Chocolate Homeschool Unit II, and Chocolate Tasting Activity

Our last unit of the year was on Chocolate. Daisy remembers the last time we did this unit (you can find lots of resources linked there) and has been begging to do another one ever since! Since she is planning to go into "the industry" (hee hee), she feels she needs to know these things—and she's probably right! So we did a very in-depth dive into the history, creation, and science of chocolate!

Chocolate Unit Pinterest Board (from last time)

We found another way to tie Macaws into our year. Can you blame us? Gus just loves them so much! Anyway, they live in the rainforest, and chocolate grows in the rainforest, so…it makes perfect sense. Here are some videos we liked about macaws:

How a baby macaw grows up

Wild macaws in the Amazon rainforest

A history of chocolate documentary

Lesson plan about the Aztec and Maya using chocolate—we used the Aztec chocolate recipe in this lesson

We looked at this Aztec-style recipe too

The Lindt company invented conching, which is the process that makes chocolate today so smooth and creamy. Here's some information about it.

Making "artisan" or "bean to bar" chocolate is trendy right now. That means a lot of fancy $10 chocolate bars at the grocery store, but it also means there is TON of information about chocolate-making online. Lots of great videos and resources. One of the most comprehensive sites is this "Chocolate Alchemy" site, which has how-to videos of every step.

Most of the small-batch chocolate makers I found online (including my friend Tye, whose house we visited for a field trip) use a melanger to make their chocolate smooth and creamy. The big companies still use what they call conching, but it seemed to me the process of melanging and conching were the same thing. Here is a site I found that explains the nuanced difference between the two, for anyone that cares (likely NO ONE).

We really liked all these "Kitchen Matters" videos about chocolate chemistry. The explanations of tempering were some of the clearest we found anywhere, and it was interesting to learn about the chemical processes connected with that. Here is crystal structures of chocolate (basically all commercial chocolate today has cocoa butter in the Phase V stage, and it's the most pleasing and best phrase for eating). Here is the science of tempering chocolate. And here is how to fix seized chocolate.

Difference between theobromine and caffeine (and why chocolate doesn't have "just as much caffeine as coffee" as people sometimes claim)

Different chocolate regulations in different countries (explains why European and even Canadian chocolate is so good)

Funny Rittersport ad campaign

And another one

Learning about emulsifiers was really interesting! (More about emulsifiers)

Some "how chocolate is made" videos—

White chocolate

Every step of of making chocolate

Making cocoa butter

This guy made chocolate from scratch

How it's made: chocolate

A guide to tempering chocolate

I bought a bunch of chocolate bars (some of the aforementioned fancy $10 variety, so this got expensive quickly and I had to put some back! goodness!) for us to taste and try. The stars aligned that everyone, even Abe and Seb, were home that day, so everyone got to participate in the activity and it was so much fun! We wrote our observations down and tried to be scientific about it, but mostly it was just so fun to try so many different iterations of the same thing! And all the different percentages and types of beans and origins really do make such a difference!

Here is the last time our family did a chocolate tasting: https://nielsonschool.blogspot.com/2014/05/chocolate-tasting-activity.html

And here are some of our notes, for posterity (in case we ever need to remember which chocolate to buy…but you can never go wrong with just RitterSport) :)

Honey tasting activity

It's always good to talk about bees! We had a whole unit on them once (Pinterest board for that here) and maybe will again sometime—there's lots to learn! But this was just part of our Flower Unit. Our honey-tasting activity was a favorite for everyone this time. We ordered a bunch of different honeys from Smiley Honey (they have a good selection of sampler sets here, or you can choose your own) and after tasting them all, enjoyed eating them on our toast for a long time afterwards (though not as long as you'd HOPE—it went fast!).

They were all good, but some favorites for their unique taste were the sourwood honey, the coriander honey, and the orange honey. But really, we liked them all! I like to order large bottles of the tupelo honey because it doesn't crystallize, or at least not very fast.

They can have very different colors as well as flavors!

We tasted each kind plain first—I went around and drizzled some into each child's spoon. The we got out the bread and had our favorites on that.

The little boys were glad to participate in this with us. Yum!

Chocolate Tasting Activity

Of course, we had to have a Chocolate Tasting Activity---it was our duty! I bought a bunch of different types of chocolate at the grocery store, and we made up a lab sheet to fill in with our observations.

The types of chocolate we tasted were:

• Ritter Sport, Alpine Milk
• Theo Chocolate, 45% Cacao, Milk
• Scharffen-Berger, Creamy Milk
• Amano, 30% Cacao, Milk
• Millcreek Chocolate, 70% Cacao
• Rainforest Chocolate, 72% Cacao, Mint
• Hershey's, Milk
• Ecuadorian Crunch, Coconut
• Lindt, 85% Cacao
• Lindt, Dark with "Touch of Sea Salt"
• Milka, Milk

I see, looking at this picture, that the only chocolate without an identifying wrapper is the Ritter Sport, and since that is mine and Sam's favorite, I feel obligated to point it out in case you want to look for it at the store. It is the one by the black arrow. It comes in a square bar and the wrapper looks like this. (The light blue wrapper kind is my favorite; the dark blue wrapper kind is Sam's favorite. Oh, and the milk chocolate with praline is pretty amazing too.) I tried it first in England, I think, but lately I've seen it stores here too. Yay!

