Cocoa Beans

Cocoa is a plant, that is flowers, to be exact thousand small florets, at it appear directly on a trunk and mature branches. Further on a place of colors there are green pods which ripen within 4 months: the chocolate tree fructifies two times a year. Mature pods under the form remind the extended melon, can be painted in brown, claret, yellow colors. Their length reaches to 30 sm, width – to 15 sm, weight – semikg. In pods there is the most valuable – 30–40 beans. Collectors cut down fruits sharp machetes, and further they arrive on processing: pods are dissected and located on the sun therefore the pulp starts to wander – thus seeds are exposed to a fermentation and lose a bitterness part.

Assume that the cocoa native land — the South America, mountain areas at sources of Amazon. The cocoa name in Russian and other European languages leaves the roots in the Aztec name of a plant and its seeds. Indians of Amazon have got acquainted With fruits of cocoa more 4 thousand years ago, but to use in food its rather specific fruits have learned far not at once. Aztecs the first began to prepare from cocoa-beans a drink— bitter water. This surprising drink with exciting properties so was appreciated that at first the emperor of Aztecs had the right to use it only.

From the name of this drink there was also a modern word "chocolate".

About surprising properties of this plant, undoubtedly, it was known to Charles Linneju, the founder of system of flora. He named it Theobroma cacao, having connected the Aztec name of a plant with Ancient Greek theobroma — food of gods.

When to America there have arrived Spaniards, cocoa was already widely used by Indians. Indians cooked the chocolate from ground grains of cocoa, a corn flour and green pepper. When the conqueror of Mexico Ernan Cortes in 1520 for the first time has brought cocoa seeds to Europe, to Spaniards strange enough American Indian product wasn't to the taste. They have thought up the recipe and began to prepare a drink from ground grains of cocoa with sugar. Despite high nutritious properties (cocoa grains contain to 55 % of fats), and this drink hasn't received a wide circulation in Europe. It also was not especially tasty, too fat both tart enough and butterfish.

Last years about advantage of chocolate it became known to everything but very few people from fans of this delicacy reflects that the basic component of chocolate, cocoa, is very tasty and useful in a natural kind — in grains. The expert on cheese eating Dzhessika Fenton considers that only not fried integral grains of cocoa possess those useful properties that attribute to chocolate, transfers Kedem.