Inspired by the Cooper’s example, several years ago here at Steelgrass,
our family farm on Kauai, we began planting tiny cacao seedlings. There
are two main cultivated varieties of cacao, forastero and criollo, and we
planted both. We chose a field surrounded by tall timber bamboo, because
the young cacao trees don’t like wind: they have large leaves, and too
strong a breeze can strip a tree of enough leaves to seriously weaken it.
We’d read that young cacao doesn’t like direct sunlight, either. It’s what
botanists call an ‘understory’ tree, meaning that in the wild it likes to
grow in the filtered light beneath taller forest species. As a result, we
planted our seedlings under a shade-cloth canopy.
Why We Love Our Midges and Gnats
Since then we’ve learned that the reason shaded cacao trees produce more
fruit is not necessarily because they don’t like full sun – in fact, our
trees seem to thrive in either partial shade or full sun. Turns out that
shaded trees give higher yields because of the little midges and gnats
that live in the leaf litter and debris on the ground beneath the trees.
These are the critters that pollinate the cacao flowers, enabling them to
grow into fruit. The better protected these no-see-ums are from the
drying-out effects of the hot sun, the happier they are, and the happier
they are, the more flowers they pollinate.
And what an abundance of flowers! Unlike familiar fruit trees such as
apples, oranges or cherries, cacao flowers and fruits grow directly from
the trunk and major branches of the tree, without stems. During flowering,
which occurs periodically year-round, the tiny pink and white blossoms
share space on the trunk with cacao seedpods in all stages of development,
from barely pollinated flowers, to the first tiny fruits (called
cherelles), to fully grown pods, each of which takes several months to
ripen to maturity.
Harvesting cacao is a simple matter. When the seedpods are ripe, they turn
bright colors. Some are yellow, some orange, others a pale lime green,
crimson red, or dark maroon. From Helen Ferris, one of the pioneer cacao
growers on Kauai, we learned the trick for telling whether a particular
pod is ready to pick. You scrape a small area with your thumbnail. If the
flesh beneath the rind is still green, the pod isn’t yet ripe. If it’s a
rich canary yellow, it’s time to harvest.
The reason ripe cacao pods are so colorful, and so noticeable sticking
straight out from the tree trunk, is because cacao has evolved a unique
reproductive strategy. Unlike most fruits, if a cacao seedpod is not
picked, it won’t drop off the tree, burst open, and release its seeds.
Instead, the pod simply shrivels and dries up. At first glance, this doesn’t
seem to make much sense as a seed dispersal strategy, but the tree has
evolved a better idea. Rather than passively dropping its seeds, cacao has
come to rely on land animals – mostly monkeys and humans, but also rodents
and pigs – to spread them around. Bright colors and prominent visibility
make it easy for these foraging animals to spot the ripe seedpods. The
animal gnaws or breaks them off the tree, then scampers away with its
prize to a safe, secluded spot, where it can chew open the fruit’s thick
rind.
Inside are thirty or more plump seeds, each encased in a delightfully
sweet-tart white pulp. At our farm, we delight island visitors who come to
tour our chocolate orchard by slicing open a ripe pod, and passing it
around so our guests can each taste the fresh seeds.
How Come Raw Chocolate Seeds Taste Great Outside, but Bad
Inside?
The cacao tree’s plan to be fruitful and multiply wouldn’t work if the seeds themselves were edible, however, because then the gathering animal would chew them up. To prevent this, cacao has developed a somewhat bitter, astringent seed. After the animal has licked off the pulp, biting into the seed isn’t particularly pleasant, so it gets spit out – and for the future of the cacao species, mission accomplished!
That not-so-good-tasting seed, of course, is the raw material of chocolate. It consists of the taproot and the two compressed, embryonic leaves of a potential new cacao tree, which botanists call cotyledons, and the chemicals that make it taste unpleasant when raw are actually the precursors to one of the most sublime flavors known to man – chocolate. As we’ve discovered here on the Farm, getting from raw seed to finished chocolate is a complex undertaking, one at least as complicated and demanding as making fine wine.
The first step is fermentation, a week-long chemical process in which heat and beneficial micro-organisms naturally occurring in the environment, such as yeasts and bacteria, bring about chemical changes within the cacao seed, now called a bean, that soften and modify its bitter, tannic taste. The fermented beans are then dried in the sun, after which they can be stored indefinitely, as long as temperature and humidity are controlled.
The next step is to remove the thin shell or husk that surrounds each cacao bean. In our home kitchen, we use a hand grinder to do this, named “Crankandstein” by its manufacturer, which lightly crushes the beans to loosen the husks. The cracked beans and their husks then go into a steep-sided bowl, and the bowl gets taken outdoors, where using a hair-dryer with the heat turned off, we blow away the lighter husks. (These make great garden mulch, and in them cacao farmers have found a new market for what was formerly a waste product). After a minute or two’s work, the husks are dusting the grass in the yard outside the kitchen, and all that’s left in the bowl is glistening fragments of pure cacao, which are now known as nibs. (In commercial chocolate factories, removing the cacao bean shells is done in giant machines called winnowers, but they use a similar crack-and-blow process, only on a larger scale.)
