What is Chocolate in five minutes.

What is Chocolate?

Chocolate is a rather delicious food made from cocoa beans, a little sugar, and a few other ingredients depending on the type and end use.

You can expect to find;

• Milk Powder (dried milk solids) in milk chocolate

• Vanilla, in most chocolates. It’s a long story, maybe Doc.Choc will write about it one day.

• An emulsifier, like Soy Lecithin. To keep things easy to work with.

What’s the go with Cocoa Beans?

Cocoa Beans grow in a pod on the cocoa tree. It’s a super finicky tree, only growing across a very narrow band of the world, typically around the equator.

When the pod is ripe it get’s cracked open so the beans can be pulled out. They’re fermented, a little like coffee, to transform the natural sugars into delicious flavours, then dried so that they can be transported and processed into chocolate.

How is it made?

Most chocolate is manufactured across mainland Europe. The process involves

• Roasting the beans to enhance the flavours.

• Grinding the beans to make a paste.

• Refining the paste and any other ingredients to make a smooth product.

• Tempering what’s left to make it stable and strong for transport.

What types are there?

Chocolate comes in a few distinct forms, with more new kids arriving on the block to combat wastage and changing consumer preferences

• Dark Chocolate, the OG. Has the highest amount of cocoa beans (and flavour) in it.

• Milk Chocolate. Sweeter, creamier, less flavourful.

• White Chocolate. Not really chocolate if you ask the French. It has the fat from the cocoa bean, with sugar and milk. No distinct cocoa taste.

the new kids

• Ruby Chocolate. Made from unfermented cocoa beans; it’s uniquely pink in colour and has a subtle fruity flavour.

• Whole Cocoa Chocolate. In the style of Dark Chocolate, where the sugar is extracted from the cocoa pod, rather than using cane sugar. Super duper flavourful.