How to Make Raw Chocolate : How Cacao Beans Become Chocolate

Hi, I’m Kelly Johnson of Sedona Chocolate Super Foods and we’re here on location in
the chocolate room of the Ridiculous Chocolate Factory, inside the Bliss Café in Sedona,
Arizona on behalf of Expert Village. Cacao originated apparently in the Amazon River
Basin and then it migrated to southern Mexico and Venezuela, and then once, once Cortez
came and conquered the Mayan or Aztec Empire it spread to Europe and then all around the
world. Now since that has happened, what’s happened is that seventy percent of the world’s
cacao comes from Africa and they grow it on plantations. It’s a hybrid strain of cacao,
it’s a poor quality, it has a high fermentation level, that means in order to get it out,
cacao comes in a pod that looks like a football and in order for them to get this out of the
pod they let it sit for days and days and days and it gets very strong, and, and, not
really rancid but very strong, it smells like alcohol and it makes it easy to get out like
I said, out of the pod. Now they take this and the reason why they roast it is to get
rid of the bad flavor. They cook it to burn the alcohol off and then in order to make
it taste good because at this point it really doesn’t taste good. It tastes kind of like
burnt dirt, then it’s added into sugar and milk to make typical chocolate, what you’re
used to, what we’re used to and the difference in this is that we use a very small ethical
farm that grows those trees in the rain forest, they have a very low fermentation level, they
hand peel the pods, dry them in the sun under a shade cloth, at very low temperatures and
then bag them by hand and then ship them to us and then we here. The whole time preserving
the low temperature and the natural qualities, of the, the real bean of, we use the original
heirloom strain of beans, cacao beans, cacao seed, whichever one you want to call it, in
order to maintain, you know the best quality. So it has a natural chocolately flavor and
a natural chocolately aroma and if you just taste it you know. Then bringing it here through
this, this slow grinders and keeping it at low temperatures and holding it a low temperatures
that keeps all of the enzymes intact and keeps all of the natural aroma and the natural quality
inside the cacao, the natural flavors, the way it is meant to be intact and whole. We
do this in order to keep the integrity intact so that that natural essence of the cacao
tree and the rain forest can come through in what we serve here.