What is the Difference Between Cacao and Cocoa and Which is Better?

Well as usual, if there is confusion now, you can bet it was based on errors or misunderstandings in the past. But it makes an interesting story.

In one definition, cocoa and cacao are complete synonyms and can be used interchangeably. They refer to the same tree and the same nut, Theobroma cacao. 

But other definitions developed meaning slightly different versions of this bean as chocolate processing developed. And it can get confusing because different companies and farmers define things to suit how they do things, so no matter what it is called, you always have to check the ingredients and the nutrient labels to see what you are actually getting. More on labels later.

Theobroma is Greek for food of the gods. Theo - god, Broma - food. And those who love chocolate think that this is very aptly named because it is the main ingredient of chocolate, although it doesn’t start out tasting like chocolate.

The word cocoa came from a misspelling of cacao that happened in the 1500’s. Cacao is derived from the Nahuatl word xocati or cacahuati. Nahuatl was spoken by the Nahua people.

The Nahua were the indigenous peoples of Southern Mexico and Central America and included the Aztecs but not the Mayans, but due to a free trade language that formed, the language of the Mayans and the Aztecs had these words in common.

Xocati and cacahuati both refer to a bitter frothy drink made by the Nuhua used for increasing strength and endurance and to revive sickened or exhausted people. It was a drink that was mostly available to the elite class and warriors and for formal events, such as marriage ceremonies.

Xocati is from xococ which means bitter and ati which means water. It refers to the drink rather than the beans. The drink often contained chili, cornmeal and spices besides the main ingredient which we now call cacao.

Cacahuati just meant cacao water or juice because that was the main ingredient of the drink.

Xocati was sometimes spelled xocolāti or chocolatl and is considered the derivation of the word chocolate. It was favored over the word cacahuati which gave other connotations due to sounding similar to less savory ideas in translation, if you see what I mean. And they’re both brown! (caca means feces if you haven’t followed.)

Now for pronunciation. Cacao is pronounced like Kah Kow. Cocoa is pronounced Ko Ko. The a is silent because early on the word cocoa was confused even in dictionaries with coco, the coconut tree, and it just retained that pronunciation. So first it was a misspelling of cacao and then got confused with coco, but its popularity overshadowed the word cacao for millennia. Only recently has “cacao” gained any popularity, but it now means the more unprocessed bean. Cocoa is made from cacao.

To understand this you have to know something about how chocolate is made or anything flavored that way. It starts with the beans. They grow in pods that are directly attached to the trunk of the tree. Each pod has 16 to 60 seeds or beans in it. They are oblong and resemble a small football. And the little football is striped lengthwise like a watermelon or squash. Pretty looking footballs. Colors vary, kind of like autumn leaves do.

The pods are harvested by hand to not damage the tree and cut open and the beans boxed or put in piles for fermenting. Or washed and dried directly. 

The mucilaginous white matrix that covers the seeds contains a lot of water and nutrients and is left intact on the bean which begins the fermentation process which can break down complex compounds and improves taste. The seeds are left for 3 to 8 days depending on the variety of seed and the fermentation method. Seed and bean are used interchangeably like that, so don't get confused.

Some companies call that stage cacao all the way up to drying the fermented seeds and some companies draw the cacao/cocoa line right there at the fermentation stage.  

In other words, some say cacao seeds and mean raw seeds dried or wet.

Some mean fermented and dried, and could still be raw if they were dried at a low temperature or sundried. 

And others say cocoa seeds and mean raw and fermented and dried. But sometimes they are not raw because they were dried at too high a temperature. 

Drying at over 110° will cook the seeds.

That’s why the terminology is confusing and you have to know something about the process to know what you are getting.

Raw cacao seeds in the past were sold to chocolate companies and rarely to the end consumer. But that is changing in modern times as cacao is being recognized more and more as a health food.

I checked online to see how one could get them. The unfermented ones are sold as “wet seeds” for planting and Walmart sells 2 for $10 or 8 for $20. Wow you could grow your own chocolate trees. That might be a good subject for a future blog!

