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Chocolate is a Spanish loanword, first recorded in English in 1604, [1] and in Spanish in 1579. [2] However, the word's origins beyond this are contentious. [3] Despite a popular belief that chocolate derives from the Nahuatl word chocolatl, early texts documenting the Nahuatl word for chocolate drink use a different term, cacahuatl, meaning "cacao water".
Chocolate is created from the cocoa bean. A cacao tree with fruit pods in various stages of ripening. Chocolate is made from cocoa beans, the dried and fermented seeds of the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao), a small, 4–8 m tall (15–26 ft tall) evergreen tree native to the deep tropical region of the Americas.
A cocoa pod (fruit) is about 17 to 20 cm (6.7 to 7.9 in) long and has a rough, leathery rind about 2 to 3 cm (0.79 to 1.18 in) thick (varying with the origin and variety of pod) filled with sweet, mucilaginous pulp (called baba de cacao in South America) with a lemonade-like taste enclosing 30 to 50 large seeds that are fairly soft and a pale ...
The center of the bean, known as the "nib", contains an average of 54% of cocoa butter, which is a natural fat. Van Houten's machine – a hydraulic press – reduced the cocoa butter content of cocoa liquor by nearly half. On one side this created a "cake" that could be pulverized into cocoa powder. On the other side this allowed the ...
Cocoa is essentially imported from West Africa. The other common ingredient, milk, is widely available in the country, which has a long dairy farming tradition. Milk ingredients are complex and critical in delivering the properties and taste to milk chocolate. Milk-origin and associated farming have become an important marketing topic. [37]
Theobroma cacao, a tropical evergreen tree Cocoa bean, the seed from the tree used to make chocolate; Cacao paste, ground cacao beans. The mass is melted and separated into: Cocoa butter, a pale, yellow, edible fat; and; Cocoa solids, the dark, bitter mass that contains most of cacao's notable phytochemicals, including caffeine and theobromine.
The raw materials used in chocolate production do not originate in Belgium; most cocoa is produced in Africa, Central America, and South America. Nonetheless, the country has an association with the product that dates to the early 17th century.
Reciprocally, cocoa was introduced in Europe in the 1520s. [19] The Natural History Museum lists Anglo-Irish botanist Hans Sloane as the inventor of drinking chocolate with milk. Sloane found the local Jamaican beverage consisting of cacao and water served to him in Jamaica unpalatable, but by adding milk to it, found it much improved.