From the Cacao Grains to Chocolate

In the jungle, the cacao trees can reach a height of around twelve to fifteen meters but in cultivation conditions, normally they are kept at 4.5 to 7.5 meters in height so as to facilitate harvesting. The leaves are longish, shiny and have a dark green color to them, and are about thirty centimeters in length. The flowers are small and have a white and slightly pinkish color to them. They are pretty unusual, in the sense that they grow directly from the trunk and the mayor branches.

Around one out of every four or five flowers matures and turns into the fructiferous pods. The trees produce as many flowers as fruit throughout the whole year, and the pods take approximately five months to mature, changing from a green color to a vivid purplish red color and finally to a reddish brown color when they are ready to get picked. Each pod that looks like a long reddish melon contains around twenty to fifty grains and roughly each tree will produce around 2,25 kilograms of grains a year.

There are three principal varieties of cacao that are commercially cultivated, which are the Creole, the Forastero, and the Calabacilla. The Forastero counts for eighty percent of the worldwide production and in mainly cultivated in Occidental Africa and Brazil, while the Creole, which has thinner skin and has a superior taste, proceeds from the more traditional cacao producing countries such as South and Central American and the West Indies, as well as Sri Lanka. Calabacilla, which is named this way because of the way it looks, produced the most inferior quality grains, and these are generally used for pharmaceutical preparations.