Remy and the Chocolate Bean
Not everyone loves chocolate, but those who do feel it deeply. My son Remy is one of those people. A skilled cook with the ability to think himself inside the dish he’s preparing, traveling between the food molecules and comprehending the forces at work. All cooking is an expression of love, but chocolate, more than most foods, confers the feeling of being loved. And for the last several years Remy has been researching the process by which chocolate is created from raw cacao beans. So when we arrived in Hawaii a few weeks ago, Remy was ready.
Within minutes of arriving at my friend Ken’s lushly planted property, Remy had an oblong yellow cacao pod gripped firmly in hand, freshly twisted from one of Ken’s trees. He carried that pod around as he took stock of the location Ken’s other cacao trees, counting the ripe pods. Harvesting the rest of them was complicated by the fact that Remy was now working one-handed, as it never occurred to him to put down his original pod.
Long before he’d unpacked his suitcase, Remy had harvested roughly 20 more golden pods. Moving with the calm steadiness of an expert, despite never having touched cacao in his entire life, Remy opened the pods by whacking them with a hammer, and extracted the seeds, which are covered in a sweet white fruity pulp. He then asked Ken for a container in which to ferment the beans.
They decided on a sun tea maker, into which they placed the pulpy beans and left it in the sun. For the next few days we enjoyed the kombucha-like liquor that built up as the pulpy beans fermented in the sun. It was fruity, alcoholic and decidedly non-chocolatey, despite being pure cacao parts.
Although Ken has a grove of cacao trees, he doesn’t bother with the laborious chocolate making process with his small harvest. Instead, he has a hack to easily the beans into a tasty snack. He simply places the individual cacao seeds on dehydrator trays, pulp and all. He dries the beans to a crisp, and done. The pulp shrinks down and hardens into a sweet leather that encapsulates the seeds, adding just the right amount of sweetness to balance the bitterness of the cocoa bean, to my taste anyway. If I had cacao trees, I would probably opt for doing the same with my beans too.
But Remy was laser focused on the smooth, refined chocolate you find wrapped in bars, with zero interest in shortcuts or hacks. After several days of fermenting his beans, he then dried and roasted them on cookie sheets in the oven, carefully stewarding them into a rich, Oreo shade of brown. The transformation was impressive, as the beans developed a rich and deeply fulfilling chocolatey flavor that Ken’s dehydrated beans lacked. Taking not of this, I began my own research project.
As Remy had cleaned out Ken’s ripe cacao pods, I visited a nearby self-serve farm stand and grabbed a few, with which I made a batch of Ken-style seeds, but with a twist. Before dehydrating them I tossed the white pulpy seeds with sugar and vanilla, because nothing brings out the flavor of chocolate like those two. After dehydrating these seasoned cacao seeds I roasted them to add that rich, dark chocolatey flavor. At this point they were perfect. No further processing necessary. A sweet and vaguely fruity deeply chocolatey snack, as crunchy as a corn flake. I am munching on some of these as we speak, as I sip my coffee. A more pleasurable and potent combination of beans does not exist.
Meanwhile, Remy was ready to grind his beans, but there was no cacao grinder in the house. So he used Ken’s coffee grinder on his roasted fermented beans, shaking it like a maraca as it spun so as to prevent a paste from building up and sticking to the bottom, out of reach of the blades. It was a generous move by Ken to allow him to use the coffee grinder, which was never the same, to put it mildly. Before that heroic little machine overheated and died, Remy managed to incorporate cocoa butter, sugar and some powdered milk to his mixture, and grind it to a state of smoothness that was probably as silky as we were gonna get without a stone roller to slowly grind away at the beans for about 48 hours.
Our chocotourist proceeded to spoon his mixture from the broken down coffee grinder into a rubber mini ice cube tray, and put it in the fridge to harden. A few hours later we enjoyed some damn good chocolate.
If you want to try any of these diy chocolate methods, finding cacao pods online is significantly cheaper than a trip to Hawaii. But you don’t have to go to anywhere near those lengths to in order to get creative with chocolate. Allow me to introduce my own hack that was created out of necessity one evening when I found myself needing chocolate, but had only cocoa powder. I came up with a little recipe that is so simple and easy that I fear I might have to go into hiding after telling you this, so the Hershey hitmen don’t hunt me down and give me the kiss of death.
I kid you not, people. All you do is combine cocoa powder, heavy cream and sugar — or the sweetener of your choice — and stir it until thick and smooth. That’s really it, and you have essentially created an instant ganache, with way less effort and fewer dishes. Proportions don’t matter, because it’s all to taste. If it’s not sweet enough, add more sweet. If it’s too sweet add more cocoa powder. If it’s too thick add more cream. If it’s too thin add more cocoa and sugar.
If you want to shape this divine paste into a cute animal be my guest, but it will never be finger friendly. This chocolatey goodness is definitely spoon material.