Chocolate If gold was used in the olden days between nations to get one side to listen to the other side, then chocolate can be used as leverage, too. Foremost, chocolate is a South American plant .You’d be surprised about how dependant we are on the so-called “new world” for cuisine. Anyway – the loved brown stuff comes from a plant called the theobroma cacao. The word theobroma is Greek for “drink of the gods” since chocolate in its original form was a drink, originally made to be consumed during religious ceremonies by ancient Mesoamericans like the Maya and Aztec. Priests offered cocoa to the gods and passed around chocolate drinks during ceremonies. Now, they don’t taste the way you think they do – Mesoamerican chocolate is pure cocoa – bitter, really bitter stuff. In fact, the word chocolate comes from the Niahuatl word “xocolatl” which means “bitter water”. So if you’re thinking that the Mayan doomsday people sat around laughing and drinking sweet hot chocolate, well… it’s more likely they’d be sitting around drinking a bitter, foamy cocoa flavored beer, disgusting right. How chocolate came to be the popular sweet item we taste today was when it was mixed with several ingredients early European chocolate makers found it was pretty sweet and thought it could be introduced in a sweet form. One other reason cocoa beans were easy to grow and transport. The day it got here to America was in 1765 what a glorious day that was to America and the people such as us. Now for the types of chocolates and how they are made is quite interesting because without several flavors chocolate would be nothing aren’t I right? First comes the unsweetened chocolate contains primarily cocoa solids and cocoa butter in varying proportions and this make the chocolate have a much stronger taste. Much of the chocolate consumed today is in the form of sweet chocolate combining chocolate with sugar. Milk chocolate is sweet chocolate that contains milk powder or condensed milk. White chocolate is formed from a mixture of sugar, cocoa butter and milk solids. Although its texture is like milk and dark chocolate, it does not have any cocoa solids. Because of this, many countries do not consider white chocolate as chocolate at all. The chocolate eaten by more sophisticated or fancy people is, unsweetened chocolate is pure chocolate liquor, usually known as bitter or baking chocolate. It is absolute chocolate: the pure, ground, roasted chocolate