Paper 1a - 5
My whole life has been chocolate, but no, my name is not Willy, but Pedro.
My father grew cacao, the tree from which chocolate comes. He was a proud man and chose to grow the criollo variety of bean, which is smaller and demands more attention than the other commoner types. As result of this less than 15 per cent of the beans produced are criollo.
Every detail was important to my father. He constantly ran the soil through his fingers to make sure it was in the right condition, and he carefully grew banana plants all around to shade the cacao. He worried when the temperature was not just what he cacao liked.
As the months passed and the pods grew larger, he watched their colour carefully and when the moment was right set the harvesters to work. Then the beans were fermented for a couple of days before being laid out on banana leaves. They gradually took on their characteristic dark and wrinkled look as they dried in the sun. When father was satisfied with his crop, it was all packed up and went off into the outside world to become fine chocolate. All this father went through twice a year, treating his criollo trees almost as members of the family.
I made my career in chocolate manufacture rather than in growing the beans. My pleasure lies in tasting the fine chocolate I make. I enjoy all parts of the process. The beans arrive and I rush to see how good they are. We sort them and after they have been cleaned, they are roasted. You cannot believe how good the smell is as this takes place! To get the roasting just right is essential to creating great chocolate. I certainly pay as much attention to detail as my father did. The roasted beans are shelled, and then crushed and heated to release the chocolate liquor. We are getting close to having chocolate at this stage, but it still has to be conched, or stirred in special ways for many days, before it can be tempered, a complicated process of lowering and raising the heat until we have a smooth, elegant, shiny chocolate ready to be enjoyed as it is or filled with creams and nuts. Truly great chocolate is more than a food- it is a little bit of heaven.
Complete the table about the process of creating chocolate using the numbers 1 t0 8