How to Make Raw Chocolate : Introduction to Cacao Beans & Chocolate

Hi, I’m Kelly Johnson of Sedona Chocolate and 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. Today, well what we have here are cacao beans. All
chocolate comes from these beans, and inside the skin is the actual bean itself. Cacao
trees grown anywhere from twenty degrees north or south of the Equator, and mostly, they’re
best grown inside the rain forest. In its natural habitat it produces the best cacao.
As I said, all chocolate comes from cacao and every bit of chocolate in the world comes
from this bean right here. Now these beans, when they are broken apart like that, they
are called nibs. Coco nibs or cacao nibs and over here, we have, I’ll show you a better
example, here look at that. Can you smell it? Uh huh, it smells very good. So these
are raw cacao nibs and
most chocolate is roasted, they take these beans and they roast them, they cook them
at high temperatures and then grind them down. Now what we do here is we don’t roast the
beans or the nibs or any of it. We keep it at low temperatures to keep the enzyme activity
alive.