How Chocolate is Made
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Most of the world's chocolate is made in large factories, where huge, expensive machines take a bean in its shell and turn it into chocolate liquor, cocoa or a finished product such as a chocolate bar. But making chocolate also requires some finesse-like coffee, chocolate doesn't start out the perfectly made bean. For thousands of years, people have been manipulating the cacao bean to create chocolate products: the Aztecs made it into foaming, bitter, hot drinks spiced with chili and cinnamon; Europeans continued the tradition of drinking chocolate, with such avidity (particularly among pre-Victorian women) that it was soon considered by some clergy to be a sinful concoction. Today, when we speak of chocolate, we're usually talking about chocolate in its solid form: advances in late eighteenth century technology resulted in an entirely new food, which we still adore.
The steps to making chocolate are numerous, which makes it even more amazing that you can still buy a good dark chocolate bar for less than two dollars. For that bar has traveled further than most people do, and has undergone successive transformations due to heating, crushing, grinding, smoothing, additions of sugar, vanilla and lecithin and further heating and molding.
Ever wonder what happens to a pod of cacao to turn it into your favorite candy?
Cacao Pods -the "Gold" that Grows on Trees
When a cacao tree reaches four or five years of age, it begins to bear fruit, which turns a lovely pinky gold when it's ripe. Cacao is peculiar in that the entire tree-trunk and stems-bear flowers, lovely, pale-pink, orchid-shaped blossoms with dark centers. The flowers grow on little pads or cushions, which will produce flowers over a portion of the lifespan of the tree-twenty or thirty years for fruit bearing, and up to a hundred as a living tree. Of the blossoms, only a small percentage will become pods. Pollination, (which in many places relies on a nasty, biting insect called the midge), fertilizes the blossoms and starts the pods on their way.
Pod Harvest
The cacao pods are harvested by hand, being cut from the stems and trunks with a sharp machete, or for higher fruits, a blade at the end of a long pole. It takes some training to cut cacao pods, since the little vegetative cushions that bear flowers and eventually pods, need to be preserved from harvest to harvest. The cacao tree, like many tropicals, doesn't bear fruit in any particular season: a single tree will contain buds, flowers and pods all at the same time.
Pod Mystery: What Happens to the Pulp?
By all accounts, the pulp inside the cacao pod is sweet and fruity, while the beans are bitter and acidic. It makes perfect evolutionary sense: a monkey breaks open the pod, scoops out and eats the pulp, and spits out the bad-tasting seeds. But, one wonders if the pulp itself might one day be an agricultural product, with cacao trees being grown to create cacao juice or liquor made from the sweet pulp.
Fermentation
A properly fermented cacao bean tastes right, but one of the major problems in the chocolate industry is fermentation. Cacao is typically grown on small farms in economically stressed regions, where agricultural education has been lacking. Farmers who could have gotten top prices for well-fermented beans have received instead low prices because they didn't know the difference a few days would make, or couldn't afford to wait those few days to be paid. Modern day chocolate making involves creating programs for growers so they can tell the difference between a well fermented bean and one that needs more time, or more moisture or heat. Coops have also been formed so that small growers can ferment their beans together-an important consideration because it takes a certain amount of mass in a pile of cacao to generate the right heat and moisture for fermentation.
The beans are removed from their pods ad piled into mounds, enclosed in banana leaves and left in the heat. The heat, combined with wild yeasts and bacteria, begins to break down the surrounding pulp, which becomes acidic and gives off alcohol, raising the temperature of the mound. The beans, which start out purple in color, turn brown and start to smell like "chocolate" as we know it.
Fermentation in chocolate, like that of wine making, is vital to the success of the product. You can't make chocolate from an unfermented bean. Most chocolate beans are fermented on the farm, from four to seven days.
Drying
After fermentation, the beans are spread out on mats or wooden floors and dried, either naturally in the sun, or, in very humid places, in drying plants. Drying the beans prevents them from becoming moldy and unusable. During this stage, the fermented pulp dries to a powder on the beans. After drying, the beans are bagged up and sent to chocolate factories or small producers.
Cleaning, Grading
At the plant, the beans are removed from their bags and cleaned of stones or other foreign material. They are inspected, or "graded", with inferior beans being discarded. This is a human part of the work: most of the work from drying on is done by machines, with the beans moving through the chocolate manufacturing plant from station to station on conveyor belts.
