Making chocolate is a little more complicated than the following, but this should answer the question: How is chocolate made?
1. Grow cacao trees, which produce cacao bean pods. (A majority of cacao trees that grow naturally are found in the rain forests in Northwestern South America (Brazil). But most of the chocolate produced is from trees that are cultivated and grown in Africa (Ivory Coast and Ghana), followed by Indonesia, Brazil, Cameroon, Ecuador, Madagascar…)
2. Take out the cacao bean pods, pry them open, and scrape out the pulp inside.
3. Lay out the cacao pulp in the sun to dry, and then after a few days remove the seeds from the pulp. Ship the seeds to chocolate processing mills.
4. Sort the cacao seeds by what type they are, and what weight they are. (The end chocolatier who buys the cocoa has very rigid specifications about what cacao seeds that they want, and how much (in weight) of each type they want. The chocolatiers or chocolate factory is the end customer of the chocolate processing mill, so it’s important that they give them exactly what they want or the end product won’t taste the same every time… Just a little important!)
5. Roast the cacao seeds, get rid of the husks of the seeds, and break the remaining kernel into “chocolate nibs”.
6. Grind down the chocolate nibs. When the nibs are ground down, the resulting mass (which is now liquid) is pure chocolate.
7. The liquid mass is called chocolate liquor (no alcohol though). The chocolate liquor can be divided into cocoa solids and cocoa butter.
8. The cocoa solids are used for making baking chocolates, and for making chocolate candy (usually more bitter chocolate).
9. The cocoa butter is used for making sweeter chocolate candy, and for cosmetics and pharmaceutical products.
10. The varying combinations of cocoa butter and cocoa solids, plus other ingredients such as sugar and vanilla, give each brand of chocolate their own trademark taste.
11. White chocolate, for instance, contains no cocoa solids, only cocoa butter, sugar, and vanilla.
12. Dark chocolate can have a very high content of cocoa solids. The higher the content of cocoa solids, the more bitter the chocolate.
13. Milk chocolate generally has some cocoa solids, some cocoa butter, sugar, vanilla, and milk.
And this concludes the lesson on how chocolate is made!