The long road from cacao to chocolate
Chocolate is an oddity.
It’s one of the few native American foodstuffs to make it immediately to the Old World.
And now, when anyone who has any pride in their foodie credentials praises the fresh and natural, chocolate, one of the most elaborately processed and industrialized foods around, is given a pass and allowed into the hallowed company of heirloom vegetables and fruits and grass fed meat in the foodie ranking of goodies. That, and the fact that several new articles and books about chocolate have come my way, are the reason for this and three or four upcoming posts.
I’m going to start with contemporary artisanal processing. I’m re-posting (with permission and a little light editing) a lovely and non-technical blog post by Beatrice Misa in the Philippines about how she processed some beans from her family’s backyard–with one important modern innovation. It’s about as clear and well-illustrated as anything I have encountered on the subject.
And it reminds us that cacao went east to the Philippines as well as west to Europe, along with the techniques for getting from pod to tablea (tablet of drinking chocolate).
Home-Processing Cacao
A thick cup of home-dried, home-roasted cacao with coconut milk from the garden. Sarap.
Three pods. You can tell if it is ready to eat when you shake it and the mass moves around, there is a layer of air between the skin and the fruit.
Cutting the pod up to share with friends.Cacao arrived in the Philippines during the galleon trade.
The fruit has thin but fabulous sweet flesh.
Seeds drying.The cacao tree is a humble one, not particularly beautiful, growing well only under canopies. Taken from the forest basins of the Americas, they have traveled well into our muggy, tropical island setting, cultivated in some large plantations and agroforestry areas, and in numerous backyards all over the country. There is still considerable backyard production and kitchen processing going on to turn cacao beans into tableas (tablets for making hot chocolate) most especially in the province.
All dried and ready to roast.I took my fruit from my great-uncle’s house in Metro Manila. The pods had been given all these years to the gardener, whose mother would do the tedious processing. As I am not schooled in these matters, I enlisted the help of Wilma, who is from Zamboanga and has been eating and growing the stuff since childhood. I have read about cacao processing in books, but I wanted to get an idea of how it is processed by normal people for everyday consumption.
Seeds roasting on an iron skillet.The pods at the top of this page yielded many seeds, covered by fruit pulp that is absolutely delicious. I would describe the taste as sweet yet tart, like a mangosteen or a nice yellow mango. The “beans”, which look a bit like rambutan seeds, were set out to dry. After they were suitably devoid of moisture (a few weeks, given the rain), they were roasted. I thought them to be a bit burnt, but Wilma insisted that was how they liked it.
An old brandy bottle.Just as our house was filled with an aroma good enough to marry, we took the beans off and put them on a bilao (bamboo tray). Wilma used a glass bottle to crush the crunchy beans and force the skin to separate. She did this in a hurry, before everything cooled off.
Almost nibs, with motions like making pie dough.
More crushing.We then ran out into the garden and got rid of the skins directly into the soil by the same movements that people use to winnow rice. The instructions of blowing the skin away with a fan seem quite comical and devoid of integrated daily exercise, once you see how gracefully the skin floats to the ground for decomposition.
Winnowing cacao.What we are left with are cacao nibs, the much-hyped “superfood” and relative newcomer to the culinary world. A whiff at this point is pretty sublime.
Skinless nibs.We decide to grind this for drinking chocolate. We first used a mortar and pestle, which proved to be too much even for our idle, chatty selves. A coffee grinder works nicely.
Too much work.
The moisture is coming up.
Cocoa fat ahoy.Once the paste was finished, we scouted the kitchen for a suitable mold. This we found in an old spice jar cap. We washed the paprika out of that and pressed the paste in.
Standardization is important to us.You can tamp it out with a bit of difficulty. Cacao, at this stage, becomes the consistency of your high school experiment of baking soda and water. It seems solid, but when you press your finger against it, there is a slow melting that occurs. Thus, you cannot scoop it out of the mold without damaging it, you must pound it onto a solid surface with some force.
From three pods, we get five 1-inch tableas.My excitement was barely enough to contain, so I plunked two of these still-soft tableas into a pot and whisk them with water into tsokolate, kakaw, cacao, chocolate-eh, whatever you may call it if you are from these islands. I feel I’ve come a bit closer to the holy grail of my cacao-loving conquest.
Ready to drink.Some things to change next time: It was a bit darkly roasted, more so than I am used to. Though delicious in its own way, I think I will decrease the roasting time. I was left with bits of the bean at the bottom of my cup, which I ate. Yes. I ate them, but it could have used a finer grind, so I may as well invest in a Turkish coffee grinder.
Now notice the one place where Beatrice cops out and abandons traditional methods. The grinding of the roasted beans. She puts them in the coffee grinder and presses the button.
