This article is from WeChat official account:Hardcore Reading Club (ID: hardcorereadingclub), author: Buao Kai West, editor: Cheng Chi, title figure from: vision China
When it comes to chocolate, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?
A full orb? A delicate gift box? Silky taste? Tempting mousse cake?
Or, will you get fat?
Remember Gao Lego? For the post-80s and post-90s who grew up in towns, this name has a bit of nostalgia, but it is not unfamiliar.
This solid beverage, which entered the Chinese market in 1990, together with orange powder, occupied the childhood taste buds of a generation. A few spoons of chocolate-flavored Golego is added to hot milk. Tasting that flavor is wonderful and rare for ordinary children at that time.
“Golego” is the childhood memory of a generation. Figure/Wikipedia
The basic flavor of Gao Lego is derived from cocoa powder. The raw materials needed to make it come from the fruit of the cacao tree.
Colego’s manufacturer is Nudresbar, SpainDivision (Nutrespa, now called Idilia Foods). This food production company was founded in Barcelona in 1940, and many products are made with cocoa powder or chocolate as the main raw material.
Spain is not a suitable area for growing cacao trees. As a plant native to the tropics, cocoa favors a warm, humid, high temperature and rainy environment: The annual average temperature is 18 to 28 degrees Celsius, the annual precipitation is not less than 1000 mm, and the altitude is between 30 and 300 meters. , And soil rich in potassium.
Therefore, most of the cocoa beans that the Spanish factories produce for Gao Lego come from neighboring Africa, and some come from the tropical regions of southern China, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America.
Mankind has eaten this kind of chocolate with its appearance and taste today, with less than 300 years of history. On the fact that chocolate can be eaten all over the world, Spain, a country located at the westernmost point of Eurasia, wrote the first and most influential stroke of the story.
The fate between Spain and cocoa needs to start from the age of the great geographical discovery.
1. The past and present of Cocoa
During the long years before the Spanish arrived in the Americas, the cacao tree was regarded by Native Americans as a sacred and noble plant. It has an atmospheric and graceful appearance, the tree can reach 4 to 8 meters high, the leaves are large and stretched, and it is evergreen all year round. The plant grows quickly, but it takes more than five years to bear fruit.
The ripe cacao fruit is large and plump, with a length of 15 to 30 cm, and the outer shell is a bright reddish brown. The cocoa beans hidden in the fruit are the main edible part. Usually there are 20 to 60 beans in each fruit.