Did you know that the average bar of chocolate has about 20 different ingredients?
Did you know that there are over 1,000 different types of chocolate in the world?
Did you know how hard it is to make chocolate?
Indeed, producing all those yummy bars and blocks requires a lot of work.
Unfortunately, most people don’t get to see how their beloved chocolate is made.
It’s not exactly something that factories want to advertise, after all.
However, we’re here to tell you what goes on behind closed doors when making chocolate.
From bean to bar, these are some interesting details about how your favorite treat is made.
What is chocolate?
Before we look at how it’s made, it makes sense to know what chocolate is.
Chocolate is a food made from roasted cocoa beans.
The beans are the seeds of Theobroma cacao, a tropical tree.
Usually, we’re talking about dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or white chocolate. Dark chocolate has the highest amount of cocoa, while white chocolate has the least.
The difference is in the amount of fat.
There are many different types of chocolate.
For example, there’s iced chocolate, boxed chocolate, chocolate crinkle cookies, chocolate-covered almonds, chocolate chip cookies, and hot chocolate.
For the rest of this article, we’ll be talking about dark chocolate. It’s the most well-known type of chocolate, after all.
Tostatura
Dark chocolate is made from roasted cocoa beans.
The beans are roasted in large batches.
The roasting process takes a few hours, so the beans are usually roasted at night.
Roasted beans are a combination of cocoa beans, cocoa butter, and cocoa solids.
The beans are then crushed and ground.
The crushed cocoa beans are put through a process called winnowing.
Hot air helps to separate the cocoa solids from the cocoa butter.
It takes a few hours to finish this process.
winnowing
When the roasted beans are separated from the cocoa butter, what’s left is called cocoa nibs. What happens next is called winnowing.
A large metal wheel spins in a tub of cocoa nibs.
This separates the nibs from the cocoa shells.
The nibs are then ground into a powder.
The cocoa powder is mixed with sugar and other ingredients, like milk and lecithin.
Mixing
The next step is mixing.
There are two types of mixing methods: drum roasters and continuous roasters.
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Stampaggio
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