Cocoa is a popularly known fruit due to its sweet pulp and its seed, which is used in the manufacture of chocolate. Desserts really wouldn't be the same without milk and dark chocolate, and this ends up creating a very frequent doubt about how the product is made and whether the cocoa fruit really tastes like chocolate.
Therefore, in today's article we are going to solve these doubts, explaining how it is made and saying what are the uses of cocoa.
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Does the cocoa fruit really taste like chocolate?
Chocolate production begins with cocoa trees – the tree that gives rise to the cocoa fruit. Such trees produce large pods with beans hidden within their white flesh. They are divided into four types, namely:
- Creole: rare and high quality beans;
- Forastero: known for its pronounced chocolate flavor;
- Trinitarian: beans that are packed with flavor and easy to harvest;
- National: have difficulty developing because they are so prone to disease.
To harvest the bean kernels, they need to be removed from their placentas – the process responsible for this is fermentation, which also gives chocolate its distinctive, complex flavor. After this process, the grains are naturally dried in the sun and then roasted to soften their acidity and eliminate some bacteria that are harmful to health.
After this complete process, the shells surrounding the grains are removed and they can be mixed with sugar. After that, the grains are tempered – a process that guarantees a smoother flavor to the chocolate. And soon after, the melted chocolate is placed in molds, thus forming the chocolate bar. After all this process, it is possible to obtain the taste of chocolate. But if you don't follow the same steps, can you get that same flavor from a cocoa pod?
The fruit is composed of a white pulp – which is characterized by having a sweet flavor reminiscent of a mango – and by beans, which when eaten raw have an intense, bitter and slightly earthy. These grains have a slight taste of bitter chocolate, so if you are going to consume them naturally, the ideal is to make it together with the pulp, thus obtaining a better balance of the flavors of dark chocolate and mango sweet.