Roasting
After they've been cleaned and inspected, the beans are roasted. Roasting dries the husk, making it easier to remove, and develops flavors in the bean, or "nib". The nib is the part of the bean that will become chocolate, and roasting is a vital part in creating a desirable flavor. If you've ever tried to roast nuts in your oven, you've probably discovered that it's not easy to get them to the perfect stage of roast-where flavor is intensified and full without being at all burnt! Chocolate manufacturers, particularly gourmet chocolate makers, spend a lot of time and energy making sure the roast is just right: the best roast, along with the best fermentation, gives the highest quality chocolate
Husking and Winnowing
After the beans have been roasted and quickly and completely cooled (to prevent unwanted continued roasting), the husks are removed by machine. The winnowing machine cracks the husks and blows the lighter shells away from the heavier nibs. Cocoa shells are often used to make garden mulch (my favorite, because it smells like chocolate!) The Scharffenberger folks wrote a book about chocolate after selling their firm to Hershey, and in it, they describe their early experimentation with making chocolate from beans, in a home kitchen. Apparently, husking a cacao bean is no easy job, as the shells are sharp and splintery! But luckily for us, it's possible to buy the cacao nibs already roasted and shelled, for those who'd like to make their own chocolate from fresh ingredients, at home.
Blending
Like coffee and wine, most chocolate is made from a blend of beans. Some chocolate beans are more expensive than others and have a fruitier or richer flavor. Criollo and the lesser known Arriba beans make up less than 15% of the world's cacao bean production, but are considered high end beans. However, with ideal fermentation and roasting, some chocolate makers say that beans from the most common variety, the forastero, can also be utterly delicious. In most agricultural products, weather conditions also play an important part in the end product, so that a "rare" bean can be ruined by poor development or poor treatment, and an "ordinary" bean can be elevated to gourmet consideration under ideal conditions.
The ideal chocolate blending situation would rely purely on taste: rich, strong beans, mild fruity beans, beans with a particular flavor not easily found elsewhere are mixed by an expert "nose" or taster, until the most delicious chocolate blend is created. In reality, cost is a consideration, and there may be some compromises made in terms of taste.
If you want to taste expertly blended chocolate, check out small chocolate makers who roast their own beans. Many chocolate companies buy chocolate liquor, which is the end product of someone else's roasting and blending, but there are still small makers who do it all themselves, creating unique blends that may vary from batch to batch. And if you want to learn about single source chocolates, there are a few chocolate makers who either bring out single source bars each year, or specialize in only single source chocolates.
Grinding
After the bean blend has been determined, the beans are ground. About half the content of the cacao bean is natural fat, or cocoa butter, and once the beans have been ground past a certain point, the coarse particles begin to melt from the heat of the grinding, creating a chocolate paste. Most beans are ground twice: the finer the grind, the smoother the chocolate will be. Grinding creates the chocolate liquor. Because of chocolate's high fat content, grinding it also "melts" it, making the chocolate beans into a thick, pasty liquid. From the chocolate liquor comes cocoa powder (after further refining) and what we know as chocolate candy.
Making Eating Chocolate -Mixing Ingredients
The pure chocolate liquor is on its way to becoming a lovely bon-bon, but it still takes a few more steps! At this point, the chocolate is sweetened, flavored and smoothed by the addition of sugar, and cacao butter or lecithin. There are two reasons to use lecithin, which is a soy product, in making chocolate. Lecithin isn't necessary, but it's cheaper than cocoa butter, so some makers add the lecithin to further smooth the chocolate, and separate out cocoa butter, which they then sell as a separate and more lucrative product. Another reason to use lecithin may be that it is more shelf stable than cocoa butter, so it acts as a preservative.
Lecithin
In making homemade chocolate, I found that adding lecithin worked well when I was hand dipping chocolates in cold weather. My tempering machine, which kept the melted chocolate at 90?F., couldn't go higher, but the air temperature was so cold that my chocolate kept losing its temper. Adding lecithin helped the chocolate stay liquid longer at a lower temperature, so I could work with it easier. Being liquid, the lecithin was easily added. I don't have a problem with soy lecithin, which is used as a health supplement, as it contains soy isoflavones, which are known antioxidants. But some chocolate purists may disagree with its use.
