This morning (Saturday) I went to a chocolate making class at my Spanish school. The brother of the director of our school, Eduardo, has taken us on various trips through the school and is always helping out. His wife, Sindy, and daughter, Andrea, live in the school too. Their primary business is making and selling chocolates. They usually have their door open during our break at school to buy chocofrutas (chocolate-covered fruits). My favorites are the chocofresas (strawberries) and chocopinas (pineapple). As it turns out, they actually make all their own chocolate from scratch (not the cheap chocolate they use for the fruits) and sell it in markets around the area.
Sindy led the class and a bit of history. Her great grandparents had been chocolate for a lifetime, passed on the lessons to her grandparents, and so on. Chocolate was traditionally a drink of warriors to prepare them for battle. They drank the chocolate without sugar and were energized. Now the best quality chocolate is prepared with one pound of sugar with one pound of cocoa. She said if you buy less expensive chocolate, they use more sugar as filler than cocoa – closer to five pounds of sugar with one pound of cocoa.
To begin with, cocoa is grown on large farms in the Costal region. Workers harvest the seeds from inside the cocoa fruit – the seeds look a bit like thick almonds with more round ends. These seeds are fermented, washed, and dried then sold at market. When you receive your bag of cocoa, you need to first sort the seeds by size. This ensures the optimal amount of time for toasting. To toast, we simply put the seeds on the stove in a hot pan – no oil, water, grease. With constant stirring, the seeds start to change to a dark brown color and you can hear them “pop” as the oil inside them is heating up. Then we removed the seeds from heat and allowed them to cool before removing the peel/skin from around the seeds. It was a bit like shelling peanuts. The next step is to mash the toasted cocoa into a paste. Using a molina de mano (hand crank), Sindy slowly poured seeds into the top as we took turns grinding the seeds. At this point, we could start to see the oils coming from the seeds and the cocoa seeds turning into a rich chocolatey paste. The pouree was then poured through the crank twice more with a greater pressure setting to further break down the seeds. We all check the consistency by rubbing in between our fingers. The taste at this point was very bitter (like a 95% cocoa chocolate bar). The paste was mixed with sugar in a large bowl and then run through the grinder again. Lastly, the chocolate was poured into a giant plastic bag and beat. We laid it on the counter and took turns hitting it with the palm of our hands. This again released more oil and, after, you could see air bubbles on the surface of the chocolate.
We then took the final product, formed it into shapes like cookies, and allowed it to dry for an hour. I made a heart for Diana (she said she was shape impaired), a car, a smiley face, and two circles. With your chocolate cookie, you can either eat it as it is – a combination of sweet and sugar – or add it to hot water and make hot chocolate. I prefer the diluted flavor of the hot chocolate to the chocolate cookie. I brought two cookies home to share with my host family. Josie quickly picked up the smiley face and sucked on it like a popsicle for hours.
In total, the process took us about two hours and we used four pounds of cocoa and four pounds of sugar. Sindy and Eduardo use close to seventy pounds of cocoa a week for their chocolates and make it all by hand. Sindy said she saw a program once on the Discovery channel of how they make chocolate at Hersheys; the principles are similar but the mechanisms are different. I can only imagine how much cocoa they use. I have a greater appreciation for the process and the cocoa plants. I am still befuddled that someone figured out how to use a seed from a fruit that you don’t eat, toast it, mash it, and eat it. I want to learn more about the commercial process for comparison.
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