WARNING: THIS IS A LONG POST ... NERD ALERT! :)
One day when I was walking in Hilo I saw a coffee shop with an ad for a chocolate making class. Of course I just HAD to take this class and I dragged along Chris (okay, I didn't really drag him - he was pretty interested too!) and after several false starts (once we were sick, the next class the instructor was sick and then it POURED) we finally took the class today.
Tom Sharkey used to be a teacher but then quit teaching to start his farm in Papaikou (just outside Hilo). It was raining all day, but that's Hilo so the show went on. Our group was actually mostly people who were really interested in starting their own cacao growing ventures, so Chris and I were a little out of place, but we learned a lot!
First Tom took us through his grove of cacao plants. There are several different varietals, but I think Tom grows Criollo, Forastero and Trinitario.
CACAO FLOWERS AND BABY PODS
CACAO GROVE
Our first task was to wander through the grove and pluck down ripe cacao pods. The color doesn't really matter so much although you are looking generally at red/orange/yellow pods. You can tell which ones to pick if you scratch the pod and the flesh is yellow under the skin rather than green. I was amazed at how many pods grow on a tree. Tom says he picks about once to twice a month.
PICKING A POD
The other thing that is really neat about this little farming endeavor is that the vine you see in the picture below is a vanilla bean vine growing on the cacao!
CHRIS + CACAO + VANILLA
CHRIS WITH VANILLA BEANS AND A CACAO POD
Along the way we sampled some of the beans from right off the tree. The fleshy white fruit around the bean varies, but there was one varietal we tried that was delicious. It was sweet and tarty...but I wasn't a fan of eating the bean with it.
Once you gather a sack of cacao pods then we settled in for stage two:
OUR HARVEST
Basically you whack the pod a few times with a mallet, crack open the pod and pull the beans off the "umbilical cord." You can get anywhere from 20-60 beans per pod. It's goopy and messy, but pretty cathartic! This ended up actually being my favorite part of the tour :0)
WHACK, CRACK OPEN THE POD, PULL OUT THE BEANS
I ACCIDENTALLY PULLED OUT THE ENTIRE UMBILICAL CORD AND THE BEANS!
Once you've opened the pods and pulled the beans out, the fermentation process starts. Basically the beans are left out and the natural yeast in the environment start eating away the fruit. This takes about 5-7 days with daily stirring of the beans to ensure they are constantly getting exposed to the yeast, oxygen, etc. The beans get up to 115 degrees through this natural process! This is when you develop the chocolate flavor.
The beans are then laid out into the sun to dry. The temperamental Hilo weather can be somewhat uncooperative, but generally they just lay out in the sun to dry out. This can take up to 6 days. The beans are ready when you can crack them open.
DRIED BEANSAt this point we got to sample the raw cacao beans. The first thing you get hit with is chocolate flavor, but then BAM this incredibly bitter and lingering taste. Depending on the bean varietal, how it fermented and how it dried the bitterness can be slightly different...but still BITTER. BLAGH!
You don't have to roast the cacao beans, but it really brings up the chocolate flavor if you do so.
Next Tom runs his beans through a Crackenstein which basically crushes up his beans and nibs:
NIBS & BEAN SHELLSThen he winnows the mix so that he gets just the nibs:
NIBS
The nibs are still incredibly bitter...yuck! However, after this process we are ready to head into the kitchen :)
In the kitchen, Tom runs his nibs through a Champion juicer or peanut butter maker. This makes a chocolate paste.
MAKING CHOCOLATE PASTE
Then the paste is put into a Santha wet grinder which conches and refines the chocolate. Conching allows the chocolate to lose some of "fresh" taste and release some of that bitterness and tannins. Refining is allows you to grind up all the little particles so that you can have really smooth chocolate. Tom runs his chocolate through the Santha for at least three days.
VIEW INSIDE THE SANTHA WET GRINDER
At this stage you can add your additives into the chocolate. For our class we just added vanilla (made from the extract Tom made with Seagrams' vodka and some of his own pods) and sugar. After the ingredients are added and the chocolate has been conched and refined, you have to temper it. Tempering allows chocolate to get its glossy finish and it's all about heating and cooling the chocolate. Once we tempered our chocolate we poured it into squeeze bottles and got ready to fill our molds! I like the technique of a pour and then someone comes along with a squeeze bottle with a cap so that you can add just the right amount. Tap the molds to get out the air bubbles and into the fridge for 15 minutes to cool and harden!
POURING CHOCOLATE INTO THE BAR MOLDS
Once the chocolate hardened we got to bag up our bars and then seal them to take them home! We made chocolate bars and hearts. There was enough for each of to get 3-4 bars and 2 bags of chocolate hearts :)
ASSEMBLY LINE: UNMOLD, BAG, SEAL BAG
FINAL PRODUCTTom is really great. He's really passionate about creating a viable Hawaii cacao plant and it definitely seems to be a labor of love over money. We also each got cacao seedlings and vanilla cuttings! (I think this was because everyone was starting farming...we just lucked out!) I think all these little eco-tourism things Chris and I keep doing on the Big Island make us want to buy a little ag land so we can have a farm with cacao, vanilla, goats, llamas and other fun stuff :)
Some interesting references:
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