How Do You Make Chocolate from Scratch?

Series Summary

Chocolate is a food product made from the seed of the tropical cocoa tree. The cocoa tree is native to lowland South America, and all Mesoamerican cultures cultivated it, including the Aztecs and Maya. The seed itself has a very bitter taste and the seeds must be fermented, roasted, or ground to bring out the flavor. After such processes the resulting substance is called chocolate or cocoa. Most chocolate consumed today is made with fats, cocoa butter, and sugar. Chocolate is extremely popular on Easter, Christmas, and Valentines Day.

In this free video series, our expert will Denise Bennet will show you how to make chocolate from scratch, including how to ground chocolate beans, vegan sweeteners, adding coconut butter, and how to form the chocolate balls. She will also teach you how to make a dusting for the chocolate balls and make chocolate chips.

Video Transcript

"Hello! My name is Denise Bennet and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village. Now we're going to have some fun. My favorite part of the whole meal, dessert. We are going to be using cacao nibs. It's in essence chocolate, but it doesn't have anything mixed with it. These heavenly nibs right here actually come from this bean. I believe these are from Ecuador. This is a cacao bean. If you take this little bean right here and you press and kind of roll it in your fingers there, look what that does right here. Those are cacao nibs. Little pieces of what we're going to eventually call chocolate. This is the cacao nib. These are absolutely heaven to work with. If you start getting to raw foods and you start working with chocolate, I guarantee you will never again go to one of those candy bars. We're not going to say any of those names, but wow. Once you put all those things like wax and fillers, preservatives, dyes, and processed sugar you don't even have chocolate anymore. This is the real deal right here. We're going to have some fun."