Although the winnowed cacao nibs are solid and dry to the touch, one of the reasons they glisten is that like peanuts, cashews and many nuts, cacao beans consist of more than 50% naturally occurring vegetable fat. This fat, called cocoa butter, melts when you grind the nibs, with the result that after grinding, you’re left with a substance that’s more liquid than solid. Cocoa butter is the main ingredient in white chocolate (white chocolate = cocoa butter, plus sugar, plus flavorings such as vanilla.)
The principal components of cocoa butter are stearic and oleic acids, both among the most health-friendly fats, and cocoa butter is a valuable commodity, particularly prized by the cosmetics industry, where its chemical composition and melting point so close to body temperature make it an important ingredient in skin products. For economic reasons, prior to making their chocolate, many large-scale producers actually squeeze the cocoa butter out of their raw cacao, and replace it in their finished chocolate product with lower-cost vegetable and even synthetic oils, so that they can reap the profits from selling the cocoa butter independently to Revlon or Max Factor.
To avoid having to disclose this fat replacement on their package ingredients list, where it might alarm consumers, the chocolate industry is currently lobbying the Federal Food and Drug Administration in Washington to change the legal definition of the word “chocolate” to mean a substance that has had its cocoa butter removed and replaced with vegetable oil or other fat substitutes.
If you’d like to learn more about this issue, and especially if you want to make your views known where they may count, please visit www.dontmesswithourchocolate.com.
Decisions, Decisions: is Cacao for Dinner, or
Dessert?
After winnowing, we can take the cacao nibs in either of two directions: we can make chocolate candy, or we can use the nibs as a savory ingredient. Until recently, candy would have been our only choice. Now that we’re learning about the health benefits of cacao, however, more and more people are saying forget the sugar – let’s find delicious ways to use just pure cacao nibs, as a savory ingredient. Here at Steelgrass Farm we wholeheartedly endorse this approach, and at the end of this article we’ve included a few easy-to-make recipes using cacao nibs that our family is particularly fond of.
But for most of us, chocolate candy is our first love, so let me outline the steps to follow if you want to make it in your home kitchen. Step One is to lightly roast the fermented and dried beans before they’ve been cracked and winnowed, as coffee is roasted, a process which deepens and enhances the chocolate flavor. Step Two is to add sugar and flavorings to the winnowed nibs, and to mix the result until the cacao particles become as small as possible. How small? It turns out that the human mouth can detect particles bigger than about 20 microns in size, so if you want your chocolate to taste smooth rather than gritty, that’s the size you want. To give you an idea of what 20 microns looks like, a human hair is about 80 microns thick, so your goal is to grind your cacao nib particles until they are small enough that four of them can straddle a single hair. Or imagine taking a red brick and breaking it into particles no larger than a grain of sugar.
Surprisingly, this is easily accomplished using a tabletop home kitchen juicer, turned to its finest setting, followed by extended time in a wet-grinder with granite rollers. Our favorite chocolate candy recipe is a pound of fermented, dried and lightly roasted beans, cracked and winnowed, then ground up in the juicer with a whole vanilla bean The resulting liquid is then placed in the granite-bottomed wet-grinder, at which point we add white sugar (we aim for about a 66% cacao blend, so we add about a third a pound of sugar to the pound of cacao nibs) and let the machine run overnight. (The chocolate gets smoother if you leave it in longer, but some of the younger members of our family have a hard time waiting.) We then pour it into molds. If we were planning to keep the finished chocolate for any period of time, we’d want to temper it, a heating and cooling process that aligns the cocoa butter crystals, resulting in chocolate with a smooth sheen and a snap when you break it. But the batch is generally eaten long before the day is over, so the tempering step is often omitted.
As our cacao trees mature, Steelgrass Farm and other growers on Kauai will be able to come together as the Kauai Cacao Cooperative,
enabling us to process and market both cacao nibs and finished chocolate. By 2010, we plan to have the beginnings of a thriving Kauai Homegrown Chocolate industry. For now, though, we don't grow enough cacao beans to make production possible on a commercial scale. Instead, we're serving as a teaching farm, sharing with our neighbors everything we've learned about cacao, and making seedlings available to anyone who wants to plant them. As a result, most of our seedpods go right to the germination tent, where each pod becomes an average of thirty new cacao tree seedlings.
While we’re waiting for Kauai Homegrown Chocolate to come into being, please enjoy our family’s favorite cacao nib recipes:
Romaine Lettuce and Citrus Salad with Cacao Nibs
We have found that this easy to prepare, delicious salad can accompany
most any meal. It is light and refreshing, while the pleasing crunch and
rich flavor of the chocolate nibs is set off by the creamy avocado. The
complex flavor of the chocolate nibs is particularly well balanced by a
dark, meaty main dish.
