Where Does Chocolate Come From?

Uncle Ken, Where Does Chocolate Come From? Well, children, it’s like this:

In the beginning, the Lord created chocolate, and he saw that it was good. Then he separated the light from the dark, and it was better.

Not buying it, eh? Kids these days – they always want the complicated explanation. Well, I found the truth on YouTube. It’s a promotional video for an organic chocolate company, but it’s not too advertisey and it’s the best short video I could find explaining cacao processing. (I waste my morning surfing YouTube, so that you can waste yours surfing this blog.)

Here’s the play-by-play in case you want just the facts.

  1. Grow cacao plants
  2. Harvest the ripe pods
  3. Get the seeds out of the pods
  4. Dump the seeds into a big wooden box and let them sit there for a while, fermenting
  5. Dry the fermented seeds in the sun or some kind of mechanical dryer
  6. Get the hard skins off of the seeds, keeping the “nibs”
  7. Grind the nibs
  8. Squeeze/press the cocoa oil out of the nibs
  9. The oil cools and becomes cocoa butter
  10. The remaining de-oiled nibs are now squashed into a hard cake
  11. Grind the caked cocoa-bean substance into a powder
  12. That’s cocoa powder!

And that’s about it. Any more questions? Ask your Mother.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 30th, 2011 at 5:19 am and is filed under Chocolate Facts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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