Everyone loves chocolate but not everyone knows where it comes from. The story of chocolate formation from a tree to a chocolate bar is full of size, flavor, and art.
Making Chocolate Step by Step
1. Coca Cultivation:
This process starts with the cocoa tree. Each tree bears oval fruit which is about 5 to 12 inches long. Each fruit contains 30 to 50 seeds and these seeds are called cocoa beans.
2. Harvesting:
When fruits turn yellow it means that they are ready to harvest. They can be harvested continuously throughout the year. After harvesting, bowls are open and seeds are removed. Each seed is about the size of an olive in Latin America. This pulp, in which seeds are present were used to make coca wine.
3. Cleaning:
3000 years ago, cleaning beans or seeds are cleaned by hands, then they are exposed to light. The colored seeds stand a purplish color then they are ready for fermentation.
4. Fermentation:
The next step is fermentation. During the fermentation process. Beans are heaped in piles on the ground and in Latin America, a system of cascading boxes is used in both methods. Beans are covered with banana leaves. During two to nine days of fermentation, beans will get the color and same flavor like chocolate.
5. Drying and Shipping:
The next step is drying and shipping. Fermented beans are carefully dried by placing them on wooden boards or bamboo mats for 7 to 14 days under hot sand. Once dried, they're packed into sacks and bundles and shipped and traded to the international market or directly exported to the chocolate market.
6. Preparing Cocoa Mass:
Beans are cleaned, then roasted at low temperature to develop flavor. Shells are separated from nerves by the process called annoying, then they are finely ground into a cocoa mass which is solid at room temperature, then it is placed under extremely high pressure and the paste gives two products cocoa powder and cocoa butter.
7. Producing Chocolate:
The next step is producing chocolate. Cocoa mass, cocoa butter, and some sugar are mixed grinds and kneaded into a paste to make chocolate. Dark chocolate required only cocoa mass, cocoa butter, and sugar while white chocolate needs only cocoa butter, sugar, and powdered milk with no cocoa mass.
8. Conching:
The next step is conching. It is a careful process of rolling, heating, and aeration into a large agitator that stirs and smooths the mixture under heat. Here some lecithin and cocoa butter is added for the required fluidity. It is a very important step. The longer is the content process the smoother it will be the chocolate.
9. Tempting and Molding:
The final step is tempering and molding. The chocolate is now finished and ready for final processing during which it is put into blocks of drops. This method requires tempering where chocolate is slowly bought to a certain temperature to give it a stable shiny and smooth surface and then it is transferred to more chocolate before the packing process.
This is how the yummy chocolate comes into being.
Stay Blessed and Stay Healthy
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