We tested several of the snootier chocolates (the kind that brag about their fair-trade origins and their "cacao" [never cocoa!] content). They were good, but Ritter Sport remained the clear winner for me. A couple of the children liked the Milka better. My second-place choice was the Theo Milk Chocolate, and Sam liked the Scharffen-Berger Milk Chocolate second best. None of the "75% cacao" or other dark chocolates really had a chance, as we like milk chocolate so much better, but we did really like the dark Lindt with a "touch of sea salt." I did like tasting the darker artisan-style chocolates, but I wouldn't buy them again, as they were SO much more expensive---some close to $6 and $7 a bar! Whoa.

We also thought that Hershey's chocolate has an unfair stigma. Sure, it is much different than the creamier European-style chocolate (and there is a difference in the law: in Europe, anything labeled "chocolate" has to be at least 35% cocoa solids and 18% cocoa butter, and in the US it only has to be 10% cocoa solids!)--I've never really been a Hershey's fan--- but it's not a BAD taste and someone who prefers it isn't inferior as so many chocolate snobs would have you believe. :)

It was really fun to taste so many types of chocolate and compare them---I think I can safely say this was an activity everyone enjoyed! :)

Cacao Trees and Cacao Beans

We spent a day just studying the cacao tree, which is pretty fascinating. This picture is from a model at the Chocolate Exhibit we went to---you can see how huge the cacao pods are, and then the flowers are those tiny little pink and white things you can see coming out of the trunk. The tree has flowers, buds, unripe pods, and pods on it, all at the same time and all year round. And the pods themselves are too thick to just break open when they fall, so the seeds must be spread by animals (and people) breaking open the pods, which, historically, they did in order to get at the sweet white pulp inside.

I had the children make lift-the-flap pictures of cacao trees and cacao pods, to show what is inside the pods. You can't see it in this picture, but the inside of a cacao pod looks like this, if you're curious.

(image credit)

You can see the white pulp and what almost look like corn kernels inside the pod---the cacao beans are within that pulp. They are kind of a pale tan color at first, but get darker and browner as they ferment and dry.

We also learned about the three types of cacao beans: forastero, criollo, and trinitario.

Here are some resources for learning about cacao trees and cacao beans:

How cacao beans are harvested (starts around 10:38)

How the cacao tree grows (from Kew Gardens in England---I've been there, but I don't recall seeing cacao trees! I wish I had.)

Another video about How cacao grows, this one by the Eden Project 

Shows a guy opening a cacao pod, eating some of the pulp, smacking his lips, etc. :)

This is a fun interactive animation from the Field Museum. You can look at some of the conditions needed for growing cacao, and some of the insects and animals that help support its ecosystem.

We also tasted raw cacao beans--very bitter, but still interesting. You can buy these raw cocoa nibs (the nib is just the inside of the cacao bean, after the shell has been removed) but we had some of these raw beans which you can brew up (like coffee?) and make a drink. We tasted that drink on another day---about which more later---but on this day we just tried some of the ground-up beans to see what they tasted like. 

Honey Tasting activity, and Honey Map

The different types of honey are so beautiful. Look at the color variation!

I admit that before we had this tasting activity, I was skeptical about different honeys tasting that different from each other. I have tasted flavored honeys before (the kind with strawberries added, for example) but as far as pure honey, gathered from different types of flowers, I thought "how different can it be?" But we did really taste strong differences. It was fascinating.

I had bought a couple different local honeys at the farmer's market, and I bought a few more types from Amazon for us to try. We had local wildflower honey, local "urban" honey (the guy has hives on top of some buildings in downtown Salt Lake---so interesting), basic clover honey from the grocery store, and then sourwood, blueberry blossom, and orange blossom honey that I ordered online. 

Later we also got to try this honey from the Black Forest, and if you ever get a chance, I highly recommend tasting it. It's expensive, but SO interesting! It's made from "honeydew," which is a substance formed when little aphids feed on the sap of conifers. The aphids eat the sap and excrete this honeydew, and then the bees sip the honeydew and make honey from it. The honey is dark and rich and almost tastes like molasses! Delicious.

Ooh! Also, you should look at these pictures of some honey that bees made from M&Ms in France! 

I made little tasting sheets for us to fill out, and we talked about different adjectives we might use to describe what we tasted. We had water to cleanse our palates between tastes. :) The boys wrote down some great descriptive terms: like lavender, like pine sap, smoky, bitter, ting-y, caramelly, hits top of mouth sweetly. If we don't watch out they'll become wine tasters.

My favorite thing was watching how seriously everyone took this. They'd take a taste, roll it around on their tongues, close their eyes, lick their lips, furrow their brows. It was really funny and cute to watch.

Junie had to participate with everyone else, of course

Daisy filled up her sheet with neatly written observations, too

When we were done tasting, we enjoyed all the different honeys on homemade bread. They were so delicious!! My favorite was the sourwood, but I loved the Urban Honey too---it had an almost smoky taste. So interesting!!

We also talked about where in the United States these different types of honey were collected. We used the map on page 51 of this packet to talk about specialty honeys in different states. The children drew pictures of the kinds of flowers or fruits used to make honey in each state.