Chocolate

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Chocolate

• The Food of the Gods?

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Cacao

• Theobroma cacao - chocolate and cacao
• Origin in eastern Andes, "Food of the Gods" to
  Mayans, Mayan drink included cacao, red pepper,
  vanilla and other spices.
• Sweet hot chocolate became popular in Europe
  1650. Spanish, then Dutch, then Germans, became
  involved in establishment of cacao plantations.
• W. Africa and Brazil are now world's largest
  producers.

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Cacao tree, w pods, roughly the size and shape of
a football, the pods grow straight out of the
tree's trunk and branches.
After ripening for up to 6 months, the pods are harvested by farmers who cut the pods down by hand.

The beans spend a week soaking in the pulp while
their flavor develops and their color changes to
a rich brown. When they've soaked long enough,
the beans are dried in the sun, bagged up and
sent to chocolate factories.
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If you opened one up, you'd find 30 or 40
purplish seeds inside, covered in a sticky white
pulp. These seeds are called cacao beans.
The beans spend a week soaking in the pulp while
their flavor develops and their color changes to
a rich brown. When they've soaked long enough,
the beans are dried in the sun, bagged up and
sent to chocolate factories
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After arriving at the chocolate factory, the
cacao beans are inspected. The beans that pass
the test are sent on to be roasted.

The roasted beans are shattered and tumbled and
ground into bits. When melted, these become
chocolate liquor, the main ingredient in
chocolate.

http//www.nwf.org/getgreen/Chocolate.cfm
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
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Processing

• Cocoa is made by pressing out fat (cocoa butter),
  dry powder is treated with alkali to produce
  Dutch cocoa.Milk chocolate is produced by
  continuous stirring of a mixture of chocolate
  liquor cocoa butter sugar condensed milk.

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Many ingredients can be added many uses
http//www.marthastewart.com/page.jhtml?typeconte
ntidrecipe2520083layoutmartharsc020606_slot3
_chocolate
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Chocolate Biodiversity
The cacao flower is complicated in design, and
its fertilization highly specialized. The flowers
are pollinated exclusively by midges--small,
gnat-like flies that thrive in the moist,
debris-strewn rain forest floor. Cacao seeds
grow inside tough-skinned, elliptical pods,
surrounded by fruit pulp. Unlike the fruit of
most trees, mature pods do not fall from the
cacao tree--and the seeds cannot germinate unless
freed from the pod. This means that in order to
propagate, cacao must rely on animals who chew
through the pod for the sweet pulp, and who
discard the bitter seeds.
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Only 1 to 3 percent of the many hundreds of
flowers produced by a single tree are fertilized
and develop into pods. Trees at plantation
edges, where the cultivated areas meet the rain
forest, have many more pods than
centrally-located trees.
It's believed that the plantation environment
(sunny, with trees planted far apart in rows) is
far less attractive to the midges that pollinate
cacao trees, as the insects prefer the damp,
shady rain forest. Pre-Columbian farmers, who
harvested trees in small plantings in the forest
or at its edge, probably got a better yield.