Everyone loves chocolate and will want to eat it all the time.
But not everyone has the idea of where it comes from. Or have heard the story of how cacao is harvested, transported, and transformed, then you’ll know the wonder of chocolate — its science, flavour, and art.
Chocolate is a wonderful food product made from roasted and ground cacao powders, which is also available as a liquid, solid or paste, on its own or as a flavouring agent in other foods. Cacao powder has been consumed in some form since at least the Olmec civilization (19th-11th century BCE),[1][2] and the majority of Mesoamerican people – including the Maya and Aztecs – made chocolate beverages
The seeds of this cocoa powder have an intense bitter taste and have to be fermented to develop the flavour. After fermentation, the beans are dried, cleaned, and roasted. The shell is removed to produce cocoa nibs, which are then ground to cocoa mass, unadulterated chocolate in rough form. When the cocoa mass is liquefied by heating.
Then we call it chocolate liquor.
The liquor may also be cooled and processed into its two components: cocoa solids and cocoa butter. Baking chocolate, also called bitter chocolate, contains cocoa solids and cocoa butter in varying proportions, without adding some sweet sugars to it.
Powdered baking cocoa, which contains more fibre than cocoa butter, can be processed with alkali to produce dutch cocoa. Much of the chocolate consumed today is in the form of sweet chocolate, a combination of cocoa solids, cocoa butter or added vegetable oils, and sugar. Milk chocolate is sweet chocolate that additionally contains milk powder or condensed milk.
