“Nine out of ten people love chocolate, the tenth lies about it”. There is no truest statement: Chocolate is maybe one of the food which is most loved by children and grown-ups.
As glutton as we are, we could not miss out on tasting this treat inside an authentic artisanal chocolate shop in San Donà, a town near Venice where all secrets of high level bakery are safely guarded, while producing pastries holding the old times’ flavours.
We learnt about different tips on the most famous sweet food of the world. We found out that the cacao tree is called Theobroma, which, not by chance, means “food of the gods”. This small tree -between six and eight metres high- produces a green-purple fruit that then assumes a yellow-orange colour when ripe.
How do we obtain from cacao seeds the chocolate we actually eat? Excellent question. To start with, the seeds picked from the tree undergo a fermentation process in order to extract the aromatic substances that are so delicious for the palate. After being cleaned up, the seeds are roasted and then crumbled, so that we are able to get rid of the peel.
Once this brief introduction had ended, we moved on to the real and proper manufacturing procedure: we saw how to obtain the delicious food of the gods from the cacao beans. We had been drooling for long by that time!
The powder resulted by the cacao seeds is put into a machine which transforms it into some liquid dough and then it comes to term with the master chocolate maker’s balanced dosage of the ingredients. The dough oozes cocoa butter forming the part that, once pulverized, becomes the proper cocoa powder; butter is then added to the refined powder to give it some smoothness.
Dulcis in fundo, we ended up the visit by stuffing ourselves with chocolate. We could not have concluded in a sweeter way!
As you might have understood by now, the chocolate making is a process which involves great precision and technical skills, demanding a rich background experience within the art of baking.
Did you know about all these tips? Have you ever had any other similar experience?
