Making Chocolate from a Tree - July 2013, Month 25 in the D.R.

While joining Community Health Worker Mercedes on rounds conducting home visits to our HHI patients with Hypertension, Diabetes and Asthma 45 minutes up the mountain in Arroyo de Leche earlier this summer I finally got the chance to fulfill a special non-work-related goal of mine for my time in the D.R.  I got to learn where chocolate REALLY comes from, and how to make it -- from Tree to Chocolate syrup!

This is a Cacao Fruit.  It's where Coco comes from to Make Chocolate.

Community Health Workers Mercedes and Carlito, and Mercedes' youngest daughter Marielis took me and two medical students into the woods near one of her patient's homes to find the ripe Cacao Fruit growing on the nearby trees. 

Here Marielis holds an open Cacao Fruit.  If you eat it fresh, there are small purple sweet sections you suck on.  The purple is covered by a layer of white skin, similar to the white skin inside the rind of an orange.  Here we are sucking the sweetness out of the Cacao. :)

(As a side note, yes, there are blonde Dominicans.  Marielis, the little blond girl, is Dominican through and through!)

Here Marielis shows off a Cacao fruit she expertly plucked off a nearby tree, while medical student Brad, in his "doctor scrubs" looks around for more.

I took a Cacao fruit home, to learn to make Chocolate.  It was yellow when they first plucked it, but because of a busy work week, it waited in my hot kitchen for almost a week before I could start the chocolate process, and it turned rather brown. Luckily the fruit inside was still good!

This is what the fruit looks like when you first take it out of the shell.  See the purple below? Those are the Cacao seeds! Yucky if you chew them! They have a sweet outer coating which is what you suck off if you wish to eat the fruit raw. :)

 
To make chocolate you separate the seeds.  They're a bit slimy, and a beautiful shade of purple inside.

Separate them into individual seeds...

 

Now they're ready to be dried so you can make Cocoa!  

So, onto the cookie sheet they go, and up onto the roof in the hot Dominican sun for a week or more.   Mine were drying for almost 2.5 weeks. That's partly because it kept raining and I kept having to bring them back into the house for a day or two to avoid the rain. :)

 *Note to self -- don't try to dry Cacao fruit on the roof during a rainy month! :)

In the end I didn't quite make it to the Chocolate stage. :(  I got to the "fruit is dry (see fruit in bowl) and smells like chocolate and is ready to be pounded into dust and turned into a liquid chocolate syrup" stage. Alas, I had to hurry into another busy work week and didn't have time to make the syrup before the hard, dry chocolate scented fruit seeds began to rot.  

*Note to self -- only try to make chocolate when you're own vacation for a week or have the time to really commit to the several week long project! : )

But still,  I am excited to now have first-hand knowledge of how chocolate is made and to be able to say I helped pick Cacao fruit off a tree and baked chocolate seeds on a cookie sheet on my roof!
Mmmmmm. The smell of baking chocolate!

Note the picture of the Cacao Fruit on the candy bar wrapper from Europe (via Ecuador) below!

So when I'm in Arroyo de Leche again I'll have to get another Cacao fruit 

and finish the whole process through to the eating stage next time!

 Here we all go - Me, two Community Health Workers, two Medical Students. and one  6 year old Marieli, crossing the river, off to visit patients in their colorful wooden homes 

in Arroyo de Leche.