from the award-winning team at HowStuffWorksHow Chocolate Works

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03-02-09

Mmmm, chocolate.

Chocolate candy, chocolate cake, chocolate cookies, chocolate milk, chocolate sauce, chocolate pudding… There’s something completely amazing about this substance – so much so that the average person in the United States eats about 10 pounds of chocolate every year! If only it grew on trees. Hey, wait a mi-nute, it does. Well, that’s where it starts, anyway …

• It turns out that we have the cacao tree (theabroma cacao) to thank for chocolate. Cacao trees grow in moist, shady areas in equatorial regions such as West Africa, Indonesia, and Central and South America. The cacao tree produces a fruit about the size of a small pineapple. Inside the fruit are the tree's seeds, also known as cocoa beans. The beans are harvested, fer-mented for about a week, and dried in the sun. The dried beans are then ship-ped to chocolate makers to be processed.

• Cocoa processing in-volves several steps, in-cluding: roasting, winnow-ing, and grinding. The roasting is important be-cause it brings out the fla-vor. Winnowing removes the meat of the cocoa bean from its shell. Sometimes different types of beans are blended together before they are ground because trees from differ-ent regions can produce beans with distinct flavors.

• Ground beans form a viscous liquid called chocolate liquor. All seeds contain some amount of fat, and cocoa beans are no dif-ferent. However, cocoa beans are half fat, which is why the ground beans form a liquid. Chocolate liquor is pure, unsweetened chocolate – meaning it’s very bit-ter.

• You can do three different things with chocolate liquor. You can pour it into a mold and let it cool and solidify. This is unsweet-ened chocolate. You can press it in a hydraulic press to squeeze out the fat. Or you can add ingre-dients to make something like a chocolate bar.

• When you put the liquor through a press, what you are left with is a dry cake of the ground cocoa bean solids and cocoa butter (useful in every-thing from tanning products to white chocolate). If you grind up the cake, you have cocoa pow-der. You can buy both unsweet-ened chocolate (baking choco-late) and pure cocoa powder at the grocery store. What you are buying is ground cocoa beans, ei-ther with or without the cocoa butter. • To make a tasty chocolate bar, chocolatiers must add ingredi-ents like sugar and vanilla, conch the mixture, and then temper the chocolate. In conching, a special

machine is used to mas-sage the choco-late in order to blend the ingredients to-gether and smooth it out. This process can take anywhere from two to six days. Tempering is a carefully controlled cooling and heating process that allows the chocolate to harden properly.

• These three steps, along with the blend of cocoa beans chosen at the start and the way they are roasted, are the art of chocolate making.

Chocolate naturally

contains phenalethylamine

(PEA), which stimulates

an amorous feeling in

the human body.

The Cacao fruitis harvested and theseeds (cocoa beans)

are fermented anddried.

The Cocoa beansare roasted andthen winnowed.

The roastedbeans are crushed

to form a liquor.

GRINDING

The liquor ismixed with otheringredients, such

as sugar and milk.

MIXING

PRESSINGMOLDING

ROASTING

HARVESTING

The liquor can be madeinto unsweetenedchocolate suitable

for baking.

Pressing theliquor separates the

butter and thesolid cocoa.

CONCHINGThe chocolate

mixture is refined oncemore and then conched

to make a smoothchocolate mixture.

TEMPERING

CHOCOLATE!

The chocolateis carefully cooledand heated beforebeing poured into

a mold.

COCOAPOWDER

COCOABUTTER