How Is Chocolate Made?
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
The journey from a cacao pod to a bar involves fermentation, drying, roasting, grinding and a final controlled crystallisation. Raw cacao seeds taste bitter and astringent with almost nothing chocolatey about them, and every step exists to change that.
It starts at the tree
Cacao trees grow in a band roughly twenty degrees either side of the equator. The pods grow straight out of the trunk and branches, and each holds thirty to fifty seeds surrounded by a white pulp.
The pods are cut down by hand and opened, since machinery damages the seeds. At this point the seeds are pale purple and taste nothing like chocolate. The pulp is sweet and pleasant, and it turns out to be essential to what comes next.
Fermentation and drying
The seeds and pulp are heaped together and left to ferment for several days. Wild yeasts consume the sugars in the pulp, then bacteria take over, and the heap heats up substantially.
This kills the seed, which stops it germinating, and triggers chemical changes inside that create the precursors of chocolate flavour. Without fermentation there is no chocolate, only bitterness. The beans are then dried in the sun to bring the moisture down and halt the process.
Roasting and grinding
Roasting develops flavour through the Maillard reaction, the same browning chemistry behind seared meat and coffee. Temperature and time here shape the final character considerably.
The shells are then removed, leaving nibs, which are ground. Because cacao is over half fat by weight, grinding produces a thick liquid rather than a powder. That liquid is cocoa mass, and it can be pressed to separate cocoa butter from cocoa solids.
What goes into a bar
Different chocolates are different ratios of the same handful of ingredients:
- •Dark chocolate is cocoa mass, cocoa butter and sugar
- •Milk chocolate adds milk powder, reducing the cocoa proportion
- •White chocolate uses cocoa butter with no cocoa solids at all
- •Lecithin is often added in tiny amounts to help everything flow smoothly
Conching and tempering
Conching is prolonged mixing and warming, sometimes for many hours, which smooths texture and drives off harsh volatile acids. It is a large part of why some chocolate feels silky and cheap chocolate feels gritty.
Tempering is the final and most technical step. Cocoa butter can crystallise in six different forms, and only one gives a glossy surface, a clean snap and a melt just below body temperature. Tempering guides the fat into that form through careful heating and cooling. Untempered chocolate sets dull, soft and streaky, which is exactly what happens when a bar melts in a car and resets.
The problem with cocoa farming
The economics of chocolate are uncomfortable. Most cocoa is grown by smallholder farmers in West Africa, particularly Ivory Coast and Ghana, and the farmgate share of a finished bar's retail price is small.
Low prices have been linked to persistent problems including child labour and deforestation, documented repeatedly by researchers and journalists. Certification schemes exist and have had mixed results in independent evaluations. There is no simple consumer fix, but the gap between the price of a bar and the income of the person who grew it is a real and well documented feature of the industry.
The takeaway
Chocolate is made by fermenting and drying cacao seeds, roasting and grinding them into a fatty liquid, then blending, conching and tempering it, with fermentation creating the flavour and tempering creating the snap and shine.