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This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public Radio. I'm Jane Lindholm. I host the show. And you are the listeners who determine what we talk about. You send us questions about the things you'd like to learn. And Melody Beaudet and I start poking around for answers. We're putting this episode out just before a holiday called Valentine's Day, celebrated in many parts of the world these days. Here's a question we got about that from Graham. I'm from...
Well, I'm North Carolina, and I'm five years old, and I would like to know why do we have Valentine's Day one day of the year instead of just every day of the year? Well, let's start first with where this holiday came from to begin with. Both early Roman and early Christian cultures celebrated a mid-February holiday about love, and those traditions merged into what we think of now as Valentine's Day.
You may have heard stories about a Saint Valentine who helped marry people, but historians haven't been able to figure out if that was a real person or if that's just a legend. Paper Valentines have been around since at least the Middle Ages, which were the 5th to the 15th century. But the holiday really took off in the 1800s. Soon, printed cards and the exchange of gifts became popular.
There are a lot of different traditions that go along with Valentine's Day. And while much of it centers around love, what I like is that more and more it seems like a day, for young people especially, to celebrate kindness. My seven-year-old son's class, for example, is filling out note cards where they write something they appreciate about every single person in their class. And I sometimes drop off handmade note cards on Valentine's Day to the people I work with to let them know I think they're special.
Graham, you asked, though, why we only celebrate it on one day instead of every day. I think you could think of every day as an opportunity to tell the people you care about that they're special. But for one thing, feeling an obligation to give gifts or to write special notes every day might be a little exhausting. And it might not feel as special to the recipient as doing something kind of big only once in a while.
But the other thing that we should mention is that Valentine's Day is big business for a lot of companies that advertise to try to get you to buy chocolates or flowers or cards or other kinds of gifts. You might hear people talk about something called the commercialization of various holidays like Valentine's Day. And that's kind of what they're talking about, that stores and buying things have taken over the spirit of what the holiday is all about.
And some people say Valentine's Day isn't really a holiday at all, just a day promoted by companies to get people to buy things. Before we move on to the main part of today's episode, I'll say one other thing about Valentine's Day. Sometimes, some people feel kind of blue on Valentine's Day. If they don't get a valentine from someone they're hoping to get one from, or if they're just not feeling all the love that this holiday is hyped up to be about.
So it's always nice to be sensitive to the feelings of the people around you. And make sure you're being kind to all the people in your class or family or friend group, whether you celebrate Valentine's Day or not. I mentioned that one of the things that's really popular with this holiday is chocolate. Now, for some people, any day is a good day for chocolate. And you've been sending us some questions about this sweet and delicious treat. It's good.
I'm four years old. How does chocolate get made? My name is Naya. I'm four years old and I live in Lebanon and I would like to know how is chocolate made? My name is Samara. I am eight years old and from Johnson, Vermont. My question is how is chocolate made?
It is your lucky day, Naya, Kurt, and Samara, because today we're going to explore how chocolate is made. Later on, we'll be talking about another treat, but this time it's one that adults usually like more than kids, coffee. Coffee and chocolate actually have a lot in common. For one thing, they both come from beans, and they can both be pretty bitter if you don't add sugar and milk.
Let's start first with chocolate. We're going to listen back to a tour we did of a chocolate factory a few years ago, back before COVID-19 made it tricky for us to take our microphones and record in cool places.
Hi, my name is Ayla Ben-Khaim and I work at Taza Chocolate Factory. We are a bean-to-bar chocolate maker in Somerville, Massachusetts. When she says bean-to-bar, Ayla means a chocolate maker that takes raw cocoa beans and turns them into chocolate. Some places get chocolate that's already made and they just add stuff to it. So chocolate actually comes from cocoa beans, which are no bean at all. They are seeds of the cocoa tree.
Now, farmers take cocoa beans or seeds and they plant them in the ground. And over about five years, the farmers water and nurture these cocoa beans so that they grow into these large cocoa trees.
And this is actually called the Theobroma cacao tree. It's the scientific name for this tree. And Theobroma is a Greek word that means food of the gods, which I think is totally appropriate. But you can't grow chocolate just anywhere.
Cocoa or cacao grows between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, 20 degrees north and 20 degrees south of the equator. And these lines take you all around the globe. And this is exactly where cacao trees grow. Ivory Coast, top producer. Ghana and Indonesia are also top producers.
In about five years, the cocoa tree is also going to produce fruit. And this fruit is the cocoa pod. Cocoa pods are really funny to look at. They look a little bit like a gourd growing off of the tree or like a lumpy, tiny American football.
