How Chocolate Is Made?

The journey from cocoa tree to chocolate bar is not complex, but it requires several steps, each of which requires careful treatment to get the best from the finished product.

Artisan chocolate makers often deal directly with cocoa farmer cooperatives, giving them a say in how the beans are treated from the moment they’re harvested and ensuring the best possible price for cocoa farmers in some of the world’s poorest regions.

Harvesting

The process begins with harvesting. Ripe cocoa pods are harvested twice a year. The harvest times vary from region to region, but the process of turning it into chocolate begins immediately.

The pods are cut open with machetes and the white pulp containing the cocoa beans is scooped out.

Fermenting

The pods and pulp are placed into large wooden containers, where the pulp is allowed to ferment for five to seven days. During the process, the beans are turned to help them ferment more evenly. This is the first stage in developing the flavour of the chocolate, and part of the reason why a farmer can have a direct impact on the quality of the finished chocolate.

Drying

After fermentation, the next step in the process is to dry the beans. This is usually done by spreading them out into a single layer in the sun. Most beans are transferred into sacks and transported around the world after drying, so in order to prevent mold, it’s important that they’re completely dry at this point.

Roasting

The next step in the process is roasting. This is done by the chocolate maker rather than the farmer. A few chocolate companies make their chocolate at source where it grows, but the hot climate required to grow cocoa makes the chocolate making process more challenging. Most chocolate is made in cooler climates, like Europe or North America.

The process and equipment used to roast the beans vary considerably from chocolate maker to chocolate maker. Some use standard ovens, others have specially made systems designed to rotate the beans and roast as evenly and accurately as possible.

The exact temperature and roast time are part of the chocolate maker’s (often secret) recipe, and will have been worked out with careful experimentation and lots of tasting!

Cracking & Winnowing

The roasted cocoa beans have a thin, papery shell around them which needs to be removed, so at this point in the process, the beans are cracked open and the shell is removed in a process called winnowing. The lighter shells are blown away with fans, leaving behind pieces of pure cocoa bean, known as “nibs”.

Grinding & Conching

The cocoa nibs are ground with stone rollers until they become a paste known as cocoa mass or cocoa liquor. This pure, unrefined form of chocolate contains both cocoa solids (the chocolatey part!) and cocoa butter (the natural fat present in the bean).

Cocoa butter can be extracted from the cocoa mass with a hydraulic press. This is useful because most chocolate makers often use extra cocoa butter to give their chocolate a smoother, glossier texture. Some confectionery manufacturers replace this extra cocoa butter with cheaper vegetable fats, and this is something you should look out for on the ingredients and try to avoid. The only fat in real chocolate is cocoa butter.

Traditionally, the cocoa mass is be transferred to a separate machine called a conch, where it is further refined. Many modern artisans combine the grinding and conching into a single process using a machine called a melanger. This is simply a large metal cylinder with two rotating granite wheels that grind and refine the chocolate into very small particles.

It’s during this process that sugar, milk powder (for milk chocolate) and other flavourings are added to the chocolate.

The conching process can take anything from a few hours to a few days and affects the chemical structure of the chocolate, as well as the particle size. This part of the process has a very big impact on the flavour notes in the finished chocolate, and deciding exactly how long to conch for is part of the chocolate maker’s skill.

Tempering

Great chocolate should have a shiny finish and a good “snap” – that clean clicking sound when you break a piece off. These are created by tempering, the controlled process of raising, lowering and raising the temperature of the chocolate to form exactly the right kind of crystals.

If you were to let the untemper chocolate cool naturally, the chocolate would be soft and crumbly and would not melt evenly on the tongue.

Tempering can be done by hand, but the process would be enormously time consuming for the large amounts of chocolate that bar manufacturers have to work with, so most use tempering machines that can heat large quantities of chocolate very accurately.

The tempering machine will keep the melted chocolate circulating at exactly the right temperature, making the final step easier.

Moulding

The final step in making a finished chocolate bar is pouring it into a mould. The melted chocolate is simply poured into plastic bar-shaped moulds and agitated to remove any air bubbles. Larger chocolate makers will have machines and conveyors that deposit exactly the right amount of chocolate into each mould, but many smaller manufacturers still do this part by hand.

Once cooled, the chocolate is wrapped and ready to go!