Chocolate

Harvesting Cocoa & Cocoa
processing
Chocolate production starts with harvesting coca in a forest.
Cocoa comes from tropical evergreen Cocoa trees, such as
Theobroma Cocoa, which grow in the wet lowland tropics of
Central and South America, West Africa and Southeast Asia
(within 20 C of the equator) (Walter,1981) . Cocoa needs to
be harvested manually in the forest. The seed pods of coca
will first be collected; the beans will be selected and placed
in piles. These cocoa beans will then be ready to be shipped
to the manufacturer for mass production.
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Plucking and opening the Pods
 Cocoa beans grow in pods that sprout off of the
trunk and branches of cocoa trees. The pods are
about the size of a football. The pods start out
green and turn orange when they're ripe. When
the pods are ripe, harvesters travel through the
cocoa orchards with machetes and hack the pods
gently off of the trees.
 Machines could damage the tree or the clusters of
flowers and pods that grow from the trunk, so
workers must be harvest the pods by hand, using
short, hooked blades mounted on long poles to
reach the highest fruit.

After the cocoa pods are collected into baskets
,the pods are taken to a processing house. Here
they are split open and the cocoa beans are
removed. Pods can contain upwards of 50 cocoa
beans each. Fresh cocoa beans are not brown at
all, they do not taste at all like the sweet
chocolate they will eventually produce. www.hospitalitynu.blogspot.com

Fermenting the cocoa seeds

 Now the beans undergo the
fermentation processing. They are
either placed in large, shallow,
heated trays or covered with large
banana leaves. If the climate is
right, they may be simply heated by
the sun. Workers come along
periodically and stir them up so that
all of the beans come out equally
fermented. During fermentation is
when the beans turn brown. This
process may take five or eight days.


Drying the cocoa seeds

After fermentation, the cocoa
seeds must be dried before they
can be scooped into sacks and
shipped to chocolate
manufacturers. Farmers simply
spread the fermented seeds ontrays
and leave them in the sun to dry.
The drying process usually takes
about a week and results in seeds
that are about half of their original
weight.


Cleaning
 When seeds arrive to factory they are
carefully selected and cleaned by passing
through a bean cleaning machine that
removes extraneous materials. Different
bean varieties are blended to produce the
typical flavor of chocolate of particular
producer. Then the bean shells are
cracked and removed. Crushed cocoa
beans are called nibs.


Roasting
 The beans are then roasted to
develop the characteristic
chocolate flavour of the bean
in large rotary cylinders. The
roasting lasts from 30 minutes
to 2 hours at very high
temperatures. The bean colour
changes to a rich brown and
the aroma of chocolate comes
through.

Grinding
 The roasted nibs are milled
through a process that
liquefies the cocoa butter in
the nibs and forms cocoa
mass (or paste). This liquid
mass has dark brown
colour, typical strong smell
and flavour and contains
about 54% of cocoa butter.


Cocoa Pressing
Part of cocoa mass is fed into the cocoa
press which hydraulically squeezes a
portion of the cocoa butter from the cocoa
mass, leaving "cocoa cakes". The cocoa
butter is used in the manufacture of
chocolates; the remaining cakes of cocoa
solids are pulverized into cocoa powders.


Mixing and Refining
 Ingredients, like cocoa mass, sugar, cocoa
butter, flavourings and powdered or
condensed milk for milk chocolate are
blended in mixers to a paste with the
consistency of dough for refining.
Chocolate refiners, a set of rollers, crush
the paste into flakes that are significantly
reduced in size. This step is critical in
determining how smooth chocolate is
when eaten.


Conching
 Conching is a flavour development process
during which the chocolate is put under
constant agitation. The conching machines,
called "conches", have large paddles that
sweep back and forth through the refined
chocolate mass anywhere from a few hours
to several days. Conching reduces moisture,
drives off any lingering acidic flavors and
coats each particle of chocolate with a layer
of cocoa butter. The resulting chocolate has a
smoother, mellower flavor.


Tempering and Moulding
 The chocolate then undergoes a
tempering melting and cooling process
that creates small, stable cocoa butter
crystals in the fluid chocolate mass and is
deposited into moulds of different forms.
Properly tempered chocolate will result in
a finished product that has a
glossy, smooth appearance.


Cooling and Packaging
 The moulded chocolate enters controlled
cooling tunnels to solidify the pieces.
Depending on the size of the chocolate
pieces, the cooling cycle takes between 20
minutes to two hours. From the cooling
tunnels, the chocolate is packaged for
delivery to retailers and ultimately into
the hands of consumers.


Thank you

Chocolate

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