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.

In an earlier post I mentioned the amounts of cocoa solids and cocoa butter contained in different types of chocolate (dark, milk, white).  In that post, I was going on about this stuff as if I had any idea what the hell I was talking about. I didn’t then, but now I do, because I looked it all up in order to write this post. So that you too can be an expert and look down on the lesser person who doesn’t know his cocoa solids from his BUTTer, I will share this new knowledge with you now:

Cocoa Solids

Basically, this is plain cocoa. No sugar. No fat. Tastes very bitter on its own. Most of the chocolate flavor, as well as the stuff in chocolate that’s good for you – i.e. antioxidants – is in the cocoa solids. So if you’re interested in chocolate as a health food, best get the kind with high cocoa (cocoa solids) density.  Just because this is too simple, there’s a variant of this called “Dutch Process Chocolate” which was developed by the van Houten family – they who make that delicious cocoa you buy in a tin. Their process makes the cocoa milder, less bitter, and easier to dissolve (good for making hot chocolate).

Cocoa Butter

Cocoa Butter

Cocoa butter is the fat extracted directly from the coca bean or from chocolate liquor (more about that in a sec).  Add some milk, sugar, and a bit of vanilla and you’ve got white chocolate.  It’s what gives dark and milk chocolates their richness. It also has the magical property of melting at around 35 degrees C, which means it doesn’t melt at room temperature, but does melt in your mouth. Another convenient truth about cocoa butter is that it takes a ling time rancid. This not only helps give chocolate its long shelf life; it also means that cocoa butter is used in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals like creams and soaps (and some other less appetizing medicine delivery vehicles.)

Chocolate Liquor

Not an alcoholic beverage in this, sorry. Chocolate liquor is what you (well not you - chocolate makers) get when you process  raw cocoa beans. By process we mean ferment, roast, shell, grind, then melt. Baking chocolate is made directly from the chocolate liquor. For eating chocolate, the stuff gets mixed with other ingredients or else separated into cocoa solids and cocoa butter, then re-combined in varied proportions.

So now we know. Feel smarter? I do.