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From the bean to melt-in-the-mouth chocolate – how does that work?

First and foremost, cocoa is needed for chocolate. This grows on cocoa trees, mostly on cocoa plantations in climatically favorable places near the equator, for example in South America or Africa. There are yellow to red-brown fruits, mainly of the Criollo and Forastero varieties. The seeds of these fruits are called cocoa beans.

Each fruit contains 40 to 50 beans - about the amount needed for a bar of chocolate. In terms of taste, the beans themselves are very bitter and don't have anything chocolaty about them - the color isn't brown either, but violet.

When the fruits are ripe, they are knocked down from the trees with a machete and split open. At the core are the beans, which are now covered and dried on banana leaves and lose their bitter substances after a while.

Further processing then takes place in the factories. The beans are cleaned and roasted. It's starting to smell like chocolate. During this process, the shells of the beans break off and are sucked off, and the fat of the beans is released – the so-called cocoa butter. Now we have a liquid cocoa mass. However, this is still very coarse-grained and must therefore be ground and rolled.

The cocoa mass is now finer and finer, but it remains rather dry and brittle. In order for it to be like we know it from all chocolate today, i.e. melting in the mouth, the mass has to be stirred for a very long time at the right temperature - and what happens in the conche. All that remains is to flow the wonderfully shiny and aromatic chocolate into the mould, cool it and pack it.

When which ingredient is added, how long each work process takes - that is the secret of every chocolatier and manufacturer.