In Case You Were Curious… About Chocolate!
January 10, 2018
The Bottom Line: Sweet facts about chocolate!
The Full Story:
- Chocolate comes from a fruit tree; it’s made from a seed.
- It takes 400 cocoa beans to make one pound of chocolate.
- Each cacao tree produces approximately 2,500 beans.
- Theobroma Cacao is the tree that produces cocoa beans, and it means “food of the gods.” Carolus Linnaeus, the father of plant taxonomy, named it.
- There are an estimated 1.5 million cocoa farms in West Africa.
- Benjamin Franklin sold chocolate in his print shop in Philadelphia.
- In November, Germans celebrate St. Martin–a knight who shared his cloak with a beggar–with a lantern-lit parade, sweets and steaming hot chocolate.
- It takes two to four days to make a single-serving chocolate bar.
- Chocolate contains two doses of cocoa butter—the natural amount from the bean, plus an extra dollop to bump up creaminess.
- Champagne and sparkling wines are too acidic to pair well with milk or dark chocolate. Try pairing a sweet bubbly with white chocolate and red wine with dark. In general you want to match the sweetness level of the wine with the sweetness level of the chocolate.
- German chocolate cake was named for Sam German, who developed a sweet bar for Baker’s Chocolate–and was not from Germany.
- The French celebrate April Fool’s Day with chocolate-shaped fish, or “Poisson d’Avr