Serves 4
Preparation time: 20 minutes
Ingredients:
1 head of romaine lettuce
1 large avocado
2 large oranges
½ cup sprouts
½ cup chocolate nibs
3 Tbsp Rice vinegar
6 Tbsp Olive oil
Salt and pepper
Wash, dry and chop the romaine (an easy way do this is to chop off the end
of the romaine, slice it lengthways into quarters, then slice the quarters
widthways every 2-3 inches.) Rinse and dry.
Peel and section one and a half large oranges. A less juicy variety works
best. Chop each section in half.
Chop avocado into large pieces.
Mix these ingredients in a salad bowl with ½ cup sprouts.
Dressing:
Juice the orange half that remains. Into six tablespoons olive oil, beat
three tablespoons rice vinegar. Add one tablespoon orange juice and beat
well. Add ½ teaspoon of salt and ½ teaspoon black pepper (if you have a
pepper mill, add a few vigorous grinds while tossing the salad).
Tossing:
Dress the salad by tossing the leaves while pouring the dressing slowly.
The salad is dressed when each leaf is glistening - there should be no
excess dressing in the bottom of the bowl. Add the chocolate nibs; give
the salad a couple more tosses, then serve.
Spicy Cacao Shrimp
Accompanied by rice or noodles, this variation on spicy shrimp curry is
especially delicious with a cooling home-made mango, pineapple or
starfruit chutney or salsa. You can also use whatever fruit is freshest at
your market.
Serves 6
Preparation time: two hours plus time to marinate shrimp (eight hours or
overnight.)
For the Spicy Cacao Base:
2 oz. shallot, peeled and minced
5 cloves finely minced garlic
½ cup cacao nibs
1 Tsp turmeric
2 Kaffir Lime leaves, ground
¼ cup corn oil
¼ cup Asian chili paste
1 Hawaiian hot chili pepper
1 oz. macadamia nuts, roasted
1 stalk mashed and minced lemon grass (bottom two inches only)
1 oz. kenjur or galangal, mashed and minced
(Chef’s Note: see http://www.foodsubs.com/Ginger.html for
details on this
variety of ginger, as well as potential substitutes)
1 oz. ginger root, mashed and minced
Place water, lemon grass, kenjur, ginger, Hawaiian pepper and shallot in a
blender and blend till smooth. Add macadamia nuts, cacao nibs, turmeric,
sugar and Kaffir Lime and blend till these ingredients are incorporated.
Heat oil in a skillet and sauté chili paste for about three minutes, then
add blended ingredients. Cook for 20 minutes on medium heat. Remove from
stove and cool. Refrigerated, this mixture will keep nicely for up to one
month.
For the shrimp marinade:
42 shrimp, peeled
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 Tbsp garlic, finely minced
1 Tbsp spicy cacao base
Coat shrimp with marinade and refrigerate for eight hours or overnight.
For the Spicy Cacao Sauce:
1 can unsweetened coconut milk
3 Tbsp sugar
1½ Tsp Hawaiian sea salt
½ cup Spicy Cacao Base
Heat coconut milk, sugar and salt to a simmer, stirring often. Add spicy
cacao base and simmer for five minutes. Adjust taste as needed.
Final preparation and assembly:
Quick-sauté the shrimp in a large skillet or wok with 1 Tsp of peanut oil.
Working quickly, brown the shrimp on one side, then turn over. They’ll
brown quickest if the pan isn’t too crowded, so cook them in two or more
batches, depending on the size of your pan. Wipe out the pan between
batches.
In the center of a large serving platter, place home-made chutney or
salsa, or the nicest sliced fresh fruit available in your market. Spoon
the sauce around the salsa or fruit, and place the shrimp on top of it.
Garnish with additional fruit and serve hot with rice or noodles.
Cacao Nibs Parfait
This recipe is packed with vitamins, live cultures and antioxidants,
making it a healthy and sustaining snack, but it’s delicious enough to be
presented as a dessert at an elegant dinner party. To increase the
indulgence factor, replace the yogurt with fresh whipped cream.
Serves 6
Preparation time: 45 minutes
6 medium sized clear glasses
3 cups granola
3 cups vanilla yogurt (variation: 1 cup chilled fresh heavy whipping
cream)
Mango, Papaya, Attemoya, Banana, Pineapple, Passionfruit, or any soft
fruit, depending on what is available and what you prefer.
½ cup chocolate nibs
3 Tsp honey or 1 heaping Tsp finely ground sugar
(Optional: Vanilla bean)
Slice the fruit into small pieces and combine. Should form 2-3 cups total
fruit mixture.
If you are using yogurt, slice the vanilla bean (optional) lengthwise and
scrape the inner pulp into the yogurt. It will form small black specks of
pure vanilla flavor. Stir the honey or sugar and vanilla flecks into the
yogurt.
If you are using cream, whip until solid. Midway through whipping, slice
the vanilla bean (optional) lengthwise and scrape the inner pulp into the
cream. Also, add 1 heaping Tsp finely ground sugar.
Layer the ingredients into the cups: first yogurt (or whipped cream), then
a thin layer of chocolate nibs, then fruit, then granola. Repeat. The
key to the attractiveness of the parfait is to keep the ingredients from
smearing along the sides as you lower them into the cups, but no matter
what it will still be delicious. |
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