How cocoa butter is made

Cocoa butter melts just below body temperature, which is why a chocolate bar snaps in your hand and goes liquid in your mouth.

stations: 6
things upstream: 1
raw source: 1
step from the ground: 1

The short version

Cocoa butter is the pale fat squeezed out of ground cocoa beans. The beans are fermented, dried, roasted and shelled, and the nibs are milled into a paste called liquor. A hydraulic press then forces the fat out of the paste, leaving a dry cake of cocoa solids behind. The butter is sometimes deodorized before it is sold.

Heap the beans to ferment

Beans and their sticky pulp are piled in bins and left alone. Wild yeasts make alcohol, then bacteria turn it into lactic and acetic acid, and the chemistry starts building the flavor precursors that will later taste like chocolate.

up to 7 days

Goes in
Cocoa beans
Spread them in the sun

Fermented beans are dried before mold can take hold. Where the weather allows, growers spread them out in the open air and rake them over for days.

5 to 7 days
Roast and strip the shells

At the factory the beans are cleaned of twigs and stones, roasted and graded. Each bean is then cracked and its shell removed, leaving small pieces of kernel called nibs.
Grind the nibs to paste

Milling breaks open the cells of the nib and the fat inside melts. The dry crumbs turn into a thick, free-flowing paste called cocoa liquor or cocoa mass. More than half of that paste is fat.

54–58% of the nib is fat
Press out the fat

The warm liquor is put under very high pressure. Golden fat runs out through the cloth and a hard cake of defatted cocoa is left behind. That cake is later milled into cocoa powder.
Strip off stray flavors

Some cocoa butter is deodorized to take out strong or unwanted tastes. The pale, mild fat is then filtered and cooled into blocks for chocolate makers.

End of the lineCocoa butter Next it goes into chocolate, white chocolate.

Worth repeating

Cocoa butter melts at around 34 to 38 °C, a little below body temperature, so it is solid on a shelf and liquid on the tongue.
Cocoa butter can crystallize in six different forms, and only one of them gives chocolate its snap and shine.
Despite the name, cocoa butter contains no dairy. It is vegan.
For centuries cocoa butter was a by-product that factories sold for cosmetics and medicine, until chocolate bars made it the valuable part.