For most of my adult life, the only cocoa powder I had ever known was the kind in the baking isle at the grocery store. Hershey’s or Nestle brand were the usual suspects and that’s all I had ever purchased. (Besides, I didn’t even know what cocoa beans looked like or where they came from.) That all changed when Jeff and I took a trip to the beautiful Big Island of Hawaii in 2008 and discovered this wonderful delicacy in all its natural, unadulterated form. Little did I know back then that turning cocoa nibs into powder is an extensive process.
It’s latin name is Theobroma cacao. Cacao is pronounced Ka-Kow. Carl Linneaus, the leading 18th century Swedish botanist who created the classification system of naming species using Latin, named the cacao bean “Theobroma,” which translates as “Food of the Gods” because he was exceptionally fond of chocolate. Many claim that the word cacao came from the Mayan word for the plant cacau. It’s believed that thousands of years ago the Aztecs brought it from Venezuela to the Mayans in the Yucatán Peninsula (southern Mexico) via trade.
Cacao generally refers to the tree, its pods and the beans inside the pods. Here’s a picture of the cacao tree and Jeff holding a pod that we found at the private residence where we stayed near Hilo, HI.
Cocoa refers to the products manufactured from the cacao bean: cocoa powder and cocoa butter. Both are extracted from the bean. Many people claim that the name cocoa is the Anglicized version of the word cacao, which may be true, so that is why I may use them interchangeably. The oval-shaped beans range from about 1 inch to around 1 1/4 inch long and vary in color from almost white to purple. 
The first step after removing the beans from the pods and removing the whiteish colored pulp, is the drying process where they lay the beans out in the sun under black cloth (to heat it up and allow the fermentation of the bean). If not properly dried, they will rot in a few days or if they do not rot, the shell will be too difficult to remove.
After dried, the shell is removed, usually mechanically through a process called kibbling and winnowing, to expose the part called a nib. The next step is grinding of the nib which produces the cacao/cocoa paste (or commonly referred to as cacao mass or liquor). This paste contains around 50 – 56% fat called cocoa butter.
In 1828, a Dutchman named Casparus van Houten Sr. patented the first method for pressing the fat from roasted cocoa beans, which consisted of a simple hydraulic press. This step occurs when the roasted beans are still hot so that the cocoa butter will more easily come out of the paste.
The last operation in this extensive process is to grind the solid mass (that already had the butter removed) to make the final cocoa/cacao powder, which contains approximately 20% fat.
Another type of cocoa powder you might find is alkalized or dutched powders. These are different than the natural ones because the powder is exposed to potassium carbonate (alkaline salts) to neutralize the acidity and bitterness. Dutched chocolate is a darker brown color and milder in flavor. Natural and Dutched are interchangeable except in some situations. Most supermarket brands are natural cocoa unless the labels says Dutch or Dutched.
Our household uses natural cacao/cocoa powder from Wilderness Family Naturals or Nutiva, both companies provide quality products in food-safe packaging, unlike many of the EBAY/Amazon vendors selling bulk cacao/cocoa powder. We use it in many recipes and especially in our “bulletproof” coffee each morning.
Side Note: I want to thank my friend Georgene Harkness for inspiring this post. She asked a simple question about this topic on a previous recipe post and I decided it needed further research and explanation. What I found was fascinating, to say the least, and a bit intense, especially the debate on raw cacao, which will spawn a separate post at a later date. So a proper THANK YOU goes out to Georgene for inspiring not only one but two posts with her comment!
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