The raw cacao myth: why most cacao isn’t

The process behind quality cacao
The cacao fruit grows on a tree. Inside the pod of this fruit are its seeds, surrounded by a white,
very tasty pulp. These seeds are the cacao beans. In good quality cacao, these beans are taken out
of their pod and are fermented to give them their nice and deep flavor. This fermentation
happens naturally; the fruity pulp is full of sugar and combined with the tropical climate creates the perfect environment for the bacteria.

During this fermentation process, the temperatures almost always gets above 48°C. This means from this point cacao is technically not raw anymore. 

After fermentation the beans are sundried. This process also creates a lot of heat. Once you’ve fermented the beans, you can’t sprout them. 

There might be a few farmers who intentionally stir their beans a lot while fermenting and keep pulling them in and out of the sun while drying to keep the temperatures down, but this is not common practice. Definitely not in the amounts of “raw” chocolate we find on the market.

So, raw chocolate doesn’t exist?
Well, it’s very uncommon. Unless you eat the fresh beans straight out of the cacao pod that you júst picked from a tree. Cacao (as in the block you make your drinks from, or the bar you take a bite from, or even the powder you bake with) is a fermented product that was heated and has been processed to change its shape and flavor. 

My guess is that what most brands mean is that their cacao is ‘not ROASTED’. The reason for this can be flavor or health believes. Or, it could be the cacao is roasted on ‘low temperatures’. Yet, then using ‘raw cacao’ is a misleading term. 

Do we roast our cacao?
Heavens YES. Besides flavor development (hello, depths of fruits and chocolate flavors) that truly excite me as a craft chocolate maker, it also has a different effect on our bodies. Foods change chemically when they are fermented and heated. Still relatively little research has been done on the effect of heat on cacao and how our bodies process the nutrients but the results so far seem to be similar as coffee: green coffee and unroasted cacao have more nutrients inside them, but our bodies are not capable of digesting them. After a heating
process, our bodies are able to digest and in the end, actually get in  more nutrients than with unroasted cacao.

Personal experience
Traditionally, in Mayan and Aztec culture, cacao was/is roasted over the fire.

But hey, we all have different bodies and in the end, you gotta find out what works for yourself!

So I hope that after reading this, you have a better understanding of the word raw when we talk about cacao and we can all look a bit better beyond marketing techniques.

Got any questions? Don’t hesitate to ask!

Love,
Malou