Chocolate
Chocolate is a food made from roasted and ground cocoa beans that can be a liquid, solid, or paste, either by itself or to flavor other foods. Cocoa beans are the processed seeds of the cacao tree. They are usually fermented to develop the flavor, then dried, cleaned, and roasted. The shell is removed to reveal nibs, which are ground to chocolate liquor: unadulterated chocolate in rough form. The liquor can be processed to separate its two components, cocoa solids and cocoa butter, or shaped and sold as unsweetened baking chocolate. By adding sugar, sweetened chocolates are produced, which can be sold simply as dark chocolate, or, with the addition of milk, can be made into milk chocolate. Making milk chocolate with cocoa butter and without cocoa solids produces white chocolate.
Chocolate is one of the most popular food types and flavors in the world, and many foodstuffs involving chocolate exist, particularly desserts, including ice creams, cakes, mousse, and cookies. Many candies are filled with or coated with sweetened chocolate. Chocolate bars, either made of solid chocolate or other ingredients coated in chocolate, are eaten as snacks. Gifts of chocolate molded into different shapes are traditional on certain holidays, including Christmas, Easter, Valentine's Day, Hanukkah and Eid al-Fitr. Chocolate is also used in cold and hot beverages, such as chocolate milk, hot chocolate and chocolate liqueur.
The cacao tree was first used as a source for food in what is today Ecuador at least 5,300 years ago. Mesoamerican civilizations widely consumed cacao beverages, and in the 16th century, one of these beverages, chocolate, was introduced to Europe. Until the 19th century, chocolate was a drink consumed by societal elite. After then, technological and cocoa production changes led to chocolate becoming a solid, mass-consumed food. In the 21st century, cocoa beans for most chocolate are produced in West African countries, particularly Ivory Coast and Ghana, which contribute about 60% of the world's cocoa supply. The presence of child labor, particularly child slavery and trafficking, in cocoa bean production in these countries has received significant media attention.
Etymology
Chocolate is a Spanish loanword, first recorded in English in 1604, and in Spanish in 1579. The word's origins beyond this are contentious. Despite a popular belief that chocolate derives from the Nahuatl word chocolatl, early texts documenting the Nahuatl word for chocolate drink use a different term, cacahuatl, meaning "cacao water". Several alternatives have therefore been proposed.In one, chocolate is derived from the hypothetical Nahuatl word xocoatl, meaning "bitter drink". Scholars Michael and Sophie Coe consider this unlikely, saying that there is no clear reason why the 'sh' sound represented by 'x' would change to 'ch', or why an 'l' would be added. Another theory suggests that chocolate comes from chocolatl, meaning 'hot water' in a Mayan language. However, there is no evidence of the form 'chocol' being used to mean hot.
Despite the uncertainty about its Nahuatl origin, there is some agreement that chocolate likely derives from the Nawat word chikola:tl. Whether chikola:tl means 'cacao-beater', referring to whisking cocoa to create foam, is contested, as the meaning of chico is unknown. According to anthropologist Kathryn Sampeck, chocolate originally referred to one cacao beverage among many, which included annatto and was made in what is today Guatemala. According to Sampeck, it became the generic word for cacao beverages, when the Izalcos from that area were the most notable producers of cacao.
History
Evidence for the domestication of the cacao tree exists as early as 5300 BP in South America, in present-day southeast Ecuador by the Mayo-Chinchipe culture, before it was introduced to Mesoamerica. It is unknown when chocolate was first consumed as opposed to other cacao-based drinks, and there is evidence the Olmecs, the earliest known major Mesoamerican civilization, fermented the sweet pulp surrounding the cacao beans into an alcoholic beverage.Chocolate was extremely important to several Mesoamerican societies, and cacao was considered a gift from the gods by the Mayans and the Aztecs. The cocoa bean was used as a currency across civilizations and was used in ceremonies, as a tribute to leaders and gods and as a medicine. Chocolate in Mesoamerica was a bitter drink, flavored with additives such as vanilla, earflower and chili, and was capped with a dark brown foam created by pouring the liquid from a height between containers.
Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés may have been the first European to encounter chocolate when he observed it in the court of Moctezuma II in 1520. It proved to be an acquired taste, and it took until 1585 for the first official recording of a shipment of cocoa beans to Europe. Chocolate was believed to be an aphrodisiac and medicine, and spread across Europe in the 17th century, sweetened, served warm and flavored with familiar spices.
Religious orders played a significant role in its dissemination.
It was initially primarily consumed by the elite, with expensive cocoa supplied by colonial plantations in the Americas. In the 18th century, it was considered southern European, aristocratic and Catholic, and was still produced in a similar way to the way it had been produced by the Aztecs.File:Fry's Chocolate Cream split.jpg|thumb|One of the first mass-produced chocolate bars, Fry's Chocolate Cream, was produced by Fry's in 1866.
Starting in the 18th century, chocolate production was improved. In the 19th century, engine-powered milling was developed. In 1828, Coenraad Johannes van Houten received a patent for a process making Dutch cocoa. This removed cocoa butter from chocolate liquor, and permitted large scale production of chocolate. Other developments in the 19th century, including the melanger, modern milk chocolate, the conching process to make chocolate smoother and change the flavor meant a worker in 1890 could produce fifty times more chocolate with the same labor than they could before the Industrial Revolution, and chocolate became a food to be eaten rather than drunk. As production moved from the Americas to Asia and Africa, mass markets in Western nations for chocolate opened up.
In the early 20th century, British chocolate producers including Cadbury and Fry's faced controversy over the labor conditions in the Portuguese cacao industry in Africa. A 1908 report by a Cadbury agent described conditions as "de facto slavery." While conditions somewhat improved with a boycott by chocolate makers, slave labor among African cacao growers again gained public attention in the early 21st century. In the 20th century, chocolate production further developed, with development of the tempering technique to improve the snap and gloss of chocolate and the addition of lecithin to improve texture and consistency. White and couverture chocolate were developed in the 20th century and the bean-to-bar trade model began.
Types
Several types of chocolate can be distinguished. Pure, unsweetened chocolate, often called "baking chocolate", contains primarily cocoa solids and cocoa butter in varying proportions. Much of the chocolate consumed today is in the form of sweet chocolate, which combines chocolate with sugar.Eating chocolate
The traditional types of chocolate are dark, milk and white. All of them contain cocoa butter, which is the ingredient defining the physical properties of chocolate. Plain chocolate, as its name suggests, is a form of chocolate that is similar to pure cocoa liquor, although is usually made with a slightly higher proportion of cocoa butter. It is simply defined by its cocoa percentage. In milk chocolate, the non-fat cocoa solids are partly or mostly replaced by milk solids. In white chocolate, they are all replaced by milk solids, hence its ivory color.Other forms of eating chocolate exist, these include raw chocolate and ruby chocolate. An additional popular form of eating chocolate, gianduja, is made by incorporating nut paste to the chocolate paste.
Other types
Other types of chocolate are used in baking and confectionery. These include baking chocolate, couverture chocolate, compound chocolate and modeling chocolate. Modeling chocolate is a chocolate paste made by melting chocolate and combining it with corn syrup, glucose syrup, or golden syrup.Cacao
Chocolate is made from cocoa beans, the dried and often fermented seeds of the cacao tree, a small, tall evergreen tree native to South America. The most common genotype originated in the Amazon basin, and was gradually transported by humans throughout South and Central America. Early forms of another genotype have also been found in what is now Venezuela.The scientific name, Theobroma, means "food of the gods". The fruit, called a cocoa pod, is ovoid, long and wide, ripening yellow to orange, and weighing about when ripe.
Cacao trees are small, understory trees that need rich, well-drained soils. They naturally grow within 20° of either side of the equator because they need about 2000 mm of rainfall a year, and temperatures in the range of. Cacao trees cannot tolerate a temperature lower than. The genome of the cacao tree was sequenced in 2010.
Traditionally, cacao was understood to be divided into three varieties: Criollo, Forastero, and Trinitario. New genetic research has not found a genetic backing for this division, and it has identified eleven genetic clusters.