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Many of the candy treats Chicagoans enjoy boast ingredients from plants. Robin Cline, public programs manager at Garfield Park Conservatory, discusses the botanical roots of some common sweet flavors in connection with the Conservatory’s first annual “Sweet Saturdays” event set for Saturday and Feb. 21.

“Fact and Flavor” stations help families learn about—and taste!—goodies such as chocolate, vanilla, sugar and cinnamon. Try out the truffle recipe featured on this page where Cline explains the botany behind the bonbons in this edited Q&A session.

Where does chocolate come from?
(It starts as) a pod from a chocolate tree. People pick these pods off the tree, hack them open, and scoop out the wet, pulpy seeds, probably 20 to 40 of them (per pod). One of the very, very important things about chocolate is that it needs to be fermented. Historically, chocolate is fermented between banana leaves in the sun from 3 to 7 days. That fermentation process actually alters the chemical taste of the seeds.

The dried beans will go through a roasting process, like coffee, and then right after the roasting process there’s something called winnowing, when the outer shell of the cocoa bean is blown off. You can use it as mulch; you can sell it to other companies who process it more.

You end up with these husked or hulled beans, almost like the seed of a nut, and these will start breaking up on their own. When those beans are broken into smaller bits they’re called nibs. Basically, if we were to equate a chocolate bar to peanut butter, eating the nib would be like eating the plain peanut. Actually, there’s quite a few roasted and also raw nibs on the market right now. It’s becoming kind of a higher-end, gourmet food.

The nibs are made into a paste. In the industry, it’s called chocolate liquor. There’s not actual alcohol in this. It’s just called chocolate liquor because when it’s heated to room temperature or when it has been agitated, it is a liquid. After it rests for a very short period of time, it’s back to a solid form. If we were to pour (the chocolate liquor) into a mold, it would be sold as baking chocolate.

To actually make a chocolate bar that tastes like what we like, you take another set of nibs and you mix that into chocolate liquor. You keep on mixing it. Then what you end up with is your fats, which is cocoa butter, and your solids, which is cocoa powder. Some of that cocoa butter is then mixed back into (the first) chocolate liquor so that you have a higher fat content than you would normally have if it was just plain nibs.

So a chocolate bar has cocoa liquor mixed with cocoa butter and then some varying degrees of sugar and vanilla and maybe a little bit of nonfat milk.

What about white chocolate?
Cocoa butter with a little sugar and vanilla is white chocolate. It doesn’t have any of the dark stuff, which is the part that is supposed to have the special health benefits. Cocoa butter doesn’t have any of those health benefits left in it. It’s just the fat. So when you hear ‘chocolate is good for you, antioxidant’ kinds of things, they’re specifically talking about the darker parts.

What kind of plant does the vanilla bean come from?
It comes from an orchid. We actually have a really wonderful vanilla orchid that grows in our new Sugar from the Sun exhibit. It’s an orchid that grows above ground. It is a yellow orchid flower and it produces a long, green fruit that looks much like a bean pod. Of course, when it dries, it gets much smaller.

How does a cane of sugar become white crystals?
They take sugar cane and they put it through a juicer. That juice is this deep brown juice that they boil, much like maple syrup is boiled down. You reduce this syrup or juice from sugar cane and it’s a brown, crystallized liquid.

What we’re familiar with goes through probably five or six more processing steps. Dark impurities are spun out. Do you know what those dark impurities are? They actually sell that—it’s molasses. The rest of the crystals –which are actually still brown– (are) put through a number of processing steps to the point where we get our really white crystallized sugar.

What makes brown sugar brown?
Brown sugar is not much healthier than white sugar because it is white sugar with molasses mixed back into it. That being said, molasses does have a little bit more flavor and molasses is actually very high in iron. Because it’s impure, it actually has quite a few more nutritional benefits than white sugar.

“Sweet Saturday,” at Garfield Park Conservatory from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and again on Feb. 21, is open to visitors of all ages. The suggested donation is $2 per person. The Conservatory is at 300 N. Central Park Ave.

A young chocolate tree grows at the Garfield Park Conservatory. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL	Vanilla beans hang from an orchid at the Garfield Park Conservatory. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL	Sugar cane enjoys the sunshine at the Garfield Park Conservatory. Photo: Dani Friedland/MEDILL

This story originally appeared with a video component on the Medill Web Service website.