How is Chocolate made?

So, last week I told you all about where chocolate comes from and how it gets from the tree to the factory.  But what happens to it when it gets to the factory?

Well, at the factory, the cacao beans are roasted in large, rotating ovens.  They are then cracked and winnowed.  This means that their outer shells are cracked and blown away, leaving the crushed and broken pieces of cacao beans, called “nibs.”

The cacao nibs will then be ground into chocolate liquor.  Chocolate liquor by itself is bitter and not very smooth and creamy so to sweeten it up and improve the texture the manufacturer will add things like sugar, cocoa butter and milk.

The cacao and the sugar are still quite grainy at this point, so the manufacturer runs the mixture through a series of steel rollers to refine the texture.

The chocolate is then run through a chocolate making machine.  At this point the manufacturer will probably add some more cocoa butter and maybe some soy lecithin which will give the chocolate its silky smooth texture.

The chocolate is then tempered by stirring it, letting it cool, heating it back up slowly, and repeating the process several times.  This will give our chocolate that nice glossy look.

Finally, we have chocolate!  At The Gourmet Chocolate Pizza Co. we temper the chocolate ourselves and then pour it into moulds and pizza tins to give you our signature chocolate pizzas!

So there you have it!  You are now a chocolate mastermind!