Amazonian cacao for your Valentine's Day

[asakiyume]

Apparently I never shared these pictures here! But what better day than Valentine's Day, when people give chocolate to one another.

As you no doubt know, a lot of chocolate is produced using cacao that's obtained and grown in ways that are exploitative and bad for the environment. What I saw, though, was small family production--probably just for local consumption.

Like coffee, cacao *can* be a very beneficial crop to cultivate because it can grow in the shade of larger trees. It can be a forest-preserving crop. (Of course that's not what Big Chocolate encourages.)

Here is a small cacao tree with some cacao pods on it.



If you cut open one of those pods, this is what you see. The milky fruit is **delicious** (and tastes nothing like chocolate. It's full of flavor and reminds me slightly of a mangosteen.) What makes us chocolate are the pips--the beans--in the center of the fruits. Each pod has a bunch of these, as you can tell from how the fruit is packed in there.




Here are pips, drying in the sun. Apparently the recommended process is to ferment the beans and fruit together and then to dry them. So these have probably been fermented. (Obviously if you do that, you don't get to enjoy the fruit!) Some farmers, though, just dry the pips without fermenting them first. According to the article I read, that results in the pips being "overly bitter and astringent." But if you're growing just for your own purposes, you can do as you please. So maybe these pips haven't been fermented.



I had no chocolate when I was there, but my tutor often has chocolate con pan for her breakfast, by which she means hot chocolate: cocoa powder added to boiling water, with then as much milk powder and sugar added as you like. I've tried preparing it that way: it's nice!

Comments

[sartorias]

Wow, those photos are interesting. I wonder what it smells like. If there are any chocolate notes.

[asakiyume]

Not that I noticed--it was richly fruity. But who knows: I had only the one experience.

I'm thinking of the difference between cilantro, the green herb, and coriander, the crushed seeds. Both have really distinctive flavors, but to my mind they're very different.

[sartorias]

Yeah, me, too!

[asakiyume]

So I think the same could be true of the fruit versus the seed, here.

[sartorias]

Ah, yep! (I did not know those two were related at all!)

[ranunculus]

I had the pleasure once of eating the fruit and seeing the process of removing the pips. I do not remember any chocolate notes to the fruit. The one I had tasted lemony in a really nice sweet way. REALLY good.

[asakiyume]

REALLY good is definitely my memory, too!

[sartorias]

That does sound delicious!

[sovay]

The milky fruit is **delicious** (and tastes nothing like chocolate. It's full of flavor and reminds me slightly of a mangosteen.)

Huh. I wonder if it is also caffeinated. If not, I could eat it.

[asakiyume]

I have no idea, but I feel like, probably not? Why: because (For example) the fruits of peaches don't have any of the arsenic that's in their pits. Or look at rhubarb!

I would love for you to be able to eat cacao fruit.

[sovay]

I would love for you to be able to eat cacao fruit.

Thank you! I'd love to try it.

[squirrelitude]

A little correction -- it's cyanide, not arsenic, that's in the seeds of the stone fruits (and some others in the rose family, such as apples).

[asakiyume]

Thank you! I *knew* I should have checked before I blithely typed that!

[squirrelitude]

It's an *extremely* common misconception, if that helps. :-)

[asakiyume]

In my case it was my brain going "pick a poison, any poison--that'll be it!!" WRONG. It reminds me of a section in the Laurie Anderson song "Babydoll":

I'm wracking my brains trying to think
Of another word for horse
I ask my brain for some assistance
And he says, Huh... Let's see... How about cow?
That's close.

Poor arsenic and cyanide--so unique, each their own special poison, and people like me go and grab whichever is in the mental closet!

[rachelmanija]

I want to eat cacao fruit.

[asakiyume]

It is very delicious, and I hope you get the chance one day!

[mallorys_camera]

Max and I went to a chocolate museum in Guatemala where we got the opportunity to process the cacao fruit into confectionary chocolate, and it was very fun. 😀

[asakiyume]

What a great activity!

[osprey_archer]

So delightful that you got to try cacao fruit! And so interesting that it doesn't taste of chocolate at all - although as you say, peach fruit has none of the cyanide in peach pips, etc., so really it shouldn't be surprising that different parts of plant have different flavors...

[asakiyume]

I was also thinking, like I said to sartorias, of cilantro and coriander--those two taste nothing alike either!

[purlewe]

I loved that you shared these both here and Bsky. Thanks!!!

[asakiyume]

My pleasure! Social media is so fragmented now, when I have something I really want to share, I go W-I-D-E

[http://lotuslandfineart.com/velvetrope/]

I'd love to try that fruit some day!

[asakiyume]

It is *great*, and I hope you get a chance!

[squirrelitude]

A local chocolatier here was selling "miel de cacao" truffles -- the cacao pulp is boiled down to produce a tangy, sticky syrup. It was pleasant, similar to tamarind. I'd love to try the fresh pulp some time, though...

[asakiyume]

I hope you get a chance! I loved it.

[lilysea]

I am 100% here for growing chocolate/coffee

in the shade of taller trees

that creates wildlife corridors

so that birds and other wildlife

can make it from [larger habitat A] to [larger habitat B]

[asakiyume]

Amen! That's two of us :-)

[heleninwales]

Thanks for the fascinating information about the cacao fruit. I had no idea such a thing existed. Interestingly, the way your tutor made her hot chocolate is pretty much the way we traditionally made the cocoa drink in the UK. I still make it that way, but with fresh milk rather than powered.

[asakiyume]

I would make it more milk based than water based, so I was surprised (and happy) to find out that, contrary to my expectations, it wasn't overly watery and in fact very smooth and chocolate-y. In general I'd use fresh milk, though, too--and I figure that's okay as a switch in the recipe. I figured they probably use dried milk because it's so much easier to store in that climate.

[minoanmiss]

Oh you've reminded me of my childhood summers in Jamaica. I still remember being so SURPRISED that the pulp around cacao seeds tasted like a tropical fruit and nothing like chocolate.

[asakiyume]

Right? Amazing!

[yamamanama]

"Vamlumtimes is serious times."
–Teen Girl Squad

[asakiyume]

TEEN GIRL SQUAD! SO GROOD!

[amaebi]

We are major fans of Lydgate Farms on Kauai, a small craft establishment where they also produce vanilla and honey (sweet with nectar from foxtail palms) and grow lots of varied tropical fruits and odd flyers like, for example, papyrus, just for the interest of it. Ethical green chocolate FTW!

[asakiyume]

Oooh, that place sounds lovely! That kind of business is great: interesting for visitors, supportive and useful in the local economy, and environmentally sound.

[med_cat]

Fascinating, thanks!

[asakiyume]

My pleasure!

[smokingboot]

Thank you for these photos, I am fascinated by the deep purple and brown of the pods, they make me want to paint them. Intriguing re the milky fruit and pips. I have never tasted mangosteen. Are they at all like Cherimoya?

[asakiyume]

I for my part have never tasted cherimoya!

Mangosteens are just full of flavor... maybe a bit like mangos, indeed, though different too. Describing flavors is so hard!