A Cacao Recipe, a Rant About Informational Access, and a Story of Inspiration
How to make chocolate for personal consumption using limited tech from cacao pods you found at the market.
First: Open the pod using either:
A knife, trying not to damage the inner seeds.
Or blunt force against the earth, both generously provided by your creator.
Cacao pods come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. No clue what type this is.
Optional: Eat the sticky white fruit around the pod, then discard the precious seed as not to mix your saliva with the later fermentation.
The fruits I bought are drier than ones I’ve seen online. They have a light bright yogurt taste with a gummy mouthfeel. Nice to suck on, but the chocolate is infinitely better than the fruit.
Second: Fermentation. Insert the seeds into any airtight glass container.
Optional: Don’t do that, but rather wrap in banana leaves. I did not do this, but it is a method used by others, though usually in larger batches. Does an aerobic or anaerobic environment matter in the end? I don’t know, but anaerobic means anti pests.
I conveniently have an unlimited supply of Lao Gan Ma jars ready at all times.
Third: Leave out in the sun to ferment for about 6 days. If using glass, open the jar once a day to release gas and avoid making a [REDACTED]. 6 days is arbitrary, your real indicator is when the white flesh becomes an almond-like brown, or when you get tired of waiting. Be mindful of mold, if you get mold, it is because you failed to practice sufficient mindfulness. Try again and think harder.
Fourth: Leave out in the sun uncovered in a single layer on a tray/plate for as many hours are needed to dry.
Optional: Don’t do that
They could be almonds if you’ve never seen one and have only had one described to you. This is post fermentation, post drying.
Fifth: Once dry (or not) roast in a pan until aromatic. Use your senses to know when you’re done. Think of coffee. If darkly roasted, more char is tasted with less fruity chocolate flavor. If under roasted, vegetable and tannin flavors are still present. If perfectly roasted, it is a sign you’re a natural and if you want to be somebody in life you need to invest your life savings into an artisanal chocolatier store called “Jenn’s Treats 😊” or “Mystic Käköw” (in Papyrus font) where your close friends and family are the only customers.
Sixth: Remove the skin. This should be easy enough to peel with only fingers without much resistance. If you are more brute inclined, lightly pound the seeds in a mortar & pestle then winnow away the skin.
Post-roast yet pre-peel. The char is chill.
Seventh: These are cacao nibs, stop here if you are into that. This is my preferred final state. No need to refrigerate.
Eighth: Grind the nibs in a mortar & pestle until a paste is formed. The paste will later resolidify into a bloc unless additional oil is added. Adding oil will keep it more malleable. This is now chocolate that it is infinitely modifiable.
God, I love these so much. I swear they aren’t like the baker’s chocolate we all snuck into as kids thinking it was the sweet stuff only to develop a formative memory of spitting it out and swearing off dark chocolate for a lifetime. It has a ton of flavor and even an under developed palate could enjoy.
Optionally: While grinding, add things you like
Dark chocolate: Add a little sugar (maybe oil and maybe salt)
- 80% chocolate comes from having an 80-20 ratio of chocolate to sugar
Milk chocolate: Add sugar and powered milk (maybe oil and maybe salt)
There are countless traditional Central American recipes that generally involve spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, chilies, or vanilla. This is then mixed with hot water then aerated before drinking. Find a recipe you like or get creative.
Try dried fruits, nuts, or snake oil superfood powders of your preference like maca or moringa.
This is your chocolate, and your life, so do what you’re into.
Who the above recipe is for and who it is not for.
Putting aside the various societally fracturing problems related to it, the near infinite abundance of information on the internet is dope, to put it briefly. Every moment an ever-growing amount of people log on and gain access to this pantheon of knowledge. An issue arises where this information is kept behind the gates of language or cultural barriers. 60% of all web content is in English, with the next group of large languages hovering around 5%. It is important to note that this share is of languages available online and languages spoken is levelling out, yet the gap persists. There are two ways for non-English speakers to access the pantheon. The first is to support, contribute, or wait for the development of the web in one’s native language as well as trust the advancement of translation technologies. The second is to learn English, a useful skill for the internationally minded and phonetically-induced-headache enjoyers. As an English language volunteer working in a country actively seeking to increase its number of English speakers, my focus in this rant is on the latter of these two options. This is where we run into the second issue beyond the language barrier, relevance of the information in the pantheon.
Smol Bean Alert
The Venn-Diagram of English popularity and cacao feasibility is a slim though existent crossover. In this skinny overlap are Hawaiian homesteaders, Filipino cacao plantation owners, and occasionally insufferable North American mystics living in Central America. The homesteaders have digestible content but are often propelled by someone’s parent’s credit card being pushed to the limit for all the capital investments. The Filipino plantation’s online content is focused on helping other Filipino plantations at scales not helpful for little ol’ me or the subsistence farmer who want to a few pods for personal use. Lastly, when it comes to the North American mystics in Central America, I don’t trust anyone who claims a single product is a cure-all for all of life’s ills. Unless that single cure-all happens to be the one I believe in, fiber. One could always take the approach I did, by mixing and matching useful parts of all the different approaches before creating a method that worked for me, at risk of losing a weekend with a nose glued to the computer.
