Wait until you learn about the ridiculous hoops you need to jump through to make cocoa or coffee beans into something palatable, especially compared to hot leaf juicetea.
Cacao isn’t too bad. Eat the fruit, spit out the seeds into a pile, ferment a few days, roast, peal, grind and you got it. There are some details to the ferment but it’s not more complicated than any other ferment d food.
As I understand it, the hard parts are removing the bitterness and getting the texture to be anything other than unpleasantly gritty. The traditional Meso-american cocoa was a spicy bitter drink; what we think of as “chocolate” today wasn’t invented until fairly recently and requires a fairly involved process.
I mean I grow it and have taken it to the nib stage and it came out quite tasty. Really not too bad in terms of process. It’s a few day/ week of fermentation followed by drying and roasting. I process it a few times a year, when I’ve got enough to actually process (I only have a handful of cacao trees).
Compared to most of what I grow, which is Vanilla, cacao is a walk in the park. Vanilla requires manual pollination, care monitoring of conditions, and a fermentation and curing process that has many steps, some daily , for months.
Wait until you learn about the ridiculous hoops you need to jump through to make cocoa or coffee beans into something palatable, especially compared to
hot leaf juicetea.Ayyyyy teaaa gang rise up.
Present and accounted for!
Cacao isn’t too bad. Eat the fruit, spit out the seeds into a pile, ferment a few days, roast, peal, grind and you got it. There are some details to the ferment but it’s not more complicated than any other ferment d food.
As I understand it, the hard parts are removing the bitterness and getting the texture to be anything other than unpleasantly gritty. The traditional Meso-american cocoa was a spicy bitter drink; what we think of as “chocolate” today wasn’t invented until fairly recently and requires a fairly involved process.
I mean I grow it and have taken it to the nib stage and it came out quite tasty. Really not too bad in terms of process. It’s a few day/ week of fermentation followed by drying and roasting. I process it a few times a year, when I’ve got enough to actually process (I only have a handful of cacao trees).
Compared to most of what I grow, which is Vanilla, cacao is a walk in the park. Vanilla requires manual pollination, care monitoring of conditions, and a fermentation and curing process that has many steps, some daily , for months.
Not to mention coffee beans that have been shat:
civet coffee (Kopi Luwak)