The unfermented dried seeds are called lavado seeds because instead of going through the fermenting stage, they are just washed. (Lavado means washed in Mexico) Sometimes they are offered on importing sites like Alibaba, but Wildly Organic which sources from the Dominican Republic sells both raw and fermented cacao bean powder. Raw is 29.99/lb and fermented is $14.99lb.

Dried, fermented seeds from a Hawaiian company went for $20 for 8oz and Amazon had them 2.2 lbs for $54.99.

Cacao bean powder is different from just “cocoa powder” as cocoa powder has been fermented, roasted and ground and separated from the fat component. 

The raw cacao bean powder is just the whole bean made into powder fermented or not. 

The non-fermented still has phytic acid attached to the minerals, a thing that is handled by sprouting and/or fermenting so it limits digestion, but contains three times the antioxidants of goji berries. 

Much of the antioxidants which are more complex get broken down in the fermentation process. Darn, to get the best nutrition and antioxidants you have to use both. So the fermented or not fermented question is answered with a combo is best.

During the spring season, you could get whole cacao pods which you have to eat or plant right away because they perish very quickly. If not, they might wind up fermenting in your possession anyway. 

But also there are cacao nibs, also called cocoa nibs which are the cacao seeds cracked and shelled. This can be done before fermenting which of course makes non fermented nibs or after to make fermented nibs which taste a little better. These have the most nutrients or antioxidants, but they also have the most bitter taste.

They are used in baking because of their intense chocolate flavor and because you can use baking soda to mitigate the bitter while creating a leavening effect which makes the baked good fluffier which is great all around. And of course you can add sweeteners.

Also, there is something called Dutch processing, which alkalizes the nibs or cocoa, making the taste better, but strips out the antioxidants along with the bitterness. So in my opinion, the Dutch-processed products are not as good; better to just use baking soda in the recipe.

Cacao or cocoa nibs can also be used directly to make dark chocolate. But nicer flavors can be made through the processing I had begun to describe.

Now back to the processing. After fermentation comes the roasting. This step can be done in an oven, a roasting drum oven or even a cast iron frying pan depending on the quantity or whichever thing you have. Temperatures range from 250°F to 400°F depending on your recipe.

The purpose of the roasting is to bring out the chocolate flavor, to dry out the bean and to make the shells dry and flakey so they can be easily removed. You know you are done roasting when the whole place smells like brownies.

After the roasting, the grinding. The product of grinding is called cocoa mass or cocoa liquor. Liquor doesn’t have anything to do with alcohol, it is from the French meaning liquid. But it does call up memories of Kahlua and Tia Maria, yum, not to mention Bailey’s and my uncle's luscious homemade Crème de cocoa.

I don’t know how he spelled it, but we definitely said Ko Ko even though in liquor stores it is spelled crème de cacao, which is a silky smooth chocolate liqueur but contains no dairy.

Incidentally, classic Kahlua and Tia Maria only taste like they have chocolate in them, but it’s all done with roasted coffee beans, vanilla and Jamaican rum interactions. Just sayin’. But they are delicious and taste like a combo of chocolate and coffee, but this has nothing to do with cocoa liquor.

With this terminology, cocoa mass/liquor, you really don’t get the idea of what is happening. When you grind a cocoa bean the fat in it gets released and it doesn’t come out being a powder it comes out like a butter. A nut butter. The same as making almond butter or peanut butter. But if they called it butter then it would be confusing in the next stage which is either conching (more on this term later) if you are making chocolate and adding cocoa butter, or pressing if you are wanting cocoa paste and the fat content which is called cocoa butter separated. 

See, you can’t call them both cocoa butter. This subject is confusing enough. So what would be called normally cocoa butter has to be called cocoa mass or liquor and only the fat part called cocoa butter.

Pressing presses most of the cocoa butter out of the cocoa mass and leaves cocoa paste or cake. It is a hard, crumbly, thick pancake. That ground up is called cocoa powder. It is also referred to as cocoa solids. These are brown in colour. But cocoa solids can sometimes refer to cocoa mass in its entirety.

