— Jane Swoboda

So let's start with cocoa powder. Cacao powder. They are the same when they non alkalized cocoa powder, which you also see listed as a natural cocoa powder means this is cocoa powder. Cocoa powder is unsweetened, it is the powder that's left after the cho after the cacao beans have been processed. And most of the cocoa butter, which is not dairy, it's the fat in chocolate, has been removed and then it's powdered. And so it is non alkali. Cacao powder is non alkalized cocoa powder. And there's always a lot of talk about which is which. And many people coming from the raw food community prefer or say they prefer cacao. I've been, um, listening to a woman who goes by the name of the chocolate journalist. I don't know, I, I can, you can write to me and I'll let you know. But anyway, she confirmed. Many people have confirmed chocolate experts have confirmed for me that cocoa powder cacao, it's a cacao bean and then it's cocoa powder. Um, there is no such thing as raw cacao. Let me just say that this is not the first time I've said it. It's unroasted. It is not raw. There is no such thing as raw cocoa powder. It's unroasted. So cocoa powder that's natural non alkali and cacao powder, it's natural and non alkali and they're used the same. I think that roasted, which is usually cocoa powder tastes better to me personally. Now carb is a whole other thing. Carb is the seeds are in a pod. Actually my son has them growing in his backyard in LA and it's the first time that I ever saw it. So it's a different thing. Carab is naturally sweeter in its raw state than cocoa powder or cacao. And it needs to be roasted before you use it, in my opinion. That makes it taste better and then rubbed through a strainer or a sieve. Uh, so you would have to, you know, back, back, back in the day when somebody gave me a carb cake, carb is brown and said it was a chocolate cake. I was very disappointed to say the very least. And um, that was one of the impetus that got me going to, you know, create a chocolate cake that tasted good. Nothing wrong with car cakes, they're just not chocolate. That's like, you know, tofu isn't Tempe, that kind of thing. Well they're both soy, so that's a bad example. But you would have to adjust the amount of sweetener. And I do wanna say that car has been touted as a health food. Cocoa powder and chocolate are being touted today as a health food. But many of the carb confections on the marketplace today have a lot of highly processed ingredients. The kinds we don't hydrogenated ingredients that we don't want to use. So if you want to use car powder in a recipe that you have that calls for cocoa powder, you go, you're gonna roast the carb first. You're gonna cut the recipe down, scale it down, do a test. You're gonna roast the car powder, put it through a sieve, let it cool and then cut some of the sweetener out of the recipe and see what happens.