Everything you ever wanted to know about chocolate and more!
All true chocolate is made from processing a bean from the Theobroma cacao tree. Processed for consumption at least since the time of the Aztecs, its popularity spread after discovery by the Spanish in the early 16th century.
Cacao is an evergreen tree and the seeds come in three major varieties Forastero, Criollo and Trinitario, about 40% of which are grown in Africa. Most of the rest are grown in Central and South America, since the plant only flourishes in near-equatorial regions.
Forastero is the most widely grown variety and produces the overwhelming majority of beans used for chocolate manufacturing. The rarer variety, Criollo, has a much finer flavor but is much more expensive to produce. Trinitario is a hybrid of the two.
Whichever kind of bean is used the process for creating the basic ingredients used in chocolate is much the same. Twigs, stones and other debris that make their way into the material from harvesting are removed. At the same time, the beans are graded to ensure that the finest are preserved for outstanding chocolates. The beans are dried, husked and roasted in a fashion similar to coffee production.
Chocolate liquor is created after grinding the beans. This viscous liquid contains no alcohol, though. Words used in special applications are sometimes just plain confusing. To remove fat from the chocolate liquor, it's pressed. The result is a blend of two major components, cocoa presscake of the ground cocoa bean solids and cocoa butter. Cocoa powder is formed by further grinding up the cocoa presscake.
Sugar is added and often other components depending on the recipe. All ingredients are then put into a container called a conch, a large tub with metal beads or rollers to blend all components together. Conching may go on for a few hours for ordinary chocolate, or as long as a day or more for truly high grade product.
The result is then tempered. Tempering is a process of alternately cooling and heating the mixture to get just the right degree of smoothing and composition. A real art, it can take several hours, but at the end a fine piece of chocolate is created.
How the material is conched and tempered is determined by the intended final product. For unsweetened baking chocolate the chocolate liquor is simply cooled and packed with no further additives (other than, in some cases, a preservative). The cocoa butter might be the main ingredient, if white chocolate is being made. To make milk chocolate, the most popular type, milk is added.
Blending different relative amounts of the ingredients together is part of what makes for different recipes. In the finest couvertures as they're termed, up to 70% or more of cocoa might compose the final product. In Europe, the percentage of cocoa solids is often on the higher end, making for a very rich, deep chocolate confection. In the USA, a much lighter product is often desired.