Currency exchange among the Maya, luxurious nectar at the royal court, the Chocolate is now a popular food available, part of our daily lives.
But what really is the chocolate ?

cocoa 500x374 The Chocolate

Cocoa roasted beans

A little History :

Native to the rainforests of Central America, cocoa was cultivated by the Mayas and Aztecs.
These people consumed it as a beverage called “chocolatl” (bitter water).
This beverage was prepared using cocoa beans (cacahuatl) roasted and ground on hot rocks.
The resulting paste was heated and then mixed with water, in addition they put some vanilla, pepper, cinnamon, anise or other spices.
This beverage was known nourishing, restorative and aphrodisiac.

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red cocoa pod

Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover cocoa in 1502 on the tiny island of Guanaja, but he attached no importance to these “almonds.”
In 1519, Hernan Cortes landed in Mexico and began the conquest. The emperor Montezuma offered a beverage made with cocoa, Cortes appreciated and wrote: “drink that builds up resistance and fights fatigue.”
In 1524, he brought back cocoa beans to the emperor of Spain and his court. Since then, the chocolate became legend !

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At that time, the preparation technique was primitive and remained close to that of Mexico. The worker was working on his knees and pounded the chocolate by hand with a cylinder on an inclined heated stone, but in 1732, Dubuisson brought the first improvement by inventing a heated horizontal table before which the worker worked up.

How do it comes in chocolate tab ?

Just after harvesting, the pod is slit with a machete, remains beans and pulp.  (The pulp is very sweety and refreshing).
The beans are dried for two weeks or so.

Then comes the roasting, as for coffee, the beans are roasted to enhance their flavor, this phase takes place after cleaning the seeds in a roaster.
They are then crushed using a grinder and turned into slurry.
Once the cocoa butter is separated from the cocoa paste.

Depending on the recipe, the cocoa butter is mixed with the cocoa paste and other ingredients like sugar, milk…
For example, dark chocolate is made from cocoa pasta and cocoa butter while white chocolate is composed only of cocoa butter, milk and sugar.