How is Chocolate Made from the Raw Cocoa Beans Step by Step?

Chocolate originated in central and South America, its main raw material is cocoa beans. It takes a lot of time and energy to make chocolate from cocoa beans step by step. Let’s take a look at these steps.

How is Chocolate Made Step by Step?

1 Step – Picking
Mature cocoa pods are yellow like papaya. The brown part inside is cocoa beans, and the white part is flesh.

2 Step – Fermentation
After removing the flesh, the newly obtained cocoa beans are not so fragrant and need to be fermented. Cocoa beans can be covered with banana leaves. After a few days of fermentation, cocoa beans produce unique flavors.

3 Step – Drying
If the fermentation is over, the cocoa beans will become mouldy. So dry quickly after fermentation. The above three steps are usually done in the place of origin. Next step is to enter the factory processing stage.

4 Step – Roasting
Roasting cocoa beans is similar to baking coffee beans, which is very important to the flavor of chocolate. Each chocolate manufacturer has its own way. A roasting machine is usually used to bake cocoa beans. The roasting process is as follows:

6 Step – Mixing
The cocoa solids and cocoa butter that are difficult to separate in the new proportion, together with vanilla, sugar, milk, and other optional ingredients, become chocolate.

7 Step – Fine grinding

Fine grinding is the step that chocolate produces smooth taste. Chocolate is heated and stirred for up to two or three days, eventually making chocolate granules invisible and improving texture.

8 Step – Temperature adjustment
The last step is to make the chocolate “not melt in hand, only melt in the mouth”. Simply put, there are several crystal types of cocoa butter crystals, corresponding to different melting temperatures. A chocolate tempering machine is essential in this process, which allows it to crystallize in a specific crystal form, producing a beautiful appearance and a suitable melting temperature. A variety of chocolate with different flavors is made.

9 Step – Moulding
Pour liquid chocolate into the quantitative model, reduce the temperature of the material to a certain range, and make the material liquid into solid state. The fat with certain crystal form is arranged into lattice strictly according to the crystal rule, forming a dense organizational structure, volume shrinkage, and chocolate can fall off from the mold smoothly.