They Said It Couldn't Be Done (Chocolate, Part 3)

As a recap, we opened up the pod, pulled out all the slimy white things and put them in our home-made fermentation tank, let them ferment for a week, then put them in a tray to dry. After two weeks of drying the beans, we decided they were ready for the next step.

 What I read about roasting was about as specific as everything else I read about making chocolate. You put one layer of beans on a tray and put them in the oven for 5 minutes to half and hour or so at somewhere between 200 and 450 degrees, and generally you'd like to get them hot first and gradually less hot. With those clear instructions, I preheated the oven to 400 degrees, put the tray on the top rack for 8 minutes, stirring the beans after 5 minutes, and then lowered the temperature to 275 degrees and let them sit for another 12 minutes. Then I pulled out the tray and set it on the stove top to cool. 

 Some of the instructions suggested that if you have done everything right, you should experience a warm-brownie smell during this process. Of course, that would depend on everything else being done right in the first place. They said fermentation requires a mass of something like 25 pounds or it won't work. If the fermentation doesn't work, the results won't be anything like chocolate. Then they said if you don't sun-dry them properly, the chemical reaction won't be able to complete and you won't get chocolate. So much that could go wrong!

They said the timing and temperature of roasting is an art. I'm not sure what the roasting is supposed to do, but it should produce the smell and make the shell stuff come off pretty easily. We definitely noticed a warm-brownie smell during our roasting process.The shell stuff came off pretty easily. After you peel off the paper-like shell, the resulting brown thing is easily separated into a bunch of little pieces that we chocolate experts call " nibs". And the bottom line is, I guess, it's chocolate. I tasted one of those little pieces. It's unsweetened dark chocolate magic!

In our case, the whole pod had 49 beans. Three of them, upon drying, were little flat empty things that looked about like a corn flake. A couple, while not flat, seemed a bit anemic. The rest were pretty much like this one: a little package of pure chocolate goodness. So we take all these remaining good beans that have been fermented, dried and roasted, and open them up to reveal all the very interesting nibs. A cool thing about this is that after you do it, for the rest of the evening your fingers smell like chocolate.

So, here we are with about 1/3 of the beans done and you see there is a little yellow bowl of CHOCOLATE sitting next to the tray. Apparently if you have a lot more beans, you don't really want to go through the hassle of opening them all by hand, so you put them in a bag and mash them all with a rolling pin for a while until the nibs are separated from the shells. Then you use the old hair dryer trick to blow the chaff from the nibs. I might do that later. We'll see. Then once we are satisfied that we have pure wholesome clean nibs, we will begin the process of making sweetened milk chocolate or something like that. But that's quite another topic for yet another chocolate blog post, someday in the future.

Meanwhile, we have attempted to go beyond still pictures and bring you some actual video of bean shelling. If it works, here are two videos:

They said it couldn't be done, but we have chocolate here!

Chocolate, Part 2

Welcome back. As we headed back home after the amazing visit to the chocolate plantation, I was the proud owner of a cocoa pod. Time has arrived for some experimenting. The banana is in there just for scale because this is a very scientific experiment.

 If you google the subject, you might find people suggesting all manner of methods for opening a cocoa pod. However, this is the method I learned from the expert: you just smack it a few times against a tree. We don't have any trees in our apartment, but we do have this handy counter top.

 After cracking the pod, you just sort of pull it apart like this.

Yep, there's slimy goo in here. Would you like to eat some?

 You're kidding, right? You want me to pick that thing up and stick it in my mouth? That's really gross. 

I think we can let one of them go, for science. Just don't bite it.

 I cut the top off a plastic pop bottle and cut holes in the bottom for drainage. Then I pulled out all the inards and dumped them into the bottle. This was my fermentation tank. According to everything I have read, it won't ferment unless you have on the order of 25 pounds or more. But I've only got one pod, and this is just an experiment. We're not expecting much.

 Ugh. This really is slimy.

 OK. The slime covered beans are all sitting in the bottle. The top of the bottle will go upside down and be a sort of non-air-tight lid. The stuff is supposed to drain and ferment for a week.

 Hmm . . . what can I do with these?

 So, this has been sitting in the laundry room fermenting for a week now. I stirred up the beans a few times and kept dumping the juice that drained off. It smells sort of like vinegar. Pretty strong. Something chemicalish was definitely going on here.

 They look a lot more like beans now. Or maybe some kind of bugs. We choose not to think about bugs. Beans. Yes, they look like cocoa beans.

