The Making of Chocolate From Start to Finish

Most of us love chocolate, and a fascinating fact is how chocolate is made. The process of making it, is a long drawn out one starting with the harvesting of cocoa beans which are taken from the cacao tree. You won't find any of these trees in the UK as they can only survive in tropical climates, in countries such as Brazil, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast just to mention a few. These beans are then left for a period of up to 4-5 days to ferment, and then they are left in the sun for another 4-5 days before being packed up and shipped to factories, once at the factory they are cleaned and then roasted inside large silos, this process can be anything from 20 minutes to a few hours depending on the quantity of beans that are held in the silos.

Once this stage has been successfully completed the beans are left to cool and then they are removed from the outer shell, crushed and melted until a liquid is formed. This liquid is known as cocoa butter which usually gets ground to make a paste which forms the base of many types of chocolates.

Other processes can be added to this to give the chocolate a sweet, delicious taste, and of course chocolate companies can add their own secret ingredients to make it their own and add other elements such as honeycomb, peanuts, caramel, toffee and many more types of confectionary to give the chocolate a real eye catching presence allowing companies to sell the product.