Chocolate tour

 Author: Huy Pham

History

    Cacao originated in the entire continent of America, which is the main ingredient for chocolate. Nobody knows which civilization started using cacao, but we do know that it was very widespread. People used cacao in 3 different ways: eating the fruit since it had a sweet and citrus taste, but mostly contained seed; as a currency to trade with; as a beverage that would be used in many religious ways.

    When the Europeans came however, that's when chocolate bars would start to get mass produced with factories. They used to make 100% chocolate, but once they figured out how to produce bars with sugar in them, everyone would start to relate chocolate with a surgery candy.

    Moving on to present time, there have been more brands that have been making more dark chocolate, which is good for everyone, as when artificial ingredients have been put into cacao, it loses a lot of its health benefits.

Cacao farming

    When cacao farming, we usually go through a process of farming and maintaining the cacao trees and fruit, to fermenting and getting rid of all the sticky fruit stuff to end up with just cacao beans. These beans go through a 6 day fermentation process where they sit in dispersed sun and in wood boxes. After these 6 days, they're transported fully into a green house where it get extremely hot to get rid of the rest of the fruit, just so that the bean is all that's left.

    Getting the trees to produce cacao, is just as much as a challenge as it is getting the beans. Years ago, there was a fungus that would infect the fruits on cacao trees, and it would make the fruit and beans useless. The fungus couldn't be stopped by any means, so they sent what cacao they had left to grow in Africa.

    There, the cacao trees would mutate into a lot of different sub-species and even have over 200 of them. when they were brought back into America, all the species where tested to see if they grew resistant to the fungus, and only 7 of them were able to resist the fungus. Soon these 7 trees were pruned and cloned to produce more cacao.

Hand making chocolate

    The first step of making chocolate, would be the roasting step. We all poured a little bit of cacao beans onto the bowl that was over a small fire. We all had to mix the beans to make sure that they wouldn't burn and go bad.

    The next step was to peel the skin off so that we would get the edible part of the bean. Throughout this process of making chocolate, we were allowed to taste a bit of for every step of the way. Once the peeling was finished, we had to grind the beans into a paste like how the Native Americans did back then.

    We all had to use this antique stone bowl and grinder to get the beans into a paste. Here during this process, the oil would get released and get the dry beans into a paste. The technique was interesting and the guide was able to grind it down very quick. Typically, they would do this for 35 hours to get rid of all the bean nibs.

    Now we had a paste and we mixed it with milk in a kettle over the same small fire. Everyone got turns to mix together the cacao and milk, until it became hot chocolate. This one didn't have any extra sugar, so at first it tasted very bitter. We were given banana to add some natural sugar, and we put some paste on it. It was very strong at the beginning, but when we mixed more the banana in, it became a lot more bearable.

Conclusion

    The chocolate tour was very cool, with lots of doing, not just showing. I learned a lot of new things that day, and I now know a lot more about chocolate than just the sweet candy bars that you get on halloween.