a4Food.com

The world loves chocolate. Chocolate companies measure the amount of cocoa beans they grind up, and have found that human beings consume about three billion pounds of the stuff each year. Most chocolate is eaten in cool climates; in the tropics, it’s too steamy to keep chocolate solid and fresh.

But ironically, it’s in the tropics that chocolate originates. Chocolate is made from the ground-up beans (also called seeds) of the cacao tree, which grows in places like Brazil, Ghana and Nigeria. A cacao tree stands about 7.5 meter high when fully grown and sports small flowers among its long leaves. Hanging on the trunk and branches are pods, each packed with 20 to 40 almond shaped beans. (If you’ve ever had plain banking chocolate, you know that the taste is very bitter. In fact, the word cacao comes from two Mayan Indian words meaning “bitter juice.” Likewise, the word chocolate comes from the Mayan words for “sour water.” Today, English speaking people call cacao beans “cocoa beans” because many years ago and English chocolate importer misspelled “cacao” as “cocoa.”)

People chop the pods off the trees with long knives, slice them open and scoop out the beans. Beans are piled up, covered with burlap or leaves and allowed to ferment for a week or longer. Then they are uncovered and left to dry in the sun or under heat lamps and are finally shipped to chocolate factories (such as the Hershey factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the whole town smells of roasting chocolate and the street lamps are shaped like candies).

At the plant, the beans are roasted and shelled. One bean is about 54 per cent far in the form of cocoa butter. When beans are ground, the cocoa butter seeps out .The liquid combination of cocoa butter and bits of cocoa bean is called chocolate liquor.

Banking chocolate is simply solid, cooled blocks of chocolate liquor. Cocoa powder is made my removing some of the cocoa butter and pressing and grinding what’s left. Milk chocolate, the kind found in most candy bars, is made of chocolate liquor, extra cocoa butter, dried milk and sugar, with vanilla added for flavour. Dark chocolate, often know as sweet or semisweet, has everything but the milk. Technically, white chocolate isn’t really chocolate. White chocolate has cocoa butter and sugar, but no ground-up bits of cocoa beans. So it has all the fat, but little or the chocolate flavour. The fact that white chocolate doesn’t contain any cocoa solids means it is also missing something else: Caffeine. One ounce of dark chocolate can have as much as 35 mg of it. (A five ounce cup of coffee has more than 100 mg).

Eating a giant bar of dark chocolate can produce the same jittery feeling as a cup of coffee. Eating a big bar of white chocolate, however, probably will only make you sleepy.