The first day we got to the amazon we saw cocoa trees growing around. It wasn’t until later when we would actually get to make chocolate. The pods grow directly out of the trunk and are either bright yellow or purple. The yellow ones are the arriba chocolate, the original plant of the area, while the purple pods grow from hybrid ccn2 trees that are more resilient to disease and pests.
Here’s me with my custom palm rain and sun hat for scale with a cocoa tree.
This is what the pods look like when you open them up.
This was the first taste of amazonian cocoa. Although at this step it was more like a tropical fruit and very sweet. You only eat the white flesh off and the beans have to ferment and dry out before you can process them. Someday the seed I spit out will turn into chocolate for someone somewhere.
We were lucky while in the rainforest and it was actually sunny the whole time so beans were being left out to dry as it doesn’t happen that much in the forest. Larger producers would use large sections of the roads as warm spots to dry their beans. They get more money for drying them before selling them to the buyers.
In the village we got to make chocolate starting with previously dried beans collected from their plants. It was a mix of the two beans. Our ingredients were chocolate beans, milk powder, sugar, and lemongrass tea.
The beans were roasted for 12 minutes before peeling.
I volunteered as much as possible to help out with this activity and stirred the beans so they wouldn’t burn. They did get quite warm and as they roasted some would pop and crack as the skins dried out.
Next was the peeling process to get rid of the skins and only keep the nibs. When you get cocoa nibs in some chocolate this is the product you are adding. They tasted like a mix of nuts and chocolate, but more on the nutty side.
The next stage was grinding where several people pitched in to help as it was a bit of a process. It smelt so good during these steps and the flakes that missed the bowl where not wasted. These tasted more like chocolate you’d be used to and were really good.
I gave it a go as well during this step, It got me closer to any missed ground chocolate and the awesome smell.
Here’s me sneaking a bit of it.
What we had ground was 100% chocolate, but this would be a bit strong so some milk powder and sugar was added.
To mix it everything went back into the grinder. They used a bigger bowl this time so less chocolate was able to escape.
After this the lemongrass tea was added to make it more of a sauce for our lunch dessert. We were able to try just a pinky finger tip of it and it was so good.
Here was the final product of our chocolate sauce over bananas. Sadly they remembered that Kerri doesn’t like chocolate so she just got bananas and I was left with only my serving. Some of the best chocolate I’ve ever had, although it doesn’t quite beat out the bar of Porcelena from Chokolat.
