The date chosen to celebrate World Chocolate Day, one of the most loved foods of all time, is set for July 7thday in which way back in 1847the English chocolatier Joseph Fry gave shape to chocolate by inventing the tabletsdelicious bars to break and bite. A great reason for us to celebrate it by talking about this good food rich in properties, telling its story and suggesting, of course, 40 delicious and unmissable chocolate recipes.

Origins and history of chocolate

When we talk about chocolate we have to start from the ancient history of cocoawhich dates back to the peoples of the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Maya (2nd millennium BC–15th century AD) and of the Aztecs (14th-14th century AD). They used cocoa beans, called “cacahuat”, to make a drink, the “xocolatl”, to which chili pepper, anise, cinnamon, vanilla and other spices were added to mask the bitter taste, and which was used as a offering to the gods to thank them for births and other happy events, or ground into powder and sprinkled on the bodies of young people in puberty rituals.

The Aztecs also used them as currency and a commodity of exchange: they had immediately understood the enormous value of this seed. In fact, it was thus that Christopher Columbus discovered this seed the July 30, 1502: it was offered to him by the Aztecs in exchange for other products. However, we have to wait until the first half of the sixteenth century for the massive importation into the Old Continent, when Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of Mexico, overthrew the Aztec Empire, subjugating the indigenous populations to the kingdom of Spain.

In the seventeenth century, cocoa also began to be produced in Italyespecially in Florence and Venice, then in the 19th century the invention of milk chocolate arrived from Switzerland, and in the 1980s we moved to France with the first collection of dark chocolate.

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From cocoa beans to chocolate: the manufacturing processes

The cocoa beans, once harvested, are left fermentdepending on the country in baskets, wooden boxes or under banana leaves away from the light: this is where the precursors of the aromas develop. The cocoa beans are then left dry in the sun, and this phase is followed by a meticulous quality control. The cocoa beans are then passed through the cleaning to then be ground in a rough way with a machine called a “cocoa breaker”, which separates the peel from the cocoa bean grains, through sievesThe collected cocoa beans are then toastedan obligatory step to allow the cocoa aromas to be released.