THE CHOCOLATE

The cacao tree is grown in equatorial regions, especially in places such a South America, Africa and Indonesia. The tree produces a fruit as big as a small pineapple. The cocoa beens are found inside it.

The beens are fermented for about a week, dried in the sun and then shipped to the chocolate maker.

Chocolate makes starts bye roasting the beens to bring out the flavor. The roasted beens are winnowed (Winnowing removes the meat (also known as the nib) of the cocoa beens from its shell) to have nibs.

Once roasted, winnowed and blended, the nibs are grounded and produces a viscous liquid known as "chocolate liquor". Chocolate liquor is pure, unsweetened chocolate, and if you eat it, it will be pretty nasty because it is bitter.

You can do 2 things with the liquor:

The liquor can be put into a mold and let it get cool and solidify, this is the unsweetened chocolate. Or you can press it in a hydraulic press to squeeze out the fat, and when you do this what your are left with is a dry cake of the ground cocoa been solids and "cocoa butter". If you grind up the cake, you´ll have "cocoa powder".

So far, we´ve taken de seeds of a tree, roasted them and ground them up, now the process of making the chocolate we eat can be being.

There are 3 basic things to make a chocolate bar.

1 Adding ingredients
The chocolate we eat contains: sugar, other flavors(vainilla etc.), and often milk. The chocolate maker adds these ingredients according to them own recipe.

2 Conching
The chocolate is massaged by a special machine in order to blend the ingredients together and smooth it out.

3 Tempering
It is a carefully controlled healting process. Tempering is "a process where the chocolate is slowly heated, then slowly cooled, allowing the cocoa butter molecules to solidify in an orderly fashion" whitout this process the chocolate doesn´t harderen properly.

And after all this process we have the most delicious thing in hole world THE CHOCOLATE.