ChocolateClear

In 60 seconds

1. A seed in a pod on a trunk. Chocolate is made from the seeds of the cacao tree. Pods grow straight from the trunk and hold 30 to 40 beans in sweet white pulp. A fresh bean is purple and bitter, and a little over half of its dried nib is fat: cocoa butter. One 100 g bar of 70% dark takes about two pods.
2. Flavour starts in a rotting heap. Farmers heap the wet beans under banana leaves for 5 to 7 days. Yeasts, then lactic acid bacteria, then acetic acid bacteria work through the pulp, and the heap heats to 45 to 50 °C. Acid and heat kill the seed and its own enzymes make the building blocks of chocolate flavour. Then the beans dry in the sun to about 7% water.
3. Roast, winnow, grind, press. Roasting at about 110 to 140 °C turns those building blocks into chocolate aroma by the Maillard reaction. Air blows the shell off. Grinding melts the fat, so solid nibs become liquid cocoa liquor. A press, patented by the van Houtens in 1828, splits liquor into cocoa butter and the cake that becomes cocoa powder.
4. Smaller than the tongue can feel. Sugar and cocoa particles are crushed below about 30 micrometres, the size at which the tongue feels grit. Then the conche, invented by Rodolphe Lindt in 1879, stirs the warm mass for hours. Sour acetic acid leaves, and every particle gets a coat of fat so the chocolate flows.
5. Six crystals, one winner. Cocoa butter can set in six crystal forms that melt from 17 °C to 36 °C. Only form V, which melts at about 34 °C, gives gloss and snap. Tempering gets it: melt to about 48 °C, cool to 27 °C, warm to 31 or 32 °C for dark chocolate. Get it wrong and the bar is dull, soft and grey with bloom.
6. Dark, milk, white and compound. Dark is cocoa and sugar, milk adds milk powder, white keeps only the cocoa butter. Compound swaps cocoa butter for other vegetable fat: FSSAI lets chocolate carry at most 5% of it. Cocoa butter is liquid by 35 °C, which is why chocolate melts in your mouth, and in your hand in May.

Words worth knowing

Term	Meaning
Cocoa nib	The inside of a cocoa bean once the shell is off. It is about 54% cocoa butter.
Fermentation	Microbes working on the pulp round the beans for 5 to 7 days. Their acid and heat start the flavour inside the bean.
Maillard reaction	Amino acids reacting with sugars in dry heat. In the roaster it makes the smell of chocolate.
Cocoa liquor	Ground nibs, liquid when warm. Also called cocoa mass. It has no alcohol.
Cocoa butter	The fat of the cocoa bean. It melts between about 30 and 35 °C.
Conching	Hours of warm stirring that drive off acid and water and coat every particle in fat.
Polymorph	One of several crystal patterns a substance can form. Cocoa butter has six, called forms I to VI.
Tempering	Melting, cooling and gently rewarming chocolate so that it sets in form V, with gloss and snap.
Compound	A chocolate-like coating in which other vegetable fat replaces most of the cocoa butter.

A short history

5,300 years from a drink in the upper Amazon to a tempered bar, and to the farms and the questions behind it.

• 3300 BCE · The oldest cacao yet found (Mayo-Chinchipe people, Santa Ana-La Florida, upper Amazon (today Ecuador))
• 1520 · Beans that were money (The Mexica (Aztec) state; recorded by the Spanish, Tenochtitlan (today Mexico City))
• 1828 · The cocoa press (Casparus van Houten and his son Coenraad Johannes van Houten, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• 1847 · The first chocolate bar (J. S. Fry & Sons, Bristol, England)
• 1875 · Milk chocolate (Daniel Peter, with condensed milk from his neighbour Henri Nestlé, Vevey, Switzerland)
• 1879 · The conche (Rodolphe Lindt, Bern, Switzerland)
• 1909 · Slavery in the cocoa islands (William Cadbury and Cadbury Brothers; The Standard newspaper, São Tomé and Príncipe; Birmingham and London, England)
• 1948 · Cadbury comes to India (Cadbury India, Bombay (today Mumbai), India)

The full story, with 29 moments, charts, people and 30 sources: glassbox.how/e/chocolateclear/history. The data lives in history.json.

Video and slides

Made with the Glassbox studio from this box's storyboard (window.glassbox.director). Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.

File	What	Size
glassbox/reel.mp4	Reel / Short, with captions and soundtrack	1080×1920
glassbox/video.mp4	YouTube video, with captions and soundtrack	1920×1080
glassbox/slide-1…10.jpg	Instagram carousel	1080×1350
glassbox/thumb.jpg	YouTube thumbnail	1280×720
glassbox/cover.jpg	Share card and repo social preview	1200×630
glassbox/history-reel.mp4	“History in 10 moments” Reel / Short	1080×1920
glassbox/history-slide-*.jpg	History carousel	1080×1350
glassbox/post.json	Post copy and schedule used by the publish kit

Privacy

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It remembers a few things in your own browser only, and never sends them anywhere:

Browser storage key	What it holds
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