How is chocolate made

When the pods are ripe, harvesters travel through the cocoa orchards with machetes and hack the pods gently off of the trees. Click here for a video clip of Cocoa processing " minutes" Requires RealPlayer. Machines could damage the tree or the clusters of flowers and pods that grow from the trunk, so workers must be harvest the pods by hand, using short, hooked blades mounted on long poles to reach the highest fruit.

After the cocoa pods are collected into baskets ,the pods are taken to a processing house. Here they are split open and the cocoa beans are removed. Pods can contain upwards of 50 cocoa beans each. Fresh cocoa beans are not brown at all, they do not taste at all like the sweet chocolate they will eventually produce. Now the beans undergo the fermentation processing.

They are either placed in large, shallow, heated trays or covered with large banana leaves. If the climate is right, they may be simply heated by the sun. Workers come along periodically and stir them up so that all of the beans come out equally fermented. During fermentation is when the beans turn brown. This process may take five or eight days. After fermentation, the cocoa seeds must be dried before they can be scooped into sacks and shipped to chocolate manufacturers.

The first steps are to mix, grind, and knead the various raw ingredients into a paste. The ingredients used are dependent on the type of chocolate being made.

Dark chocolate requires only cocoa mass, cocoa butter, and sugar. Adding milk powder makes milk chocolate. Because it contains no cocoa mass, some do not consider it a true chocolate. A conche is a large agitator that stirs and smooths the mixture under heat. This is an important step in the process of producing consistent, pure, and delicious gourmet chocolate — and it is here that the final aroma and flavor are defined.

At this point, soy lecithin and cocoa butter may be added for required fluidity. Chocolate is then refined until smooth and the longer a chocolate is conched, the smoother it will be. The chocolate is now finished and ready for final processing. Do you have a picture to add? Click the button and find it on your computer. Then select it. Click here to upload more images optional. Your Name. Your Location. Check box to agree to these submission guidelines.

For the best experience on our site, be sure to turn on Javascript in your browser. The road to tastiness starts with the picking of many cocoa pods by cocoa farmers. Once the beans are removed from the pods, they are coated in a sweet white pulp which is fermented and left to dry.

The beans are cracked to separate the shell from the nib, then we roast the beans until they are dark and rich in colour to accentuate the natural flavours and aromas of the nibs.

The nibs are ground to produce a thick liquid called cocoa mass. Some of this is pressed to separate cocoa butter from the compressed solid cocoa.