How Factories Make Chocolate

The process of making chocolate is quite long, and hefty. In fact, it seems to be a tedious process to make such delicious treats that can be gobbled up in just a matter of minutes. In this article, I'll bring you to the many cycles of making chocolate from the beans.

For every cocoa tree, it takes around 5 - 6 months for the cocoa beans to ripen; thus, a cocoa tree can be harvested twice in a year. The ripen beans are usually green, yellow, orange or red. The workers from the cocoa factory will harvest these beans, and then place them in the process of fermentation which will make the beans less bitter, and darken the color. Fermentation is the process of obtaining energy without respiration. Fermentation usually occurs in wooden boxes or banana leaves.

After fermentation, these beans are then sun-dried for several days to bring out the aroma in them. After, they are packed and shipped to the factories which will sort the beans through, and clean them. Next, they will roast these beans in revolving drum-like ovens from 250 - 350 degrees for thirty minutes to a couple of hours. Roasting the beans will help the flavor shine through the beans, and will create chocolate with better tastes.

After roasting the beans, the outer shell of the bean is then removed and given to animal industries as animal feed. The inner contents will then be crushed and heated to make cocoa butter or a thick paste known as chocolate liquor although there is no content of alcohol in the chocolate liquor.

After this process, there are many different ways you can go. For one, you can make chocolate powder by extracting some of the cocoa butter from the chocolate liquor. These cocoa powders are used for drinks to dessert. The chocolate liquor can also be molded and solidified which then turned into chocolate. Depending on what other ingredients you mix in with the chocolate, you will have dark chocolate or milk chocolate. This process solely depends on the factory, and the sort of chocolate they are creating.