Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Spice guide to Cocoa Bean along with all the Cocoa Bean containing recipes presented on this site, with 398 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the spice-based recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Cocoa Bean as a major flavouring.

Cocoa beans are the fatty seed of the cacao tree from which chocolate is made. The seeds themselves are tightly packed into the cacao pod. The cacao Theobroma cacao is a small (about 6m tall) evergreen tree in the Sterculiaceae (Hibiscus [also known as Malvaceae]) family of plants, native to the deep tropical region of the Americas. Recent studies of Theobroma cacao genetics seem to show that the plant originated in the Amazon and was distributed by man throughout Central America and Mesoamerica. Its seeds are used to make cocoa and chocolate.

Even though we think of the cocoa bean today in terms of chocolate, the baked and hulled seeds (known as 'cocoa nibs') are used in cooking (both sweet and savoury) as a flavouring. Even though we think of chocolate as a sweet substance it is, technically, a spice. Being produced from a seed.

Chocolate itself represents a mix of cocoa solids and cocoa butter derived from the fruit of the cocoa tree, Theobroma cacao, a native of lowland, tropical South America. Archaeological evidence suggests that it has been cultivated for three millennia in Central America and Mexico, with its earliest documented use around 1100 BC. The majority of the Mesoamerican peoples made chocolate beverages, including the Maya and Aztecs, who made it into a beverage known as xocolātl, a Nahuatl word meaning "bitter water". Chocolate itself is produced as a by-product of the fermentation of cocoa beans. Subsequently the beans are dried, cleaned, and roasted, and the shell is removed to produce cacao nibs. The nibs are then ground and liquified, resulting in pure chocolate in fluid form: chocolate liquor. The liquor can be further processed into two components: cocoa solids and cocoa butter. Chocolate is produced by the mixing of cocoa solids and cocoa butter in varying portions. Chocolate is now the world's favourite snack and three quarters of the world's production comes from Tropical West Africa, with almost half this production originating from Côte d'Ivoire.

The recipes given here are all for using the cocoa bean directly. But you can find a whole range of chocolate recipes on my: Chocolate Recipes page.