The machine that mixes the chocolate with its added ingredients is called the "melangeur". Milk chocolate is made when the maker adds sweetened condensed milk or milk powder (labeled as "milk solids" to the chocolate liquor in the mixing stage. After doing time in the melangeur, the chocolate mass has become smooth dough.
Refining
The chocolate then undergoes further grinding between a series of rollers, making the "dough" thinner and thinner with each successive rolling. If the chocolate is going to be used in making cheap candy (usually with lots of additional milk and sugar), this may be the end product. For fine chocolate, though, there are more steps to the process.
Conching
The maker of Lindt chocolates, Rodolphe Lindt, invented the chocolate conching machine in 1880. The conching machine got its name from the conch shell whose shape the machine resembles. During conching, the chocolate is warmed and agitated, a process that further smoothes the chocolate and develops the flavor. Conching can be done from 12 hours up to a week, and in general, the longer the conching, the better the chocolate. At this point, flavors such as vanilla (practically imperative) are added, and there may be addition of cocoa butter to create more smoothness
Tempering
The last part of the chocolate making process is called "tempering", a term that's often used with metal working as well. Tempered chocolate is vastly superior to untempered chocolate. Tempered, chocolate has a shiny, silken surface and it snaps when you bite into it. Untempered chocolate is waxy and sticky, dull in color, sometimes with safe but homely splotches of "bloom", or fats which have separated out and risen to the top of the bar. If you've ever left a chocolate bar in your glove compartment over the summer and then eaten it in the fall, you've seen untempered chocolate.
The point of tempering chocolate is to blend the cocoa butter more firmly with the cocoa solids. The bar left in the glove compartment during warm weather started out tempered, but melted in the heat. When you melt chocolate, its cocoa butter (which is a collection of different types of fat molecules) separates again from the cocoa solids, and being light, rises to the top of the candy, causing the well-known bloom, which is completely edible, just not very pretty. The bad news is that chocolate can easily lose its temper: when room temperature rises over 80? F, your chocolate, depending on its cocoa content, may bloom. The good news for chocolate makers is that if the temper on your chocolate gets ruined by heat, all you have to do is temper it again.
Tempering involves heating the chocolate to the melting point, letting it cool to a near-solid state, then reheating it to a slightly higher temperature and using it. If it sounds tricky, it is, especially if you're trying to temper at home, using the traditional equipment of a bowl, a marble slab a pastry knife and a thermometer. If you like frustration, try tempering at home. If like most of us, you heartily dislike fussing with something only to have it ruined anyway, don't bother: you will most certainly lose your temper as your chocolate loses its!
In the movie "Chocolate", you often see the star holding a bowl and stirring. That's one way to temper chocolate by hand, but the traditional way to do it is sometimes seen behind the glass windows of touristy shops. The chocolate is melted, then poured onto a marble slab, where it is worked back and forth by hand until it reaches the correct temperature (85-91?F. depending on the contents of the chocolate). Once it has reached the right temperature, it can then be made into candy (poured into molds, dipped or put in an enrobing machine), but only as long as it stays at that temperature! Once the chocolate cools the temper is lost and the tempering process must be done again.
But in the safety and security of an even slightly larger chocolate making company (or even a small commercial kitchen), you can temper chocolate by way of pouring it into a machine that's part mixer, part warmer. The best temperers (I have a Revolation, from a company in New Jersey) also have lovely built in temperature sensors and beepers that tell you when the chocolate has reached the right temperature for working. If you love chocolate and want to make great candy without killing yourself over tempering, it's worth buying a home tempering machine. You can get machines that make as little as five pounds at a time, but I bought a ten pound model because I was making a lot, and you'd be surprised how fast you can go though ten pounds of chocolates when you're making Valentines candy!
Moulding, Enrobing, Hand-Dipping
Once the chocolate is tempered, it's ready to use. It can be poured into chocolate or soap-making molds (soap molds have a wider range of themes and some of them are truly beautiful. They make big, hefty bars of chocolate, too.) Hand-dipping truffles or fruit is an easy way to work with chocolate, but it's important to keep filling from melting into your tempered chocolate-it doesn't take much filling to wreck your dipping chocolate! Enrobing is usually done by machine these days, but if you want to pour chocolate over a series of fillings, you can place them in a screen and pour the tempered chocolate over them.
How Chocolate is made