And the coco pods grow in a really interesting way. They grow off of the branches of the tree, like apples for example, but they also grow right off of the trunk of the tree. So they can grow anywhere from the ground almost to the very top reaching branches of the tree. The coco pod is going to be chopped down using a big machete by farmers or it can be twisted right off of the tree.
Immediately after that, farmers are going to use machetes, big knives, to chop into the cacao pod or cocoa pod. And the first thing that we see is this white pulp that surrounds the cocoa beans. And this pulp is called in some Spanish-speaking countries, baba beans.
Baba is a Spanish word that means saliva, spit, drool. It is kind of gross to think about. But this baba, it's called that because the pulp is really slimy. And you can actually eat the slimy fruit straight from the cacao pod. It tastes a little bit tart sometimes. It can taste a little sweeter depending on how ripe the fruit is. So these are dried cacao pods.
So you can't hear, if these were fresh, these cocoa beans or seeds would be held in place by the pulp, by the baba. But as chocolate makers, we want to save this baba, this pulp, for the next step of the process, which is fermentation. Fermentation is a neat process that's used to make a lot of foods. Sourdough bread, some pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, even yogurt.
Fermentation is so important in chocolate making and this is one of the most surprising things about chocolate making, I think. In the fermentation of cocoa beans, we're going to put all these big batches of these wet with pulp cocoa beans into a wooden box. And in this wooden box,
We stir this whole mix around and there's yeast in the atmosphere. It's everywhere, but we can't see it because it's microscopic. So it's there and there and there. We just can't see it. And this yeast actually likes to eat the sugar. And we have a lot of sugar in these big wooden boxes because of the baba, that pulp.
And the yeast come, they eat this sugar, and they fart out CO2, carbon dioxide, which is exactly what you and I breathe out.
Now in this fermentation, it's the yeast is at play, the sugars are at play, there's also bacteria. And what all of this is doing is it's cooking the cocoa beans, making a really nicely flavored cocoa bean and also a good looking cocoa bean. So something that looks a little bit more like the brown chocolate.
Now, after fermenting the cocoa beans for about a week, we want to dry the cocoa beans. The seeds will be spread out into one thin sheet of seeds and they're left out on these wooden planks to dry for about a week. I think of it kind of like a vacation under the sun. So here we've got a big pile of cocoa beans. They look, let's say, like an almond.
maybe a little smaller, and they are dark deep brown. After we are done fermenting and drying the cocoa seeds on the farm, we're ready to then ship the cocoa beans to wherever they're actually going to be made into chocolate. And the first thing that we want to do with these cocoa beans is almost like a continuation of that drying that we left off with on the farms. We're going to roast the cocoa beans.
This is our roasting and winnowing room here. We have a big roaster that's about... It can hold 400 pounds of cocoa beans in this roaster and it's about twice my height, about 10 feet tall. These are the big bags of cocoa beans. They come in big sacks of plastic or burlap sacks and they are filled with about 150 pounds of cocoa beans per sack.
We roast the cocoa beans at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for about an hour. And in that time, we get this really nice toasted flavor to the cocoa beans. It starts to smell a little chocolatey in the air. And we also start to separate the thin outer shell that surrounds the inner part of the cocoa bean. So this is the soft sound of a cocoa bean shell.
Our next step is actually to separate the cocoa shell from the inner part of the cocoa bean called the nib. So we do this by winnowing the cocoa beans. Our winnowing machine is made up of a big bean crusher that crushes the cocoa beans.
and splits them up into these tiny fragments of shell and nibs inside. And then we introduce a gust of wind that blows these tiny fragments and disperses them throughout the winnowing machine based on their weight. The lightest part of the cocoa bean is the shell. The shell is going to be blown to the back of the machine
we use a tiny vacuum to suck the shells right out of the winnowing machine so that we're left with just the nibs, the gold to chocolate makers, and we're ready to grind them down into chocolate. Those are nibs. Nibs are a little bit nutty, they're pretty dry, they're a little bitter because it's just cocoa beans broken into pieces, no sweetener yet. Then we bring the cocoa nibs down
down to grind them. So what we do at Taza Chocolate is we use a traditional Mexican milling style using a molino or mill in Spanish to grind the cocoa beans down. Back in the day, makers of chocolate would use a metate
Amatate is made out of stone. This is a granite stone and it kind of looks like a large stone plate with a stone rod. And we pretty much put the cocoa beans on the stone plate and then we use the rod to grind it down.
