You would never begin to guess how complex this process is or how it ever developed to produce the chocolate we now love so much.
Growing the beans.
Interestingly, about 80 per cent of the world cacao harvest is grown in 1- to 2-hectare estates: it's not big agribusiness, but small farm production.
The delicate and beautiful cocoa tree requires a consistent temperature and humidity level, together with protection from direct sunlight - this is often achieved by using shade from larger mother trees. These demands effectively limit the scope of cocoa growing to about 20 degrees either side of the equator.
Trees will produce fruit in about 4 years but can take 10 years to offer the very best mature fruit, although at no stage is there ant indication that, after many steps this fruit will produce something as wonderful as chocolate.
Preparing the beans
Once the pods are opened and the beans removed, they must be fermented. This varies from country to country, but on smaller plantations the beans are often fermented and dried in the sun, they are cleaned, ready to be roasted.
Once roasted the beans must be shelled or winnowed to reveal the nibs from which the chocolate is made. The roasted nibs are now ready to be ground into a paste that will eventually become chocolate.
The first stage of grinding is to produce cocoa liquor from the nibs. This thick paste is somewhat misleading named as it isn't a liquid and more akin in viscosity to peanut butter. All designed to add to the mystery and confuse the unwary!
With fat content of more than 50 per cent, at room temperature the solid cocoa butter suspends the other cocoa particles, which is more interesting when we begin to work with chocolate and attempt melting and tempering.
Effectively the final stage is to knead and mix the chocolate liquor and cocoa butter with other ingredients to make chocolate of various types. For milk chocolate, sugar and powdered milk are added, for dark chocolate no milk is needed but sugar is, while for white chocolate, cocoa butter without the other cocoa elements is added to milk and sugar. Often vanilla is added to all types of chocolate to help with and end notes in the flavour profile.
This 'grinding, refining and mixing' is achieved through a couple of processes that can take from several hours to many days depending on the depth of flavour and also on the age of the machinery.
The most well-known of these processes and most talked about is a stirring and milling process that removes moisture and acidity from the chocolate which also increases the smoothness by reducing the particle size further.
