Chocolate

SLIDE 1
Good morning friends !!
Please take your chocolates from the basket. Thank you.
Myself and nithya will share on Chocalates………………
SLIDE 2
So Where Chocolates come from?
Yes!! It comes from most of the tropical parts of the world like Africa, Ghana the number one producer, then Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico etc etc…
This is a Cacoa Tree which bears the Cocoa pods. The tree takes 5-6 years to mature and bear a fruit. The ripe cocoa pod has about 30 usable pods each year ie rougly 1000 cocoa beans a year
Around 500 beans make 1 pound only ie 2 pound of bittersweet cocoa per tree in a year.
Cacao farming is very labor intensive. Every part of cacao farming, from planting to harvesting to fermenting, is best done by hand, not machines. Pods must be removed from the trees individually, by hand, because not all ripen at the same time. Farmers generally use machetes or large knives attached to poles to slice down the ripe pods, taking care not to hurt nearby buds.
The pods are split open by hand. The beans are scooped out and the outer shell is discarded. If you tasted a bean at this point you would notice a sweet, lemony flavor from the pulp. The actual bean would be bitter and hard to eat.
SLIDE 3
Fermentation
Once the cacao beans are scooped from the pods, they are fermented and dried in the two-step curing process that sets in motion the development of the flavor nuances which maketasting chocolate so exciting.
Fermentation is the first critical process to develop the beans’ flavor. The beans, still covered with pulp, are placed in large, shallow wooden boxes or are left in piles and covered with banana leaves. The fermentation process takes anywhere from two to eight days.

Drying
The next key process is drying. The best way to dry cacao beans is to lay them on bamboo mats and let them bask in the sun's warming rays. In some humid, rainy climates,