Cacao, Before It Became Chocolate

Split a pod in the shade with a machete and the fruit inside is white, wet and sweet — closer in taste and texture to lychee, or to a very ripe custard apple, than to anything that comes wrapped in foil. This surprises almost everyone who tries it for the first time, including people who have grown up around cacao farms and simply never thought to ask what the plant tasted like before it became an ingredient.

The pulp clings to rows of pale seeds arranged like teeth inside the husk. You suck the pulp off each seed and discard the seed itself, which at this stage is bitter and unpleasant — the opposite of what happens to it later, once it has been through the process that turns it into something people pay a premium for in a different country.

Everything that tastes of chocolate happens after the tree has finished its work.

The long middle

Fermentation does the first and most important transformation. The seeds, still coated in pulp, are piled and covered for several days while natural yeasts and bacteria work on the sugar in the pulp, generating heat that in turn changes the chemistry inside the seed itself. This is where the bitter, grassy compounds of the raw seed start breaking down into the hundreds of flavour precursors that eventually read as chocolate. Skip this step, or rush it, and no amount of skilled roasting afterward can fully make up the difference.

Sun does the second transformation, drying the fermented seeds slowly on raised beds or patios, turned by hand through the day so they dry evenly rather than moulding on one side. Then fire — roasting, which develops the deep, familiar aroma most people associate with chocolate before they have ever thought about where that aroma came from. Time does the rest, in storage, in grinding, in whatever final form a maker chooses to give it.

What we serve

We try to show guests both ends of this process rather than just the finished bar, because the distance between them is the entire point. Pulp at breakfast, straight from a pod opened that morning, sweet and slightly tart and gone in a mouthful. A bitter cup in the late afternoon, made from beans fermented and roasted on a neighbouring farm, unsweetened, closer to the plant's original character than most chocolate anyone has tasted.

Stand under a cacao tree for a while and the plant stops being an ingredient. The pods grow directly out of the trunk, heavy and ribbed, in colours that look painted on. They ripen unevenly, so a single tree holds three stages of its own year at once. Nothing about it is efficient. Everything about it is patient, which is the only quality the finished product never advertises.

Between the two sits everything that makes chocolate taste like chocolate, and none of it belongs to the tree. The tree only supplies the raw material and gets none of the credit that later attaches itself to sugar, milk, and a wrapper with a brand on it. We think that is worth remembering, standing under the tree with pulp on your fingers, before the whole thing becomes a product again.