From Bean to Bar: The Six Steps That Make Chocolate
Fermentation, drying, roasting, winnowing, conching, tempering. Most of chocolate's flavour is created after the pod is picked…
The Journal
Stories from the cocoa belt
Where chocolate came from, how it is made, and why the bar in your hand is a surprisingly recent invention.
Chocolate Comes to Britain: Chocolate Houses, Quakers and the First Bar
Britain met chocolate as a fashionable drink in 1657, then spent two centuries turning it into something you could put in your…
When Chocolate Was Money: Cacao in the Aztec Economy
For centuries, a cacao bean was small change across Mesoamerica. You could buy a turkey with a hundred of them — and people…
The Origins of Chocolate: From Bitter Drink to Sweet Bar
Chocolate spent roughly 90% of its history as a drink, and most of that unsweetened. Here is how a bitter Mesoamerican beverage…