 I have rinsed them a couple times. They're soft and squishy now.

 At least one place on the web suggested it would be a good idea to let the beans soak in water for a couple hours before laying them out to dry.

 So here they are, 48 beans. There were 49, but Tom sucked on one. We threw that one away. It's all part of the experiment. We shall now wait while these dry for a week. They're supposed to dry in the sun. We don't get any sun in our apartment. So, I guess they'll just sort of dry in whatever fashion we can manage. Stay tuned.

Chocolate Grows On Trees!

They grow chocolate here! Chocolate grows on trees! Who knew? We've also recently learned about cinnamon and cashews, but that's another story. Today we're talking about chocolate.

Elder and Sister Javier are a senior missionary couple who work at the temple. They own a house and a CHOCOLATE PLANTATION in a little city called San Franciso de Macoris. 

This is the front door of their house and we are honored guests for breakfast and a trip to the plantation followed by lunch. We experienced wonderful Dominican meals and similar hospitality. From left to right in the picture are the Javier’s daughter-in-law, who helped prepare the meals, Sherrie, Gina, and Sister Javier. The men are all hiding from the camera.

This is a cinnamon tree. Cinnamon grows on trees, too. Actually, it comes from the bark. Brother Javier peeled off some bark for us and we sucked on it. So this is where atomic fire balls come from. But that has nothing to do with chocolate, so we move along.

 





A little way out of town and up into the hills we came to the plantation that has been in the family for several generations. This blue house is where Elder Javier was born. His great great grandfather planted the trees many years ago and they have now somewhere on the order of 8000 cocoa trees. In Spanish it's cacao. In English we call it cocoa. I don't know where the name comes from. 

Pronounce it how you will, this brown thing hanging off the trunk of the tree is a cocoa pod.

 The yellow thing is also a cocoa pod. They come in several different colors depending on the particular tree, and they also change colors as they mature. But you can't tell by the color whether they are ripe. You have to "thunk" the pod. If it sounds like a milkshake then it's the right time.

 One particularly interesting thing is that the inside is not anything like you might expect. The pod is full of slimy white things. Even more bizarre is that you can pull one out, stick it in your mouth and suck on it. It's a little hard to imagine, but it didn't taste bad. Nothing at all like chocolate. That happens much later.

 No, really, you just reach in there and grab one of those slimy things. Remember in Ghost Busters when the guy got slimed? I think this is where they got the slime. And I just stuck it in my mouth and sucked on it for a while. It's quite sweet. Elder Javier eats them like candy. But you don't bite them. At this point only the slime is worth eating. The beans inside the slime are "agrio". I think that means bitter or sour.

 Bananas are ubiquitous. You can't get rid of them. And why would you want to? During a long hot humid day of picking cocoa pods, you might just feel like a banana. Or any of several other kinds of fruit for that matter. There are all kinds of strange fruit growing among the cocoa trees.

 Yep, Sherrie was there too. I think this particular pod is not quite ready yet, although  I didn't personally thunk it.

 On the other hand, this one looks pretty much ready.

 Pretty cool, eh? They just sort of grow all over on these trees. It's very strange looking to me.

 I guess it's time to stick another slimy thing in my mouth. Generally I'm not much for eating slime, but this is the stuff that becomes chocolate. How bad could it be?

 Elder Javier threw me this pod. He didn't say anything, he just tossed it to me. I decided to keep it. Experiment time after we get home.

 Here are some more pods just unexpectedly hanging off a tree trunk. Most interesting.

 Things tend to be done a little differently in the Dominican Republic. These are a couple of saddles. I presume when you're riding around on your horse through your chocolate plantation you need a saddle.

 And of course sometimes you just need to sit down and rest for a while in the comforting shade of a nice thatched roof pavilion. I suppose this is where they have the Saturday night dances.

 I'm not sure exactly what's in all these little buildings, but there is much extended family living all over the place throughout the plantation.

After you break open a pod, the slimy things you don't eat get put into fermentation boxes. After about a week in there, the slime has pretty much soaked into the beans and they now are set out to dry in the sun for a week or so. These are cocoa beans. If you could find a way to buy these, you could make your own chocolate - like in that movie called "Chocolat".

We had a great visit to the cocoa plantation. It was pretty cool. I don't think it would have been nearly so interesting had it been, say, an onion plantation. Chocolate, after all, is sort of magical. In fact, when it's all said and done, perhaps if Columbus had not discovered chocolate nobody ever would have heard of him again.