Pat’s Wildways: Chocolate from scratch

Well, it took an overnight stay in a Mayan home in Belize for me to figure out the difference between cacao and cocoa. I was visiting Juanita and Reiny Choc in Indian Creek Village and they toured me around their jungled few hundred-acre cacao plantation. I kept saying “cocoa” as they harvested the yellow pods containing seeds that ultimately become chocolate. They kept correcting me. It’s cacao, not cocoa, they said. Coco is something entirely different in their world — it's taro root that they dig up and eat as a tuber. No wonder I was confused.

And here’s how cacao makes the transition from the tree to an edible food — chocolate — revered around the world. Cacao is a tropical tree with large seedpods that grow from the trunks and heavy branches, not on the ends of branches like most fruits I’m familiar with. Their property is loaded with these trees, all bearing fruit in different stages and in different colors of green, yellow, red and orange. While we toured around, they picked a ripe yellow pod and showed me the contents, a mass of seeds with a gelatinous covering, which they encouraged me to taste. And so I did. It was refreshing and surprisingly not anything like chocolate, just another sweet tropical taste like many of the other fruits I’ve sampled in Belize.

Juanita and Reiny make small batches of cacao from these seeds, one tarp-full of drying “beans” (as they are called) processed at a time. The cacao beans are removed from the pod, washed, and laid out on a tarp in their yard for a few days until they ferment a bit and dry out. Even this part of the process takes a lot of work on their part. The beans need to be constantly rotated for even drying, and brought inside again when it rains, as it often does in the tropics. Someone needs to constantly supervise the drying process. But for Juanita and Reiny this is a time to also weave their baskets made from the jippi jappa palm fronds, also abundant in their jungle.

When the beans have been in the sun long enough, they are roasted over their wood-fired stove, turned often to prevent burning. The morning I woke up in their home, there was already a fire burning and cacao beans roasting well before dawn. These people work all the time! They killed and butchered a chicken while the beans roasted, added herbs and greens to a boiling pot, and simmered chicken parts, young pumpkin, coco and other ingredients for hours to make their distinctive caldo stew.

When the cacao was roasted long enough, Reiny, with the “help” of her 4-year-old son Shawn, ground them into a powder, which then had to be winnowed outdoors in a breeze to remove any of the covering still left. And, finally, they mixed the powder with water and a bit of sugar and presented me with a natural chocolate-flavored drink direct from the jungle. Unlike most store-bought cocoa powder, this has not been alkalized, a process done to reduce bitterness to make the more typical Dutch chocolate that we are more familiar with. No, this is the real deal.

Juanita sent me off with a package of this fresh cacao and I spent the rest of my stay in Belize adding a spoonful with a bit of sugar and some milk to my usual morning coffee. Actually, Bucko is my barista. Every morning, wherever we are, he makes and brings me coffee in bed. There are a number of professional cacao plantations that mass-produce cacao, some for export to be processed elsewhere, and some to be made into chocolate products sold in the country. Now that I am home, I have purchased more 100% unalkalized cacao from Amazon. And thanks to Juanita and Reiny, Bucko has to up his coffee-making game every morning. Poor Bucko.

Next time I visit Juanita, Reiny and Shawn in Indian Creek Village, I will see if they have more fresh processed cacao ready and I will happily procure a lot of it, enough to last me until I go to Belize again. There is always a take-home message I get from my repeated trips to Belize. And now my take-home is tangible. Freshly made cacao! Perfect!

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. patandbucko@yahoo.com