Oh the adventures you’ll have with weekends free from your nose in the computer.
The question is likely to be raised, why didn’t I just ask local people how they process cacao? Since it grows here, surely people know how to process it. Well I did ask people, many people, but not a single person in my area knew how. My area is famous for coffee so no one grows cacao, but yet everyone knew someone who grew it but didn’t know how to process it. Maybe the wisest action would’ve been to talk to an actual producer on the island, but then I wouldn’t have this long rant to write about for my tri-monthly article quota. I still stand by the foundational claim of this essay, that availability to relevant information in many languages is good and a better world will have more of it. And finally, because I know PCV Kyle will read this, maybe when GPT 5.0 comes out, my entire argument will become moot because anyone can use AI to learn anything, but it won’t stop me from finding something to rant about.
Why I Like Chocolate and a Commentary on Minimalism
It started with my dad foraging through his dark chocolate stash above the living room TV to give me bits of the good stuff. It was the first time I’d experienced flavors so rich and complex, and it paired so perfectly with the self-righteousness of being the kid who preferred dark chocolate. I didn’t know it then, but it’d kindle an interest in food and drink I’d continue to carry to this day.
The cover photo shows me smiling big, looking good. The reward for those who read through is to see the behind the scenes of me choking and crying from smoke.
A decade later I’d find myself sitting in Peterson Hall of the University of California San Diego listening to Professor Patterson lecture for a class of The Making of the Modern World discussing Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Tastes of Paradise where he’d introduce us all to Genussmittel. This German word groups items like chocolate as well as all the luxury consumables that make life a little more, ranging from the familiar and unexceptional salt, spices, coffee, and tea to the marginally more fringe alcohol and tobacco all the way to hard drugs. These items are all luxuries because asides from salt, not one person needs any of them for baseline survival, except for the cheugy millennial who swears they need their Starbees. Even with salt, our use of it has drifted far from necessity and has creeped into gluttonous indulgence. Despite their lack of necessity, they enhance our life in terms of our satisfaction, productivity, and (occasionally) destruction. These products have existed on the periphery of Human History yet have stood boldly in the background defining our relationships with each other. There is an incredibly rich history of interactions humans have had with both Genussmittel, with each other about them, and where we draw the line of acceptability; anyone interested should read Tastes of Paradise as Schivelbusch can paint a better picture than my ramblings.
It’s a pretty photo
The most recent sources of inspiration came from my time working in craft coffee, craft cocktails, and nice-ish cooking. In my view, the previous generation of the drinks industry focused on what people could add to the base Genussmittel as to set oneself apart from the rest. This is the world that birthed and embraced the Frappuccino, lattes with a pump of each of the 15 syrups to ensure not any coffee is noticed, and cocktails like the Mudslide and AMF. These are beverages designed to confuse and excite the senses to taste any one thing, but rather a wall of sensory riding on crippling amounts of sugar and artificial flavors. Today’s 20–40-year-olds grew up in this world. Some, like me, felt anywhere from disillusioned to bored of its excesses; and, as seems to be the trend of any new generation, zagged hard. Starting in the early 2000’s and peaking in the mid 2010’s was a new era of beverages that walked fingers laced with hipster minimalism, both draped over each other like a high school couple.
Why read about my brief thoughts on minimalism and how it relates to chocolate when you could get lost in ur local forest.
This new era sought to strip down the product to its essentials, focusing primarily on quality ingredients and either white walls and sans-serif font in the coffee world or incandescent lightbulbs and suspenders in the cocktail world. It’s funny now to laugh at how the businesses and people inspired by minimalism to distinguish themselves from their current trend, became the new trend to get lost in; however, I became an adult during the peak of this period and was heavily influenced by its seemingly radical approach to deconstruct consumption as we (I) knew it. Tasting two different single origin coffees or playing around with different brew methods blew my mind at the number of variables there are to the flavors of a product I previously understood as something to hide with ice and syrups. Previously, the positive answer to any question of “how is it?” about any boozy drink was, “good, I can’t even taste the alcohol” until I realized alcohol’s ability to extract and then pair complex and interesting flavors. The conversation moved from how to hide it to how to showcase it.
Market day in Ermera. Not the market I got the Cacao from, that was in the capital, Dili.
In extremely mid 20’s fashion, I used this ‘revolutionary’ lens to ask what is good and what is bad, what is worth keeping and excelling and what can be left behind. Stemming from this shift, I made many changes to my life that made me a much happier person. Count me as a winner from my own interpretation of the multi-faced trend of minimalism. On this same stream of dubs I was on, I found myself at the Hillcrest Farmer’s Market where I met a very lovely lady selling craft chocolate. The hipsters have come for the chocolate. As I was trying all her single origin chocolates, she was telling me the variables that that created the flavors I was tasting as I was tasting them like a sport’s color commentator calling a game winning drive. How did she know what was going on in my mouth, and how did all these chocolates with identical ingredients list have such radically different profiles? This type of chocolate broke the mold of what I had known chocolate to be while also reaffirming that first bite of the good stuff from my dad’s stash all those years ago. You can think of your own Ratatouille reference, I have chocolate to make.
