It takes about 60 cocoa beans and 48 hours to make a chocolate bar.
One of Ukraine’s chocolate giants, Korona, let the cameras follow its African beans on a mysterious journey to becoming a deliciously guilty pleasure.
In the beginning, cocoa beans are cleaned and disinfected to prevent any dangerous bacteria from creeping in. Then, they are roasted in gigantic stoves to a certain degree, which very much determines the taste of the final product.
Roasted beans are next grounded into a special paste called chocolate liquor. Don’t let the name trick you – there’s no alcohol in it. Chocolate paste and butter then get extracted from the liquor only to be mixed together again, minus the byproducts.Then come milk, sugar, nuts and raisins, among other ingredients. The dark mixture is then poured into special moulds to cool down and harden.
Chocolate has not always been around the way we crave it now. Apparently, the ancient Maya tribes enjoyed it as a drink. Europeans knew nothing about it until the 16th century, when Spanish conquistadors brought it home from their voyages to the Americas. For many years chocolate was an expensive privilege that royalty and the rich enjoyed alone. Luckily, things changed in the 19th century. The British found a way to make chocolate bars, previously available only in liquid form. Soon thereafter, the Dutch set up mass production.
Kyiv Post staff writer Nataliya Horban can be reached at horban@kyivpost.com
