There is an amazing restaurant here in Arequipa owned by a Peruvian that lived in Australia for tenish year. They are known for their wood oven pizzas and chocolate. Honestly, the restaurant makes us feel like we are back in Colorado. But today I will focus on THE CHOCOLATE. I went to a chocolate making class with some students from the school and it was super interesting!! Once you try real chocolate you can’t go back to the fake kind. I mean I definitely can, but apparently, I value the sugar more than the actual cacao bean. The rule of thumb is that so long as a chocolate has 3% of cacao it can be called “chocolate”. Real chocolate only contains 3 ingredients. Cacao mass, Cacao butter, and evaporated milk. How dark/bitter the chocolate depends on the percentage of cacao mass. The cacao butter is what actually gives the chocolate the smell of chocolate. So the next time you eat chocolate, smell it first if it doesn’t smell like chocolate it probably doesn’t have any cacao butter in it. The cacao butter is actually the most expensive part. Hence why white chocolate should be more expensive than regular chocolate. White chocolate is only made with cacao butter and evaporated milk (sometimes a little bit of sugar). For a chocolate to be considered dark it needs to have a cacao content above 70% meaning that there is only 30% left for cacao butter and a little bit of evaporated milk.
![Picture](/uploads/5/2/1/4/52148477/published/b2f19011-bca6-4bc8-93de-b970b7b57a44.jpg?1526341617)
So here is how it works…drumroll please! The first step, you take the cacao bean (when it is dried) and select the ones that don’t have any cracks in the shell. You will then “sanitize” the bean. Basically, a light heat just to clean them off. Once the bean has been roasted you then use your thumb to push down on the shell and crack the outer layer. Take the bean out and this is what you will grind into a fine paste. They have machines now that process the paste and where you will add in the amount of cacao butter and evaporated milk you want. It was pretty awesome.
![Picture](/uploads/5/2/1/4/52148477/published/img-9071.jpg?1526341671)
We then had a blind taste test to see if we could guess what chocolate was real and which was fake. And also try to guess the percentage of cacao, cacao butter, and evaporated milk. All in all, it was a great experience. The chocolate I made tasted DELICIOUS! I will officially add chocolate connoisseur to my resume.
Moral of the story…look at the ingredients of your chocolate and see how much cacao mass is actually included in the “chocolate” you are eating! Cacao is actually healthy for you in moderation BUT a lot of the dark chocolate we think is healthy for us really isn’t because it is just sugar!
Moral of the story…look at the ingredients of your chocolate and see how much cacao mass is actually included in the “chocolate” you are eating! Cacao is actually healthy for you in moderation BUT a lot of the dark chocolate we think is healthy for us really isn’t because it is just sugar!