Welcome to my chocolate World !

What is Chocolate?

Chocolate or cocoa is a food made from roasted and ground cacao seed kernels that is available as a liquid, solid, or paste, either on its own or as a flavoring agent in other foods.

Origins

It all starts with a small tropical tree called the Theobroma cacao tree. Originally native to the Amazon and later spreading north into Central America, the tree gained its evocative scientific name in part because of the high regard the Aztecs had for the plant and the drink they would prepare from its beans, which they called "Xocolatl" (pronounced "sho-ko-LAH-tl").They drank their chocolate during rituals and used it as medicine, over than 5000 years.

Chocolate is made from the fruit of cacao trees.They are called pods and each pod contains around 40 cacao beans. Theobroma cacao produces large, oval-shaped seed pods that each contain 30 to 60 seeds, or cocoa beans, wrapped in a sweet, sticky white.

Since the seeds of the cacao tree have a bitter taste, they must first be fermented. After the fermentation process, the beans are dried, cleaned and then roasted.

Cacao Types

There are three main varieties of cacao:

• Forastero, which is mostly grown in West Africa and has a more intense, heavy chocolate flavor,
• Criollo, which is mainly grown around the Caribbean, produce the most interesting and complex cocoa, with notes of fruit and spices,
• Trinitario (a hybrid of criollo and Forastero).

Most chocolate today, however, is made from hybrid cacao breeds because they are more resistant to pests, among other reasons.

About 70% of the world's cacao is grown in Africa: Ivory Coast,Ghana and 30% in Asia, especially in Indonesia, which account for most of the world's cocoa production.

Chocolate Types

The three common types of chocolates:

• Dark chocolate is the most bitter of the three with less addition of ingredients other than cacao,
• Milk chocolate is the most popular and contains about 10-50% of cocoa,
• White chocolate is made entirely without cocoa bits.

In 1815, a Dutch chemist Van Houten, figured out how to separate the cocoa butter (fat) from the plant and mixing the remaining powder with alkaline salts to cut down the bitter, acidic taste. Combining with the invention of the steam engine, these innovations greatly moved the popularity of chocolate forward by making it much more affordable.