CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE!

After leaving the banana plantation, our adventure got even better.  We traveled to Finmac, which is the site where I’ll be collecting data for my independent research project during the months of March and April.  On the farm, we took a tour through the cacao trees, and we saw sloths!  

A lot of research takes place on Finmac, because it has been organically managed for over 30 years and so it provides a good case study for long-term organic farming.  It is also an ideal site to study sloths, because cacao trees are maintained at only about 6 feet tall, so it’s easy to locate and observe sloths (in other ecosystems, they live too high up in the trees to be easily studied).  There are around 100 sloths that have been identified living on Finmac, and they are all fitted with radio collars to be more easily tracked.  This way, researchers can tell how far and how fast sloths move, and which types of vegetation they prefer to travel through.  We got to see a female sloth with a month-old baby clinging to her stomach, and I held a juvenile sloth!  

Smiling Sloth

Mama sloth with a baby clinging to her stomach!

After wandering through the cacao trees for a while, we got to see the rest of the process of making chocolate.  I had already seen most of the process when I worked on a farm in Ecuador last year, but this was on a much larger-scale and more mechanized.  

So!  Here’s how chocolate is made:

When ripe, workers harvest the fruits from the trees and haul them in a train (similar to the one on the banana farm) to be processed. 

Cacao train

 The fruits are loaded onto a conveyor belt, which brings them to a machine that breaks them open and separates the seeds from the shell.

Loading the conveyor belt

 The cacao seeds are surrounded with a white, slimy pulp that tastes really good – sweet and a little sour.  Indigenous South-Americans simply ate the pulp of the fruit in this way; it was only the Aztecs in Mexico who discovered that the cacao tree could yield an even more delicious treat.

Tasting Cacao fruit

The seeds, still surrounded by pulp, are covered in wooden boxes to ferment for several days.  This is an important process because it kills the plant embryo within the seeds, sealing in the cocoa flavor.  If fermentation didn’t occur, the plant embryo would begin to grow, sucking up the nutrients within the seed that give cocoa it’s yummy aroma and flavor. 

 After they are finished fermenting, the seeds are spread out to dry.  In smaller-scale operations, this is done by simply laying them out in the sun, but at Finmac they have equipment that releases hot air to speed the drying process.

Fermented seeds laid out to dry

Once the seeds have dried to 7% moisture, it’s time to turn them into chocolate!  Most cacao farmers sell their seeds to companies in the US or Europe at this point, but by carrying out the rest of the chocolate-making process on his farm, Hugo (the owner) is adding value to his product so that he can make a better profit margin.  First it’s important to check the quality of the seeds to make sure they are properly fermented and dried.

This apparatus cuts the seeds in half to check their quality

Dried and fermented seeds, ready to be toasted

 Then the seeds are sent through a series of machines that toast them, remove the shells, finely grind them, add some amount of sugar depending on what percentage cacao is being made at that moment, and then stirs the melted chocolate for 72 hours to produce a fine texture.  What comes out is a huge chunk of untempered chocolate, that tastes absolutely delicious but doesn’t yet look like a satisfyingly-shiny chocolate bar.  

This is where the Amazilias women come in!  Las Mujeres de Amazilia is a really awesome project started in Pueblo Nuevo (the town where Finmac is located).  A group of local women buy some of this crude chocolate from Hugo and turn it into delicious chocolate bars by tempering it (heating it up to boiling, pouring into molds, and then quickly placing in a cold refrigerator; this produces a nice dark, shiny chocolate bar) and adding yummy ingredients.  While most of the chocolate he produces goes to Belgium, this is a way for Hugo to support the local economy, and to improve the economic and social status of rural women.

Mujeres de Amazilia chocolate

The Mujeres de Amazilia also cooked us a delicious lunch after we came back from our tour of the chocolate plant – it was a typical Costa Rican casado, consisting of gallo pinto (essentially rice and beans), chicken, salad, and fried plantains.  Of course we had chocolate for dessert, and of course we all were delighted to support these women by buying lots and lots of chocolate from them!  Friends and family, please pretend to be surprised by the souvenirs I bring back for you.

Enjoying lunch on the cacao farm

Yummy lunch!

What an amazing experience!  I couldn’t help but feel a little bit smug that I get to come back here in a couple weeks for two whole months.

Bellies full of chocolate, we loaded into the bus for the next part of our trip – heading to the Tirimbina Biological Reserve!  Stay tuned for that experience!