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.

Enough to buy a cup of cocoa?

I guess we should file this under Chocolate Trivia. Did you know (I didn’t until a minute ago) that the cacao bean was once used as money? Yep. In ancient Mesoamerica – from what is now Mexico on down through to the northern part of South America – the cacao bean was once legal tender, so to speak. According to some sources, the beans were used in place of coins right up into the 1800s in parts of the Yucatan peninsula

Back in the day, 80 beans or so would buy you a hip and trendy cloth mantle. (About the same as today if you shop at Banana Republic.) A mantle, by the way, is a piece of clothing kind of like a cape. The sort of thing you might wear nowadays if you were the Pope. But hang on to your beans ’cause I hear they’re coming back in style.

The Aztec empire used to receive tributes (i.e taxes) to the sum of up to about 8 million cacao beans. The use of fake cacao beans by scammers was not unknown…