Took a pretty cool chocolate tour today. Here’s what I can remember…
– They have about 1,000 chocolate trees; each tree will get about 20 pods. However, there is a fungus that will kill about 40% of the pods.
– This pod was cracked open by smashing it against a tree
– Each pod has between 20 – 50 “seeds” or beans.
– They take the beans, throw it into this bucket, and they sit in there for five days fermenting…
– Next, they take the beans and dry them out for 15 days in this little shack.
– The beans are now hard and they gently crack open the bean shells with this huge pestle, giving you the inner bean meat
– The meat is now grinded down into shavings by this hand crank.
These shavings are now added to the heated milk, giving us some hot chocolate.
– The shavings can also be combined with sugar to make these really yummy chocolate pieces that are 90% chocolate and 10% sugar.
Sweet!
Our tour also included a bunch of fruit tastings of soursop, papaya, mango, pineapple and fresh sugar cane juice.
