VOA常速英语:科普文：巧克力的制作流程

I’m Bill Mclaughlin, and I’m the creator of plants here the United States’ Botanic Garden. What we are looking at today is our chocolate tree or cacao tree. The scientific name for this is Theobroma Cacao, and Theobroma is Greek, Theo- is for God and Broma- for fruit, so it’s literally Fruit of the Gods, and definitely because of its association with the sweet chocolate we all love, that is a pretty easy association. In nature, the flowers are pollinated by tiny fly like creatures called midges. Once plant pollinated, they produce little pod, and the pod grows in a period of 6 to 9 months, and changes from green to yellow. And we happen to have a pod that was just harvested off our tree, and I’ve cut it open here so we can see what’s inside. What we have is while pulp, and that is surrounding the seeds which we call chocolate beans. These are what are processed and eventually become chocolate, but it is quite a process.

Once these seed are fermented, and often time done by just simply piling them up in a basket or a vessel, and covering them up with something like banana leaves, they’re left to ferment for about ten days to two weeks. That fermentation process drives the flavor into the bean. Once they are fermented, they’re dried and ready for processing.
So these beans are then ground down, made into smaller pieces called nibs, and these are processed by pressing. With all the pressure, it goes into pressing them down, usually concerning a roughened stone or something. You got a separation. The product is just called chocolate liquor, but actually it’s fairly solid that’s separated out into both cocoa butter and the actually powder cocoa. These are recombined with milk, sugar and other ingredients to make chocolate. It was the Europeans that came as the colonial powers into Middle America that thought to add sugar and milk, so that’s become the chocolate we know and love today.