Great blog! Your pictures really help tell the story.
Thanks Kathy. But they are Beatrice’s photos. Please give her the credit.
I was baffled at no mention of sugar. I had always thought that sugar was needed or is that only if you make the drink with milk?
Kay, I’m talking about pre/conquest before cane sugar was available. Even post conquest, sugar is added later.
Excellent images, I wish I had seen the process before I processed cocoa beans for when I recreated some historical English chocolate recipes – peeling off all those skins from the roasted beans!
I guess a few other items also made a rapid transit to the Philippines – pineapples I would guess, as they were growing in China when the first Europeans started to explore there, chillies also. Not the cooking technique through? I was interested to read that Tamales are also made in the Philippines, I wonder how long they have been there?
Hi Adam. We should have some answers soon. Two or three young scholars are starting to explore the Spanish-Mexican-Filipino connection. I think there will be lots of interesting things emerging in the next couple of years.
Brilliant post and how interesting to see Beatrice’s chocolate making process. I was struck by your reference to huge amount of processing in this substance. I am so into the least amount of processing possible in my food, yet I love chocolate and “good quality” chocolate at that. Hey ho!
Hello, welcome to this site. I see you were recently in St Ives, a place that meant a whole lot for different reasons both to my mother and my father.
But that’s by the by. Yes, sorry, chocolate=lots and lots of processing, no way around it. Too bad but that’s the way it is.
I look forward to reading about the Spanish-Mexican-Filipino connection in the future. Actually I would extend the dots further to a Mexican-Spanish-Filipino-Portuguese-SE-Asia-Goa network of trade. It is interesting to see recipe and cooking techniques that extend through-out this network. The layered cake (“Bebinca” in Goa, “Bibingka” in the Philippines) is an excellent example of this.
Really I am constantly amazed how seeming random food items suddenly start moving around the world, then become localized. The best modern example I know of at the moment is the spread of “pastel de nata” custard tarts. I first remember them in Australia in the late 90’s as an artisan product, now sold in supermarkets. I now have seen them quite commonly being sold here in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Why Portuguese custard tarts or even chocolate for that matter? I can’t see it as a matter of simple deliciousness, as there are many delicious things that remain purely local. A stochastic process maybe?
Well, Manila was a huge entrepot, the main ship mending port in Southeast Asia so everyone got there. The trail needs to be extended up along the ports of the China Sea as well. And as you know, Adam, bibingka has been on my hit list since forever. I am not sure that contemporary custard tarts are such a puzzle. They are a twist of something already familiar to Anglophone diners. I believe David Leite has publicized them in his very popular book and blog. And such things are followed internationally now.
I do agree though that deliciousness is absolutely not, not, not the way to understand the spread of dishes.
Hey Rachel, thanks for posting this! I’m actually in the process of sorting out my pictures about sugarcane “wine” production up north here, which involves a little bit about sugar. There were many palm sugars produced here before, as all over SEA. But since industrial sugar took hold, the buri/nipa/etc. panochas (solidified sugars in coconut shell molds, piloncillos, to others), which used to be sold interchangeably at the markets, have disappeared. I’m wondering if it is the same in Americas?
As for my surrender to the coffee grinder– Since we’ve begun extruding rice flour from machines instead of those round stone mills, it’s been nearly impossible to find our versions of the heavy stone grinders unless as out-of-service ones at antique shops. I’ve heard of people still making their own from piedra china or “buhay na bato” (living rock) from their local rivers. Some gourmet restaurants contain lines like “lovingly stone ground” but personal accounts from people from the province tell me otherwise!
Adam, tamales came here during the Spanish times, but ours are made with ground rice flour and wrapped in banana leaves, with meats and salted egg inside. They are smaller and taste quite different, and in some provinces have contained bizarre things such as Chinese noodles.
That is amazing about bibingka! I actually have never heard about the Goan version, but it looks delicious. But speaking of Portuguese areas in India, walking in Cochin, I was startled to see the Chinese fishing boats along the coast that were pretty common around 50 years ago not far from where I live, and eat “puttu” for breakfast (similar to production of some types of “puto” here, like puto bumbong, steamed in a bamboo node). These are very interesting cross-pollinations.
BTW, the designated Dia Del Galeon for Philippines and Mex is on 8 October, and there will be international speakers over a few days before that. I met the organizers and they are heavy on clothing, language, and quite lacking in the food arena, perhaps you could point me to these researchers you are speaking of?
fascinating post rachel
that little electric motor makes a cup of cocoa look like child’s play
Rachel, I am begining to suspect that ” familiarity” is as much of a red herring as “deliciousness” as a cause of food migration. Why Portuguese custard tarts and not Yorkshire Curd tarts? In the former case why the massive popularity in the last 20 years, but very little in the previous 200?