Marc-André Sabourin from Stoneham, Quebec wins the prize for correctly identifying the plant in our November 17th post. If you want to have another look before we reveal the answer to everyone, click here to review the photo, then read these hints:

1) The photo was taken in Bali.
2) Christopher Columbus is thought to be the first European to discover it in 1502.
3) The scientific name for it means “food of the gods” in Greek.
4) It’s commonly eaten at Christmas,
5) even more commonly eaten at Easter.




Everyone in unison now: CACAO! Which eventually becomes… CHOCOLATE!

This is a fascinating plant. Hack open a pod and find the surprise – clusters of ‘beans’ covered in a sweet, pale mucousy pulp that tastes absolutely delicious, but nothing like chocolate. Just gum, don’t bite because the beans taste even less like chocolate. Cindy got the hang of this living in Bali and wondered if there were any jobs at cacao plantations sucking the pulp off of beans. Perhaps not since the pulp is actually fermented off (buried in banana leaves under the tree in the romantic version; in crates in a factory more commonly). It’s the fermentation that turns a hard bitter seed into an aromatic chocolaty bean. After 2-10 days of fermenting, the beans are dried in the sun for a week or two, smelling increasingly delightful. Then the fun’s over for the farmer and off the beans go to overseas factories for roasting and processing.

You start to do a little research about chocolate and you learn all kinds of interesting things:

• After roasting, the husk is removed leaving the inner “nib” that's basically unsweetened chocolate. You can eat it as is, but the usual procedure is to grind it into a creamy paste. Cacao butter is the fat; there’s liquid too called ‘liquor’ (non-alcoholic); cacao powder is left after the fat is pressed out.
• A standard 100g 70% Chocolate bar contains 80 to 85 beans, the seeds from about 1.5 pods. A standard 30g 10% milk-chocolate bar contains 6 beans, or about 10% of a pod.
• Most commercial cacao comes from giant corporate plantations where working conditions range from barely decent to completely inhuman.
  
• Some companies try to avoid slave chocolate, but the five biggies – Nestlé, Hersheys, Mars, Cadbury & Phillip Morris – apparently don’t.
• One ounce of milk chocolate, contains 6 mg of caffeine, slightly more than what’s in a cup of decaf coffee.

Because we still haven't gotten around to writing about our time in Bali. Here are some pictures of Bali's bounty.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 07, 2005 at 3:28 p.m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.