Chemistry of Chocolate Essay

Chocolate is made from the cacao bean. According to Rodney Lipson, Cacao has been a cultivated crop for at least three thousand years, probably quite a check more. The mountain who first utilized Cacao were the inhabitants of what is like a shot Venezuela (Lipson) This group of people would eventu bothy spread the cacao bean in northwestern South America. Cacao was clearly highly valued by these people and they spread it northward through slew with their neighbors. It was probably the Maya, over 1500 years ago, who brought Cacao to Yucatan in what is now Mexico.The Aztecs who got Cacao from the Maya, apply Cacao in a number of ways, one common way was as a bitter spice in food and possibly also as a prow for pasta or bread, but the most well-known way that Cacao was as a drink. plot the Maya drank Chocolate hot, the Aztecs seem to have often taken it cold. The Aztecs called the drink, and apparently the bean as well, Xocoatl. From this condition comes the pan-European word C hocolate. When Europeans first made contact with the Aztec civilization, Cacao was being cultivated and used extensively.The Spanish Conquistadors quickly observe the benefits of Chocolate and used it to keep their armies marching long distances with little food. From the Aztecs the Spanish took it to Europe. Chocolate was widely used in Catholic countries after 1569 when Pope Pius V declared that Chocolate, the drink, did non break the fast, despite the self-coloured nutritional aspects of Chocolate (Lipson). Chocolate continued to be moved from country to country through trade and exploration.Soon coffee found its way into America, and according to Lipson, In 1900 Milton Snavely Hershey, a Mennonite from Pennsylvania, began producing milk-chocolate bars and kisses with great success. He was anti-alcohol and saw Chocolate as a good, profitable alternative. His empire grew even larger during World state of war I, when Milton Hershey encouraged the US Army to add four Hershey b ars to each soldiers daily ration (Lipson). Because of Hershey, chocolate was now affordable for everyone, and his methods of making chocolate are still used today.Peters chocolate tells us that chocolate is made by, storing the cacao beans in silos or warehouse. These rooms are well circulariseed, unploughed at cool temperature and the humidity regularly checked. Before the production stage, the beans are sorted and cleaned. Cocoa does not acquire the richness of its color and the fullness of its flavor until it is roasted. The degree of care given to this operation has wide influence on the ultimate quality of the end product either deep brown powder or chocolate.When roasting is complete, the beans are cooled and their thin shells removed by a winnowing machine. The husked and winnowed beans are called nibs. Heres where the first secrets of the chocolate manufacturer come in. The nibs are blended, combining as many as octad to ten varieties. It is control of these subtle mi xtures that maintains a constant quality and brings out the flavor of each cross variety of chocolate. The roasted and winnowed nibs then pass through refining mills and are ground.The heat generated by grinding causes the cocoa butter or fat to melt and form a fine spreadhead or liquid known as chocolate liquor. This goes to large hydraulic presses which remove most of the cocoa butter. The cake which is left may eventually be made into cocoa powder. The cake goes through several(prenominal) processes in which it is crushed, milled and finely sifted. After the cocoa paste, cocoa butter, milk, sugar and additional flavorings have been guardedly weighed out in accordance with the recipe, they go into a mixer where rotating, kneading arms thoroughly mix all the ingredients.The result is a homogeneous, paste-like mixture which is already pleasant to taste, but still feels gritty to the palate. The chocolate is move in a conching machine. While in the machine, the chocolate turns o ver in the conching machine, a controlled amount of air ventilates the mass, allowing the full aroma and flavor to develop. The still-warm conched chocolate is placed in a tempering machine so that it can be slowly and steadily cooled. The tempering prevents separation in the chocolate when its fill up into bar molds and hardens (Peters). This results in the average chocolate bar.