And over time, those cocoa nibs or the cocoa beans, they'll be turned into a cocoa liquor. That's what we call it. And this cocoa liquor is smooth and chocolatey. If you can imagine a chocolate waterfall, it looks a little bit like that. It looks beautiful. It smells chocolatey and delicious.
and yet it is not very tasty because we're missing a really important ingredient in chocolate, and that is sugar or the sweetener. Downstairs in our factory, we use moinos. Those are the traditional Mexican mills. They use two stones, and we use the same type of stone, Oaxacan granite stones, and moinos.
one of the stones will be stuck in place while the second stone is going to be very, very close but not exactly touching and it's going to be spinning super quickly. It would make your head spin if you were to watch it. And in between the two stones in that very small space, we feed the nibs and that's how we grind those nibs down into the chocolate liqueur.
This is where we add the sugar. You can see sugar crystals along the bar here into the molten chocolate liqueur.
This is kind of cool. We use our chocolate plumbing system, so it's these vertical and horizontal metal pipes that are going to suck up the chocolate and carry chocolate from one place to the next. All of the pipes are insulated with a hot running water so that the chocolate within remains molten, and it also helps to move the chocolate from one point to the next.
Here at Taza Chocolate, we do a second and final phase of grinding. We use the molinos again to grind those that now sweeten chocolate down even more. In this stage, we'll sometimes add some of the other ingredients. You can make a chili spicy chocolate. You can make a coffee flavored chocolate. You can make a fruity chocolate. You can go crazy with your chocolate making choices. Now, at this point, some chocolate makers are going to conch the chocolate. It's a method of
raising the temperatures of your chocolate and this is going to melt everything down and melt the sugar granules down so you get this really smooth chocolate. At Tazza Chocolate we don't conch the chocolate. We go straight to what all chocolate makers do and that's called tempering the chocolate.
Tempering is so important. It's increasing and decreasing the temperature of the chocolate between 87 degrees and 89 degrees Fahrenheit. And it's only two degrees difference, but it makes some really, really big changes to your chocolate. Important things happen here. First of all, in tempering the chocolate, we are going to get a nice glossy finish to your chocolate.
Also, in tempering your chocolate, you get a really nice brittle chocolate bar so that when you go to break apart a chocolate bar to share or not share, it doesn't crumble in your hands and it doesn't become flexible. It just has this nice crisp break to it. After tempering, they pour the chocolate into molds and cool them down. They wrap them up and ship them off to folks like you. Then you unwrap the chocolate at home.
So there you have it. That's basically how chocolate goes from bean to bar. Did you think it was going to be that complicated? It sounds like quite a process. Here's a question we got from Tallulah. Why not healthy to eat?
like a lot. Why is it not healthy to eat a lot? So Tallulah asks why it's not healthy to eat a lot of chocolate when it tastes so good. There are a couple things that make chocolate hard to eat in big quantities. Um,
That is because chocolate has the fat in it. So that makes it not the best thing for our health in some cases. Chocolate is often made with sugar, which is not good in large quantities. And chocolate also gives us this big burst of energy. That's partly because of the sugar in chocolate.
Chocolate also has a little bit of caffeine and a lot more theobromine. Theobromine is a chemical that stimulates you. It gives you this nice big burst of energy, which sometimes we don't want too much of that, right? Especially if we're going to bed, for example. So a little bit of chocolate is totally good. And there are also many good things about chocolate.
Chocolate has flavonoids, which are good for your health. They have these antioxidant properties. Chocolate also has iron and copper in healthy amounts.
Chocolate, and this is my favorite thing about chocolate, we know that chocolate can help raise your serotonin levels and serotonin is a chemical in your body and your brain that makes you feel happy. So if you get this good boost of positive energy after eating chocolate, it may be because of the serotonin lifters in chocolate.
A little bit of chocolate is definitely good for you. Of course, some people may not find that chocolate is their thing, and that works too. But if you like chocolate, then a little bit
It's pretty good. My name is Emmond. I'm seven years old and I live in Collinsville. And my question is, why does chocolate make you thirsty? It's not just chocolate that can make you thirsty. Anything with a lot of sugar can make you reach for a glass of water. When those sugar molecules enter your bloodstream, they pull water from your body's cells. Your body then sends a message to your brain that it's time to drink more water.
This is your body's way of trying to keep its sugar levels normal. So it's important to drink a little extra water when you're eating sweets. My name is Elon and I am five years old. I am from Lyme, New Hampshire. And my question is, why can't dogs eat chocolate? Hi, my name is Eleanor. I live in Louisville, Texas. I am seven years old. And my question is, why is it bad for dogs to eat chocolate?
Hi, my name is Rowan and I am nine years old and I live in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And my question is, why is chocolate bad for dogs?
The theobromine that Ayla mentioned at the beginning of the episode, along with caffeine that's in chocolate, is okay for humans, but not okay for dogs. Their bodies can't process those chemicals the way humans can, so it actually poisons the dogs if they eat too much. That's why we have to be very careful to not let dogs eat chocolate. Thanks to Taza Chocolate and Ayla Ben-Chim for showing us around and teaching us how chocolate is made.
