While doing a home-stay in Puerto Jiménez, I learned how to make homemade chocolate. My host, Elias, was pretty great and taught me step-by-step:
★ Pick and open the fruit of the plant (preferably, with a machete)
★ Inside, there is white stuff around the seeds… The white part is sweet like candy and delicious!
★ Spit out the seeds and set to dry
★ Ferment the seeds in wooden box for about 6 days… Seeds will turn black
★ Dry in sun for about 5 more days (until conpletely dry)
★ Roast on stove
★ Peel shells and separate shells from seeds (actually, they’re not really hard shells; they’re more like thin flakes that come right off if you roll the seed between your thumb and index finger)
✩ Save the “shells” to make chocolate tea
★ Grind seeds into powder
★ Put water and sugar in a pan, and slowly heat
★ Add cocoa to got sugar-water mix
★ Cool in fridge
When it is cold and hard, it’s like a super dark chocolate bar. It was delicious! I also love that we made it completely from raw ingredients, so nothing about it was processed at all.
This is the finished product:
.
Share Your Thoughts!
What do you think? Would you try this at home if you had the chocolate *fruit* ? (It’s a fruit, right??) Can we buy this is the U.S.?
.
.
This is the most awesome post to date. Hope you took a lot of pics to post.
Just updated with pictures! =)