-produced chocolate bar when Joseph Fry added additional cocoa butter to Van Houten's chocolate, which turned it into a moldable paste. Milk chocolate was invented soon after with the help of Henri Nestlé, who went on to found the major food company that bears his name. Major European chocolate brands Lindt and Cadbury also got their start in the 1800s; Rodolphe Lindt invented the conching machine, which gives chocolate a velvety texture.