In just a minute, we're going to learn about something a lot of adults think is delicious, coffee. This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane Lindholm. We just learned about how chocolate is made, starting with the seed of the cacao plant. Let's learn about coffee now. You've been wondering what the deal is with coffee, including nine-year-old Emma, who wants to know why all adults drink coffee. And here's Nathaniel, who's four and lives in San Diego. Why do grown-ups drink coffee?
Hi, my name is Violet and I'm seven years old. I live on Kauai, Hawaii. And my question is, why is coffee bad for children? Hello, my name is, I'm Fielder. I live in California. My question is, why do daddies drink coffee?
Coffee seems gross to a lot of kids, and yet many adults drink it without even making a disgusted face when they take a sip. Why? To get some answers, we traveled to Deer Isle, Maine in 2016 to learn from someone who spends her days making coffee. My name is Megan, and we are on a little island off the coast of Maine at 44 North Coffee, and you are in our roasting shop where we roast beans and bag and then ship them all over the country.
Coffee actually comes from a fruit that looks a lot like a cherry. It has a skin and then it has a fruit or a mucilage component and then the very center, the pit, also the seed, is what is the coffee bean. So when coffee is picked from trees, usually by hand, usually at high altitudes around the world and around the equator, it is gathered and then it is washed and de-pulped so the skin and the fruit come off the bean and then dried out in the sun on these huge flat beds either on concrete or on a
or wood or tarps and there it's dried and it loses a lot of moisture, kind of shrinks like a raisin and then it's bagged up and it's shipped all over the world. We get coffee that is delivered at our door on a pallet and each pallet is about 130 to 150 pounds, pretty heavy. And then when you open up the bag, there are these little green beans. They vary in color from turquoise to pea soup.
These are green beans from Ethiopia, from the Yirgacheffe region. And then we weigh them out and we put them in our roaster and that's when the real magic happens. That's when the color changes and the whole roasting process creates the coffee that we drink.
And once a coffee has roasted, it expands in shape and also in flavor. It usually takes between 12 and 16 minutes to roast coffee, and the temperature varies from 150 degrees to 455 degrees. So it's a huge span, and then when you dump it out, we have roasted coffee.
When you roast coffee, it's interesting because it actually smells a lot like baking bread. There's very much like this kind of bready, toasty smell. So when people drive by, they often think that we're a bakery because all they can smell is toasted bread. Okay, here we're going to grind a cup of coffee. There's a lot of different ways you can drink coffee.
I think the very first time that I had coffee, I was in Honduras, I was 10 years old and it was Christmas. And everyone around me was drinking coffee and I never had a cup of coffee before. And they had this big pile of cake on the table and the only thing to drink was coffee. So I think I put a lot of cream and a lot of sugar in that coffee and I drank it and I thought it tasted horrible. It was pretty horrible. But it was a memorable cup of coffee, my first cup of coffee.
It's true, coffee tastes weird. I often think it smells a lot better than it tastes, even now, even though I love it. But it's more the effect of coffee. It gives you energy. The caffeine in coffee is the component that allows people to drink it and wake up and go do their day.
Sometimes I think people might drink coffee because they think it's what they're supposed to do. I think the culture of the coffee pot and that you wake up and have a cup of coffee and you go out to the diner and you have a cup of coffee might be what people do. But I also think that there is a ritual around it. I personally know this. This is what I do every morning, whether I mean to or not. I get up and I put on the hot water and I grind the beans.
and I make that pot of coffee and that's something I do every single morning and that's my routine and it's become probably one of the most enjoyable parts of my day.
Coffee plays a huge role in culture and how people come together and how they find a place to, over a hot cup of coffee, create community and conversation. The coffee house has definitely been a fixture in society and communities all over the world for a very long time and has a very strong role and influence in productivity and enlightened community activity. Well, in that case, let's have a cup of coffee. Let's do it. It tastes good. It tastes really good.
That was Megan Wood. She co-owns 44 North Coffee in Deer Isle, Maine, with her business partner, Melissa Raftery. Does that make you want to have a cup of coffee? Maybe start with a decaf. Kids have enough energy already. You don't need caffeine, which is a stimulant, meaning it amps up your energy. Even if it doesn't make you want a taste of coffee, maybe that helped you understand why adults like both the taste and the ritual of drinking it.
That's it for this week. As always, if you have a question for us, you can send it to questions at butwhykids.org. We'll try to get an answer for you. But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public Radio. We're distributed by PRX. And our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. We'll be back in two weeks with an all-new episode. Until then, stay curious. From PRX.