With Valentine’s day coming up, this promises to be a chocolaty weekend. I heart chocolate. But I won’t be blinded by my love… let’s look at the cold, hard, bitter chocolate facts.
Theobroma Cacao (more commonly called cocoa) is an evergreen tree native to Central America. They grow to 60 feet tall in the wild, and have 3 to 5 main branches that grow outward. The branches sprout thousands of small, white, scentless flowers. A small amount of flowers produce a berry which, over a period of six months, grows to a ripe pod about the length of your hand. One tree will produce only 30 of these pods per year.
Inside the pod is the cacao bean, the source of my tongue’s best friend. Through my affair with dark chocolate I’ve come to a greater understanding of how others enjoy wine. The process of turning cacao beans into chocolate requires similar care, from drying, through fermenting, to extract the richest flavour. Mind you, the majority of cacao beans get used for low-end candy bars where the milk and sugar overpower any such flavour… so they don’t worry about the details so much.
While the cacao tree originated in Mexico, now the majority of cacao is produced in Africa. My personal favourite chocolate bar features beans exclusively from Madagascar. Like most other things that come from the secluded island, the flavour of these beans is entirely unique. You have probably bought wine from specific regions of France, but you may not have considered the same principle applies for chocolate bars!
Going back to the origins, the Mayans and Aztec both produced a drink from the native cacao plants. For the Aztecs, it was a spicy, bitter chocolate drink reserved only for those of the highest status, drank from golden goblets that were tossed in the lake after one use. They called it xocoatl (pronounced shoco-latle).
The drink traveled back to Spain with Cortes, and once they added a bit if sugar to it, really caught on across Europe. The rest is history… but the above was history too.
