How Chocolate Is Made

Chocolate starts as a bitter bean and ends as something that melts in your mouth. Here is how it gets there, from cacao tree to tempered bar.

Growing cacao

Chocolate comes from the cacao tree, originally from Central and South America. Just as grape vines thrive in a "Wine Belt," cacao thrives in the "Cacao Belt," found right around the equator and extending about 10° north and south. A warm, humid climate with lots of rain meets the partial shade of the rainforest to create the ideal habitat.

The fruit of the cacao tree is called a pod. Pods from different varieties ripen to bold reds, yellows and even purples. Each pod holds 20 to 60 cocoa beans, and a tree produces only 50 to 60 pods a year. It takes around 400 beans to make one pound of chocolate.

Harvest, fermentation and drying

Cacao pods are hand-harvested to protect the tree from damage. Pods can ripen all year, but there are two main harvests: November to January and May to July. After harvest, the pods are cracked open and the seeds, covered in a sweet pulp, are removed.

Beans and pulp then move to a fermentation area, piled in boxes or large heaps. As with wine, fermentation creates heat and breaks down the pulp, so workers stir the beans to keep the process even. After 5 days, the beans turn dark brown and develop a rich, chocolatey flavor.

The beans still hold too much water to become chocolate, so they are spread out in the sun to dry for 7 to 14 days. Dried beans snap easily, which is key for making chocolate. They are inspected for mold, other imperfections and pod fragments, then bagged and sold to chocolate makers.

Transforming beans into chocolate

At the chocolate-making facility, the beans are roasted at 210°F for about 15 minutes to enhance the flavor and loosen the shell. Then they are "winnowed" to remove the shell and pull out the nib, the inside and most important part of the bean. Some producers roast the nibs again to develop the flavor further.

Around 50% of the nib is fat, also known as cocoa butter. The nibs are ground until they become a liquid, cocoa liquor. Add sugar to the liquor and you have chocolate. The ratio of nibs to the other ingredients sets the style:

• Milk chocolate: add milk powder.
• Dark chocolate: use less cocoa butter and sugar, meaning a higher ratio of nibs, for bittersweet 70–90% dark.
• Unsweetened chocolate: leave out the sugar.

Cocoa butter can also be extracted as a separate ingredient.

The mixture, now the texture of a thick cake batter, has to be refined further to remove any grittiness. This turns the cocoa mass into a powder, which is then reliquefied through conching: friction and heat remelt the cocoa butter. Conching can take anywhere from a few hours to several days to reach the finest quality of chocolate.

The final step

Once the larger batch is mixed, the chocolate can take different formats. A common way to go from large format to bite-sized treats is tempering: the chocolate is slowly heated and cooled, which aligns the crystals and stabilizes them. Untempered chocolate is dull and soft. Tempered chocolate has a beautiful shine and a sharp snap when cracked.

From there, filled pralines, solid chocolate bars and gianduja are all within reach. Italian chocolate is a delectable world of its own.