Bean to Bar Chocolate Making

Unroasted & Uncommonly Delicious

We make unroasted dark chocolate from scratch, with traceable, high quality, and transparently traded single origin cacao, crafted into something uncommonly delicious.

Cacao beans are the seeds of the cacao fruit, harvested and prepared by producers at origin. Every bean has a flavor profile shaped by the soil and climate it grows in, as well as the care each producer takes in cultivating and processing it.

This fruity flavor is often roasted away in favor of that classic chocolatey note. We love this fruit-forward flavor, and we make our chocolate without roasting so you can enjoy it too.

Chocolate starts with a fruit.

Cacao beans are fruit seeds. Theobroma cacao is a fruit tree that bears heavy, football-shaped pods, full of lemony, sweet pulp and about forty to sixty seeds. These seeds are harvested by hand and referred to as “wet cacao” since they’re coated in the pulp.

This pulp is about ninety percent water and ten percent sugar, making it the perfect food for microbes, which leads to the first step in the post-harvest process: fermentation!
 

Fermentation brings out the flavor

The wet cacao is fermented in wooden boxes covered with banana leaves for four to seven days depending on the origin and the producer.

While it’s the pulp that is fermented, and not the cacao seeds themselves, the seeds are subjected to the effects of fermentation like high temperatures and the creation of ethanol and acetic acid, deactivating the germ and developing flavor and aroma precursors. What this means is that it tastes a whole lot better than before. 

When you eat chocolate, you’re almost always eating cacao beans that have been through the fermentation process. This is why we don’t refer to our chocolate as raw: reactions during the fermentation process generate heat, bringing the temperature of the pile up to around 120°F.

Without this process, cacao won’t properly develop the flavors and aromas that are so vital to the chocolate experience. At Raaka, our focus is on the flavors of the fermentation profile.