Our last stop was a Cacao farm. We started with a nice lunch. The main course was chocolate chicken. That was a new taste for all of us, but a very good one. For dessert had passion fruit ice cream in a mango sauce.
We took a walking tour of the farm that grows cacao. You can see the trees on the right. There are two kinds of trees. The original tree which was severely affected by a fungus decades ago. And, a fungus variety created by a plant geneticist by carefully breeding trees. It took him many years. The end product from the original trees tastes better, but they are still susceptible to the fungus.
The trees mature year around. Every two weeks a crew goes through the trees picking the ripe pods.
Besides cacao, the farm grows rice, some fruit, bananas. It is a small farm, about 30 acres. Roughly, half is in cacao and the majority of the rest is planted in rice. Eddie, our guide, told use the rice was between 80 and 90 days old. He knew because there were a multitude of white moths on the tops of the rice. Those moths are only around during those 10 days.
After finally finding some ripe cacao pods, we were given a demonstration on how they are turned into chocolate.
First Eddie cracked one of the pods open and showed us the seeds inside. They are covered in a white gelatinous structure. We each got to taste one and it had a pleasant sweet taste. After the beans are harvested, the seeds are extracted and laid out to ferment for 4 days (typically). They are turned every day. After 4 days, the beans are laid out in the sun to dry for 4 days. After they are dry, they are roasted, the hull removed, and then ground into chocolate.
Left: The ripe pod with the beans exposed. After the demo, Eddie took the yellower of the two split pods home with him for a snack that night. Right: The beans after fermenting and drying. We tasted them again and they were slightly sweet and starting to taste like chocolate. After roasting and hulling, we tasted them again. Almost no sweetness and more chocolate tasting.
Then, they ground some beans using an ancient grinder that looks like the one my grandma had. When we tasted it, it was quite bitter but very much like chocolate. Then Eddie had us take equal part of molasses sugar and the ground chocolate and then we got a great flavor of sweetened chocolate. And finally we drank a cup of hot chocolate with cinnamon flavoring. It would have been great on a cold winter evening. On a hot summer afternoon not so satisfying.
It was a fascinating day. If you ever go to Guayaquil, get Eddie to be your guide. He was super.