The cocoa butter product of the pressing is a light yellow or cream color. This is used to make white chocolate and is also used in the cosmetics industry. It is also used to add to the cocoa mass to make a creamier chocolate as I touched on earlier.

Another method of getting even drier (less fat) cocoa paste with even stronger chocolate taste was discovered in 1865 at the Ghirardelli factory here in California. It was called the Broma method after Theobroma cacao.

We don’t get the story on this one, except that an unknown employee discovered that if you hung up bags of cocoa liquor in a hot room (the melting point of cocoa butter is just over room temperature), the cocoa butter dripped out, all of it, not just the percentage they were getting from pressing. This put Ghirardelli on the chocolatier map for more chocolatey chocolate, and he got a lot more cocoa butter out of it to use and sell.

Cocoa Liquor or Cocoa Mass contains both the cocoa solids and the cocoa butter of the bean. It can be dried into blocks, making a rough chocolate on its own. This chocolate is often called raw chocolate even though it was cooked in the roasting stage. But it is raw in the sense that it is not cultivated into finer chocolate or cooked further. 

Just to be confusing, the percentage of cocoa solids listed in dark chocolate also includes the cocoa butter combined.

Cocoa mass is the first ingredient of more developed fine chocolate. It is also sold to industries to add as chocolate flavoring and as an ingredient to make chocolate products.

Before conching was discovered (more soon on that name), this was the end of processing except to mix things into it to make different chocolate recipes. 

But in 1879, Rudolf Lindt, a famous Swiss Chocolatier, before he was actually famous, accidentally overlooked turning off his mixer one Friday and when he returned on Monday, he had a big surprise.

Chocolate in his day was pretty bitter and rough like cocoa mass, but that Monday he came in to find that the chocolate in the mixer had been transformed into a shiney, creamy, sweet, deliciously whipped chocolate that flowed smoothly. Eureka!  Well that was the beginning of becoming that famous chocolatier. This discovery revolutionized the whole chocolate industry.

The friction, aeration and heat had made a miraculous transformation.

Why it is called conching:

The first machines made to do this to cocoa mass on purpose had screw turners and were elongated and resembled a conch shell, so they called the process conching. As good a name as any because they couldn’t call it mixing because that was what they did before.

Conching brings the temperature of the cocoa mass up to 120°F to 180°F. This along with the aeration of the screw mixing gets rid of the acids by evaporation and unmasks the sweetness, adding cocoa butter to it intermittently ensures that the fine cocoa solids and any sugars and flavorings are individually coated with cocoa butter which makes that silky smooth, flowing gorgeous liquid chocolate that can be poured into molds and cooled. Boy! Writing about this is making me hungry!

Cocoa butter accounts for most of the calories in chocolate. It also carries with it a significant part of the nutrition.

Here is a breakdown taken from a chart published by healthline.com

Cocoa Solids or Cocoa Powder  

(w/o cocoa butter)

• Calories: 64
• Fat 3.5 grams
• Protein: 5 grams
• Carbohydrates: 16 grams
• Iron: 22% of RDA

Cacao (Cocoa mass w/o cooking)

• Calories: 160
• Fat: 11 grams
• Protein: 9 grams
• Carbohydrates: 6 grams
• Iron: 4% RDA

Knowing this data, when you look at the Nutrition Facts on a label, you can tell whether you are getting something in the Cacao range or the highly processed Cocoa powder range.

I will go more into nutritional aspects in the next blog as well as things I have found about levels of quality. Till then maybe you might want to review this blog and check labels on chocolate products to get some reality on it. All these terms without the physical item to refer to made me dizzy when I was researching. But I hope I carved out a path through the morass of overlapping terminology, so that you could grasp it.

Oh, and in the question of which is better, cacao or cocoa? It all depends on your goal and preference. But now that, hopefully, you know what they are, you can finally decide for yourself.

Herbal Roots is proud to announce that you can now get Herbal Cocoa! This is not a hot chocolate. It is an herbal experience of deliciousness! Click the image of the cocoa to find out more!

*This article is intended for informational purposes. The statements above have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.