Cacao Derivatives

Humans have been enjoying the gustatory and medicinal qualities of cacao and its derivatives since ancient times. Cacao was an important part of Mesoamerican cultures before being carried across the Atlantic to Europe. For centuries, the use of cacao in products, including chocolate, signaled health in the Americas and both health and wealth in Europe. After a years of focusing on indulgence, America's contemporary cultural and culinary thoughts on chocolate skew, once again, toward health and quality.

Cacao is the original word for cocoa (Afoakwa, 2010). Cacao seeds come from the fruit of the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao, of which there are three principle types: Criollo, Forastero, and Trinitario (Vela, 2012). The cacao tree was classified

For centuries cacao was used primarily to create beverages. These beverages were consumed on occasions that were considered special and of great importance for social life, such as christening and marriage ceremonies; one such beverage was agua de cacao, which is a simple mixture of ground cacao seeds, sugar, and water (Vela, 2012). Some people in ancient Mexico used blood from pigs as a thickener for chocolate (Frydenborg, 2015). Aside from consumption in its own right, cacao was also used in Mesoamerican cultures for flavoring, cosmetics, as a stimulant, and for its medicinal qualities (Vela, 2012).

The Spanish brought cacao to Europe in the seventeenth century (Afoakwa, 2010). Along with the product, Europeans adopted the belief in the bean’s medicinal qualities. On 1640, army captain James Wadsworth translated Jesuit missionary Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma’s Curioso Tratado de la naturaleza y calidad del Chocolate (A curious treatise on the nature and quality of chocolate), sharing with the English-speakers the belief that a beverage made with cacao was a “wholesome” drink that “strengthens the stomacke [sic]” (You, 2016). Some even believed chocolate could bring the dead back to life (You,

When melting chocolate to temper, the general advice is to only use ⅔ of the chocolate at first, putting the roughly cut chocolate in a heatproof bowl and putting the bowl over a simmering pan of water, to avoid direct heat, which could burn the chocolate. The water should not be allowed to boil, as it could over-heat the chocolate. A candy thermometer should be used to check the temperature of the chocolate; after heating, the remaining chopped chocolate is added, and the melted mixture is allowed to cool to 31 or 32°C. The cooled mixture can then be poured into a measuring cup for pouring it easily into the desired shape (Bittman, 2012). More exacting technique calls for heating the bulk of the chocolate to 115°F/45°C, then adding the chocolate that was set aside. This mixture should be cooled down until it reaches 82°F/31°C, then heated up for 30 seconds to one minute until the mixture reaches 89°F/34°C (Norris & Heeger, 2013). Both techniques would yield a chocolate suitable for coating pralines, truffles, fruit, and other savory or sweet treats.

With the international global sale of chocolate estimated at $74 billion in 2006, it looks like consumers have not lost their ancient interest in cacao (Afoakwa, 2010). New research on the nutritional benefits of cacao, along consumer interest in “functional foods”, seems to pair with the new idea of “real” (i.e. dark) chocolate to keep cacao