Let me introduce to you a new type of article today: “Making of…” where we explore how certain food products are made. And to start, the wonder of wonders: chocolate!
So, what is chocolate and how is it made?
First, chocolate is a mixture of cocoa paste, cocoa butter and sugar.
What will change between dark, milk and white chocolate is the proportions of all this and the addition of milk. Fun fact, everybody has the impression that dark chocolate is less caloric than milk chocolate but in fact, they both contain around 500 kcal per 100g. It's just that dark chocolate is fattier and milk chocolate is sweeter.
But then, where does this cocoa come from?
Chocolate is made with cocoa beans. These beans are found in pods. And a pod is the fruit of the cacao tree. Here is a cocoa pod !
So, biologically, when you eat chocolate it's almost like eating the seeds of a fruit, as if you were eating a paste made from the seeds of an apple.
These trees grow in hot areas of the planet like Latin America, South East Asia or Africa. And even though cocoa originally comes from Latin America, today the largest cocoa producers are mostly African, with Ivory Coast and Ghana which accounted for more than 60% of world production in 2017.
Those cacao trees are very difficult to cultivate. Firstly, the transformation of the flowers into pods is really difficult to obtain and this for 3 main reasons:
A lot of trees have colored and fragrant flowers that will attract pollinators. But our cacao tree has dull flowers that are of no interest for insects.
Secondly, most trees have a pollen that is very light to be movable by the wind, but the pollen of our cacao tree is very viscous and remains stuck to the flower.
Finally, the flowers only live for two days!
All of this explains why only 1 flower out of 500 will turn into a pod.
Finally, the cacao tree does not have enough sap to feed all the pods, so a large part of them will die before reaching maturity.... In the end, a cocoa tree will only produce an average of 20 to 25 pods per year. And since it takes 2 just to make one average chocolate bar, you can imagine how many pods it takes to supply the whole world with cocoa. The calculation is quickly done: one cacao tree will allow us to make only 10 bars per year!
Now that we have cocoa beans, how do we make chocolate out of them?
For the moment, the beans transformation remains very artisanal. The beans are extracted from the pods with a machete and put in bins covered with banana leaves. They remain in these bins for about a week. This will allow them to ferment in a complex process and to develop the precursors of the chocolate aromas.
The beans are then sent to a factory, which will make cocoa paste and butter from them. There, the beans are roasted and crushed, resulting in a cocoa paste. This paste will be pressed in order to have on one side liquid cocoa butter and on the other side a kind of very dry block of cocoa called cocoa cake which can then be transformed into powder.
So we got our two ingredients: cocoa paste and cocoa butter! All that's left to do is add sugar to make chocolate!
But if you want to have a nice and shiny chocolate, it's not enough to just mix all the ingredients together. You also have to heat the chocolate: this is called tempering.
Basically, in chocolate there are different types of fat crystals. Some will give it a dull, matte, ugly color and some will give it a very shiny color. These two types of fat crystals do not have the same melting point. So the idea is to play with these different temperatures to keep only the crystals that will give shine to the chocolate.
So you can see that this process is complex and that explains why it is difficult to rework chocolate at home.
In any case, now that you know more about chocolate, I challenge you to reproduce at home this amazing sculpture made out of chocolate by Amaury Guichon (@amauryguichon) :
Challenge accepted ?
Sources :
Schenk, Henk. (2009). The science of chocolate, by S.T. Beckett. Crystallography Reviews. 15. 275-277. 10.1080/08893110902972611.