The history of chocolate a story of Olmecs, the Mayans and the Aztecs.
Are you curious about the origin of chocolate, or the way we process this product? We consume chocolate as bars, sweets, chocolate milk and chocolate sauce, for example, but how did chocolate actually come about?
The processing of cocoa
Chocolate has been around for hundreds of years in our history, it is difficult to pinpoint a starting point. It was probably the Olmecs, the Mayans and the Aztecs who used it first. They already work with cocoa, the raw material with which we produce chocolate.
There are mentions of, for example, the Maya who, some 600 years ago, used cocoa to make chocolate, making them a particularly rich source of nutrition. In addition, they used the cocoa to de commission it to their gods, paid for it and used it to count. They also discovered that cocoa as a drink could reduce fatigue, a result of the caffeine in the product. For example, they felt that drinking cocoa drinks would lead to wisdom and knowledge.
How chocolate came to be
For the processing of chocolate, we use the cocoa bean, which local farmers can harvest twice a year on the cocoa plantations. Next, it is important to ferment and dry the beans, and then mix them. Then we roast the cocoa beans in a rotating tunnel, at a temperature of 140 degrees Celsius. The duration affects the taste of the chocolate, after roasting the beans can be broken and peeled. There is a ‘nib’ left, this until a thick paste is ground. Then a press is used to extract cocoa butter, which we can use as the chocolate as we know it.
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