After traveling 5,000 miles and spending nearly $1,500 to make a few candy bars from scratch, How to Make Everything's Andy George knows every single step it takes to transform cacao beans in to the chocolate you might find in your local sweets shop. This video shows exactly what it takes to create the beloved confectionery.
The whole chocolate-making process begins with the fruit of the cacao tree, which can be found only within 10 degrees of the equator. Once beans from the fruit are harvested, it takes quite a while to transform them into something most chocolate consumers would recognize. They're fermented for five to seven days, dried for another four days, roasted, separated from their shells, and then combined with sugar and ground for at least eight hours. This results in a liquid chocolate that's much more familiar. Once it's been tempered, the chocolate is ready to be molded into bars. After that, all that's left to do is eat it.
Watch the above video and learn how it all comes together.
• Do You Know Where Chocolate Comes From? [YouTube]
