Chocolate The “Food of the Gods”?

Cacao Theobroma cacao - chocolate and cacao Origin in eastern Andes, "Food of the Gods" to Mayans, Mayan drink included cacao, red pepper, vanilla and other spices. Sweet hot chocolate became popular in Europe ~1650. Spanish, then Dutch, then Germans, became involved in establishment of cacao plantations. W. Africa and Brazil are now world's largest producers.

Cacao tree, w pods, roughly the size and shape of a football, the pods grow straight out of the tree's trunk and branches. After ripening for up to 6 months, the pods are harvested by farmers who cut the pods down by hand. The beans spend a week soaking in the pulp while their flavor develops and their color changes to a rich brown. When they've soaked long enough, the beans are dried in the sun, bagged up and sent to chocolate factories.

If you opened one up, you'd find 30 or 40 purplish seeds inside, covered in a sticky white pulp. These seeds are called cacao beans. The beans spend a week soaking in the pulp while their flavor develops and their color changes to a rich brown. When they've soaked long enough, the beans are dried in the sun, bagged up and sent to chocolate factories

After arriving at the chocolate factory, the cacao beans are inspected. The beans that pass the test are sent on to be roasted. The roasted beans are shattered and tumbled and ground into bits. When melted, these become chocolate liquor, the main ingredient in chocolate. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Processing Cocoa is made by pressing out fat (cocoa butter), dry powder is treated with alkali to produce Dutch cocoa. Milk chocolate is produced by continuous stirring of a mixture of chocolate liquor + cocoa butter + sugar + condensed milk.

&layout=martha&rsc=020606_slot3_chocolate Many ingredients can be added & many uses

The cacao flower is complicated in design, and its fertilization highly specialized. The flowers are pollinated exclusively by midges--small, gnat-like flies that thrive in the moist, debris- strewn rain forest floor. Cacao seeds grow inside tough-skinned, elliptical pods, surrounded by fruit pulp. Unlike the fruit of most trees, mature pods do not fall from the cacao tree--and the seeds cannot germinate unless freed from the pod. This means that in order to propagate, cacao must rely on animals who chew through the pod for the sweet pulp, and who discard the bitter seeds. Chocolate & Biodiversity

Only 1 to 3 percent of the many hundreds of flowers produced by a single tree are fertilized and develop into pods. Trees at plantation edges, where the cultivated areas meet the rain forest, have many more pods than centrally-located trees. It's believed that the plantation environment (sunny, with trees planted far apart in rows) is far less attractive to the midges that pollinate cacao trees, as the insects prefer the damp, shady rain forest. Pre-Columbian farmers, who harvested trees in small plantings in the forest or at its edge, probably got a better yield.