Episode 7
Cocoa Beans
Cocoa beans are the primary raw material for making chocolate. They come from the fruit of the cocoa tree, native to Central and South America. The ancient Mayans would grind them up to make a special beverage for marriage ceremonies and other rituals. Today, cocoa is cultivated in the rainforest areas of many countries in the tropics.
These cocoa beans from Costa Rica were cultivated without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or fungicides. Farming cocoa organically requires meticulous care and maintenance of the crop, along with grafting techniques to help establish disease-tolerant tree varieties.
The farmer cuts a budwood, a young branch about to bud from a healthy productive tree, and grafts it onto a sucker growing from the base of a tree which is either diseased or old and unproductive. She cuts a slot at the top of the sucker, then wraps a plastic strip around the budwood to hold in moisture until the graft takes. Next, she cuts a pointed end on the budwood and inserts it into the slot she made in the sucker. Then she binds the union and covers it with a plastic bag. Bagging protects the graft against two potential extremes, dehydration and excessive rain, which causes rot or fungus. If the graft takes, the union seals itself in a month or even sooner. Strategic pruning strengthens the tree and keeps it growing low and in a shape that's easy to maintain and harvest. Before long, flowers begin to bud and bloom. Tiny beetles pollinate the flowers, after which tiny pods - the tree's fruit - begin to emerge. The pods grow and grow, and gradually change color. When the color transformation is complete, they're ripe for harvest. There are many varieties of cocoa trees, with pods of different colors. It generally takes about five months from first blooms to pod maturity.
Come harvest time, they collect only the pods which are undoubtedly ready. If a pod isn't fully ripened, the cocoa beans inside will be acidic and bitter. They carefully cut the pod stem off the branch without damaging the tree in the process. The pod's rind is a little over an inch thick. It's rough and bumpy. They hack it open with a machete to remove the fruit inside. The fruit is made of a sweet, edible pulp encasing 30 to 50 large white seeds. These are the cocoa beans.
The beans and pulp go to the fermentation area, where workers lay them in boxes or heaps and cover them for four to six days. As heat under the cover builds up, fermentation kicks in. The natural sugars interact with oxygen. The pulp slowly breaks down, liquefies, and drains away. The color and chemical composition of the beans change, and they become less acidic and develop a chocolatey taste. The next step is to dry the beans. Workers spread them out on big trays and lay them out in the sun for about a week.
Here's what a cocoa bean is like wet, versus dried.
The dried beans now go through a selection process. Workers examine them, removing pod remnants and any beans with mold or other imperfections. Beans which fail inspection are sold locally at a lower price or go to the compost heap. Beans that pass are weighed, bagged for export, and sold to chocolate makers.
Depending on the size of the beans, which varies according to the cocoa-tree variety, it takes about 300 to 600 cocoa beans to produce one kilogram of chocolate.
Bulk Chocolate
Chocolate owes its existence to the cocoa bean. The ancient civilizations of Mexico and Central and South America cultivated this seed to make a drink. The Spanish conquest brought this chocolate drink to Europe, but it wasn't until 1847 that a British company invented solid chocolate.
This factory makes chocolate in various forms and sells it to companies which manufacture chocolate products for retail sale. It also supplies chocolate components, such as cocoa powder and cocoa butter.
Most of the cocoa beans arriving here come from West Africa, which grows 70% of the world's crop. A conveyor belt moves them through a cleaning system, a series of sieves that screen out twigs, stones, and other debris. Next stop is a micronizer, a revolving drum that heats the cocoa beans to loosen their shells. Then they enter a shell-removing machine called a winnower. Inside, successive rakes drag the beans across screens, pulling off large pieces of shell. Then a vacuum sucks away the remaining smaller pieces. Removing the shell exposes the inside of the cocoa bean, which is called the nib. The factory will roast the nibs to develop their flavor. 50%-plus of the nib is fat, which is cocoa butter.
To make chocolate, they'll combine processed nibs, cocoa butter, and sugar, along with milk powder if they're making milk chocolate. First, the factory processes the nibs by grinding them. The heat and friction activate the cocoa butter, producing pure liquid chocolate called chocolate liquor. The factory extracts some of the cocoa butter to sell it separately as chocolate-making ingredient and to use for in-house chocolate production along with other ingredients in various proportions. The dark chocolate recipe, for example, calls for more chocolate liquor, sugar, and cocoa butter, but no milk powder. The recipe for unsweetened chocolate contains no sugar. The mixer blends the ingredients to the consistency of a very thick cake batter. The flavor is fine by this point, but the coarse texture needs to be smoothed out, so the chocolate moves to a refining machine, passing between a set of five rollers that reduce the particle size, so much so that within just minutes, the chocolate leaves the refiner as a fine, dry powder. But now it needs to be reliquefied, so the next stop is a machine called a conch. The friction and heat once again activate the cocoa butter, returning the powder to a liquid state. At this point, they add more cocoa butter, enough to reduce the viscosity to the exact thickness they need: just a bit, for example, if they're making chocolate chips or much more if they're making a thin chocolate coating.
For chocolate chips, the conch feeds a machine called a drop depositor. As the name implies, it deposits drops of chocolate onto a conveyor belt. The nozzle trays are interchangeable, so the machine can be set up to produce various sizes of chips, disks, or other shapes. The chocolate chips, still warm and soft, enter a cooling tunnel, traveling for about five minutes through several temperature zones, which vary between 30 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit. By the time the chips exit the tunnel, they're hard. A conveyor belt then takes them through a metal detector, a standard food-safety precaution.
The factory also produces 10-pound bulk-format chocolate bars. A depositor fills bar-shaped plastic molds. The conveyor transfers them to an elevator system, which moves through a cold room for about two hours. This constant motion ensures optimal air circulation, helping the cooling process. Chocolate shrinks slightly as it cools, so the bars pop out of the molds easily.
To make the chocolate look as good as it tastes, the factory cools, then reheats the liquid chocolate before depositing it. This process, called tempering, promotes the growth of the most stable cocoa butter crystals, making the surface of the chocolate smooth and shiny.
