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I SHOULD cocoa – it’s Chocolate Week! The most delicious seven days of 2018 kicks off today with choc makers, hotels, bars and restaurants all celebrating the sweet stuff.
In the UK, we scoff a whopping 660,900 tonnes of chocolate a year – which equates to about three bars per person each week. But how much do you know about the yummy treats? NADINE LINGE brings you some surprising facts.
AROUND two-thirds of the world’s cocoa is produced in West Africa. Ivory Coast is the biggest grower, producing nearly 1.5million tonnes a year.
CHOCOLATE was rationed during World War Two. When rationing ended in April 1949, demand outstripped supply so much it had to be reintroduced four months later.
You can test the quality of chocolate by the sound it makes when it snaps. The higher the cocoa butter content, the sharper the snap.
White chocolate is technically not chocolate. It’s made from cocoa butter rather than the cocoa solids which qualify something as chocolate.
Chocolate chip cookies were invented by accident. In 1930, American chef
Ruth Wakefield
ABCDEran out of baker’s chocolate and mixed in a Nestle choccy bar, expecting to make chocolate cookies. Instead she created choc chip cookies – and sold the idea to Nestle in return for a lifetime supply of chocolate.
You can die if you eat too much choccy. It contains high levels of a stimulant called theobromine, which can cause heart failure, seizures and kidney damage if consumed in large amounts. But you’d have to eat about 22lbs of chocolate, or 40 bars of Dairy Milk!
Enough Toblerone bars are sold each year that if they were laid end to end, they would be 62,000 miles longer than the circumference of the Earth.
Chocolate has an anti-bacterial effect on the mouth, and helps protect against tooth decay.
FGHIn 2013, Belgium issued a limited edition of chocolateflavoured stamps.
Chocolate has been used as money. The Mayans traded cocoa beans as currency, and it was considered to be worth more than gold dust.
There’s more than just cocoa in that bar – there’s likely to be insects too! On average a chocolate bar contains around eight bug parts that have fallen in during processing – but it is still deemed to be safe to eat. Anything more than 60 insect parts per 100g is deemed dangerous.
Across most of its history, chocolate was drunk as a liquid. Then in the 1800s, Brits worked out that they could add sugar and cocoa butter to create a more solid substance to package.
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