Raw cocoa vs. freshly roasted cocoa.

Today I learned a lot about roasting cocoa. There are e.g. you find a Polish scientist who carried out a very interesting study on the amine content of cocoa after roasting here). In this study, she showed that there was up to ten times more phenylethylamine PEA and up to four times more dopamine in roasted cocoa than in raw cocoa. PEA is structurally similar to amphetamine and is one of the main contributors to cocoa’s stimulating effect.o.

How can roasting cause phenylethylamine to increase tenfold?

How does it work? You can imagine it like this: The cocoa bean is like a closed physical system. If we add heat, as we do to roasting, we add energy to the system. Because heat is nothing else than thermal energy. This thermal energy serves as a catalyst for some chemical reactions. For our cocoa bean, this means that some of the building blocks it contains that were still lying idle before roasting, e.g. Phenylanine, tryptophan, only turns into phentyl through roastingtylethylamine or dopamine.

Cocoa beans from Guatemala in our roasting oven.

How hot is cocoa roasted?

Incidentally, cocoa is not roasted as hot as coffee. For example, we roast our cocoa at around 130C (light roast), 140C (medium roast) and 150CC (dark roast).

We often don't question what marketing campaigns tell us & amp; let us be guided by emotions

Why is there so much misinformation out there about so-called "raw cocoa" I think that's because we very often don't think rationally but rather emotionally. At some point we learned that fire can hurt. We see pictures of forest fires in Australia and fire automatically means destruction to us. But of course that's rubbish. Many foods only become edible for humans when they are heated, e.g. Potatoes and savoy cabbage. Others only get their full aroma through roasting, such as coffee, almonds and cocoa. After all, nobody would think of selling raw coffee. It's the same with cocoa. Only through careful roasting does it develop its full aroma..

The loss of polyphenols from roasting cocoa is low

I do not want to deny here that in fact some substances contained in cocoa beans are destroyed by roasting, such as Flavenols & amp; Polyphenols. As can be read in another study, the loss of these substances through roasting is very low, only 20 and can be greatly reduced by setting the correct humidity in the roasting ovenrd (here).

The Polish researcher quoted above has also found that the content of amines increases the hotter the cocoa is roasted and the higher the humidity in the roasting oven.

Roasting cocoa significantly improves the taste

Because the taste of cocoa is so positively affected, we have decided to only sell roasted cocoa. Incidentally, I see a similar market in cocoa as in coffee. Fresh, local roasting is an integral part of the coffee market. It is therefore only logical for me to pursue this approach for Moruga Cacao as well.

Enjoy!