Steve, shown here with an ancient Maya whistle he found in a
cave on his property, is the owner of a citrus and cacao finca.
He offered to have us pick as much of the fruit as we wanted
and we jumped at the chance. Steve has several thousand
acres of citrus and some of cacao. He has not harvested the
cacao for several years because the bottom fell out of the
market and it is not currently profitable to grow and harvest
cacao.

Cacao is the fruit whose seeds make chocolate. The pods grow on the
trunks and large branches of the trees. When the pods are ripe they
are either yellow or reddish depending on the type. Larry and Joyce
remembered eating cacao from when they were in the Peace Corps in
Ghana in the 60s. Colleen and I were introduced to it on our last trip to
Panama.





We also picked a couple hundred pounds of grapefruit and oranges.
Every one of the fruits either was eaten whole or made into juice. The
white slimy stuff around the cacao beans is tasty, but we soon got the
idea to try to make chocolate. We asked Steve how to make it and
decided that it was a fairly low tech process and at least possible.
Then we found a website that offered more detailed information and
the rest is history.




Larry and Kathe are cracking open the pods and putting the slimy
beans into a bucket to ferment. We didn't really know how long to
ferment them so we just stuck the bucket in a corner of Larry and
Joyce's 5th wheel and Larry occasionally stirred up the beans. As the
days went by they got pretty smelly until we decided that it must be
long enough. We got them out of the bucket and rinsed them off.



This is what the beans inside the pods look like. The slimy stuff is kind
of sweet/sour and does not taste anything like chocolate. The beans
under the slimy stuff are in a husk and the beans themselves are a
beautiful deep purple color. They are quite bitter at this point and you
barely get a hint of the fact that they are really chocolate.






The next step is to dry the beans. We put them in pans on a table
while we were staying at Finca Ixobel. Every time it rained we had to
run to put them under cover. This step took about 3 days and we
finished up after we moved to Rio Dulce.




After they were dry we roasted them in the oven. We now think that
roasting them in a skillet on the stove in small batches until they start
to 'pop' is better. Then we had to peel off the skin from the individual
beans. Up until this point the group had been very skeptical that Larry
and Kathe were really going to get any chocolate out of this messy and
stinky project. The rest of the Loose Chickens had finally become
believers and decided that they'd better help if they wanted any of the
final product. We all sat under the palapa in Florencia, near Antigua,
by lantern light and got them peeled.


We then put the roasted beans in a food processor and ground them
until they started to become a thick paste as the oils were released
from the dried beans. The next step was to add sugar and condensed
milk to the 'chocolate liquor' as the thick oily paste is called. Since we
didn't have a recipe - Hershey's declined to assist us with the recipe -
we had to experiment a bit to get a final product that was usable. We
ended up using a recipe of one part chocolate liquor to one part sugar
to one part condensed milk and have a dark creamy semi-sweet
chocolate.


In the bowl with the spatula is the 'chocolate liquor' and in the
processor is the final product that becomes creamier as the friction
from the blade creates heat. We were not able to get it as creamy as
the commercial products, but we also did not add any emulsifiers or
paraffin either. You would not believe how good it is.
Copyright - All Rights Reserved
2005
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Making Chocolate
Around the World with Kathe and Colleen