All About Chocolate

All About Chocolate

Introduction Ask people about their favorite sweet thing to eat, and they'll probably say it's chocolate. People around the world love chocolate. They love it so much that every year they eat more chocolate than any other sweet.

Where Chocolate Comes From It might surprise you to learn that chocolate actually grows on trees. That doesn't mean that you can pick a chunk of chocolate from a tree branch and eat it. In fact, the chocolate growing on trees looks, tastes, and smells nothing like the chocolate you eat. The tree that gives us chocolate is the cacao (kah-KOW) tree. Chocolate comes from beans that are found in large pods on the tree. Cacao trees grow near the equator, where it is hot and wet.

Today, most cacao trees are grown on farms called plantations. The trees have lots of small white or yellow flowers that bloom during the year. Some of the flowers change into pods, but most do not.

The pods are shaped like little footballs. The pods are green when they first form, but they change to a golden or reddish color as they get ripe.

Preparing the Beans Taking the pods from the cacao trees is the first step in making chocolate. But it's not the pods that are important-it's the 20 to 50 beans found inside the pods, which are actually the tree's seeds. It takes a lot of beans and a lot of work to make chocolate. First, the pods are gathered. Then, someone using a large blade called a machete (mah-SHET-ee) cuts the pods open.