Candy Alerts

But do you know how the chocolate is being made?

Chocolate is made from cocoa beans and Cocoa beans are native to Central America. Cocoa is also found in Africa, having been imported to that continent a long time ago. Along with the equatorial Africa and South America, the Cocoa is also exported from the Hawaiian Islands.

The process of making chocolate from beans is very systematic and purifying. The beans are fermented after the bean harvested. Cocoa beans grow in pods that sprout off of the trunk and branches of cocoa trees. The pods are taken to a processing house, where they are split open and the cocoa beans are removed. They are placed in large, shallow, heated trays. If the climate is right, they may simply be heated by the sun. Workers come along periodically and stir them up so that all of the beans come out equally fermented.

The beans are now ready to be processed into the forms of chocolate we know and love. The chocolate manufacturers do dry roast to these cocoa beans. By doing this the color and flavor of the beans to what our modern palates expect from chocolate. The outer shell of the beans is removed, and the inner cocoa bean meat is broken into small pieces called "cocoa nibs."

The two important components of Cocoa nibs are cocoa solids and cocoa butter. The cocoa butter is generally fat, and the cocoa solids are essentially coarse cocoa powder. Then the manufacturers try to separate these two components which are essential to produce smooth, high quality chocolate candy. After all, you can't stir up crumbled up cocoa beans with some sugar, press the mixture into a bar, and call it chocolate.

The manufactures are implementing two processes for getting the cocoa butter out of the cocoa solids. In the first, the cocoa nibs are converted into non-alcoholic liquid called cocoa liquor. The liquor is then subjected to high pressure in a press to squeeze the cocoa butter from the cocoa solids. The remaining part of this process is a cake of solid cocoa. In the second process, the cocoa nibs are pressed directly to separate the two components. This process, however, does not do as good a job as the first and exists today as just a footnote in the history of chocolate production.

The cocoa butter is again refined for chocolate production later and this butter is added back to the refined cocoa powder. Some cocoa butter also finds its way to the cosmetics industry.

After pressing, the cocoa solids are ground to a fine powder in the cocoa press. By adding cocoa butter and sugar at a minimum, the Dark, bittersweet chocolates are made. Milk chocolates add milk as well. Nearly all chocolates have some emulsifier to help the ingredients blend, as well as vanilla.

The ingredients are mixed under heat into molten chocolate. This goes into huge vats where it is "conched". To conch the chocolate, there are large smooth granite rollers in the vats that keep the mixture stirred and further grind the cocoa powder into extremely small bits. Some companies use smoother steel rollers which give their chocolate a very smooth, velvety feel. The longer the chocolate is conched the smoother it becomes. Good chocolates are often conched for several days straight; while cheap mass produced chocolates may be conched for as little as 12 hours. Finally, the chocolate is poured into molds, and allowed to cool. It is then wrapped, shipped and sold for us all to enjoy.