Tour de Chocolate

The two largest sources of income for the Dominican Republic are services—including tourism—and remittances. Like many Latin American countries rich in natural beauty, the Dominican Republic is starting to explore the field of eco-tourism. One branch of eco-tourism is agro-tourism, which showcases agricultural processes in a fun and educational way. I had my first experience with agro-tourism on Tuesday with the rest of my training class and a Canadian couple. The farm is a member of a cacao cooperative called Conacado. Check out their website!

Alana is a volunteer who lives outside El Seibo and who has been working with a local cacao farm to improve their agro-tourism offerings. Our training group, trainer, and Spanish teachers went for a tour of the chocolate processing plant and the farm and learned all about how chocolate gets from fruit to sweets.

The previous drying picture was taken directly outside the city in what’s called the Bloque de Cacao, the processing plant for cacao. But before the farm moved its operations there, they dried the beans at the farm. These roofs are the old driers. The beans would be exposed to the sun, but if it rained the workers would move the roofs along the metal tracks to keep the beans dry. It was an imperfect system.

This gadget measures the humidity of the beans. They need to be dried to a humidity of less than 7% to be packaged and sold. Some beans dry down to 3%, and others are pulled at 5%. It all depends on what you want your final product to be like. How do you test to make sure your batch is dried to perfection? Enter the guillotine.

Here, Vickie and Adán load up the guillotine with a sample of beans from the drying table.

The blade is attached and driven down through the rows and columns of beans. If it helps, imagine each bean with a little powdered wig on screaming “Let them eat cake!” right before the blade comes down on them. Or, you know, don’t. Whatever.

After you finish playing Robespierre with your cacao, the guillotine is opened up and you can examine the beans. They can be too purple, too brown, or just right. Being colorblind, I was lost at this part. But I’m sure it makes sense. Color is related to dryness, and there’s some color that means perfection. Just don’t ask me which it is.

Here Adán is showing off a few of the sample beans at different points in their drying process. The different colors indicate different levels of humidity.

If there’s no sun, don’t worry! That’s why we have artificial drying. While natural drying takes a few days, drying using machines takes only a few hours. The beans are put in these big drums that are hooked up to furnaces. The smoke of the furnace escapes up a chimney so as not to ruin the flavor of the coffee, and the heat continues on to the drum to dry the beans. When they’re dry they get carried up to a chute that brings them down to a thing that separates out all the unwanted parts from the beans.

Gratuitous black and white machinery shot. Just because.

Here Tim and Adán are filling a bag with dried beans. Ready to ship! I ate a bean from the bag. It was the bitterest chocolate I’ve ever tasted. The beans themselves don’t have any sugar—just chocolate and fat—so they have to add sugar later.

Our cacao journey starts with the planting of a tree. The tree, Titico (we named it) is being supported by our guide Adán while Marcia the Spanish teacher looks on. The trees take about six days to sprout and then a few months to actually look like a tree. At two years old, they’re producing cacao. There are different kinds of trees, and they produce different kinds of cacao. New varieties of cacao can come abut from cross-pollination, whether purposeful or not.

Once the beans are dried they’re ready to be made into chocolate! First you have to roast them over a low flame. Then you take off the shell, as Ben is demonstrating here.

Then the naked beans are thrown into the pilon and squashed into a paste. Adán started the grinding, and we all took a turn at it. Smashing the beans brings out the natural fat, which turns them from a solid into a paste. After that, we each grabbed a blob and rolled it into a ball. You let the balls sit overnight to dry and harden. Then you grate them, add sugar, and enjoy! The only ingredients were cacao beans and raw sugar, but it was some awesome chocolate. I licked about three servings off my hands. Delicious, organic, and homemade—you can’t lose.

After we made chocolate, Adán took us up to a lookout point—or mirador, shout out to my Spain friends—to check out the view. You could barely see the houses of Los Botados, the community where the cacao farm is, because they were covered in trees. The view was breathtaking—layers and layers of mountains and hills rising out of a sea of lush, green trees. We spent our time at the top taking pictures, relaxing, and tossing riddles and jokes back and forth.

Here’s a Los Botados house, almost completely covered by trees.

Me with the mountains–dirty, sweaty, and skinny. Pretty normal Peace Corps appearance.

Paul (or Pablo in Dominican) showing off his tigueraje next to the bar.

The chocolate engineer (is it fair to call him Willy Wonka?) poking his head into the gift shop. He leaned in right when I was taking the picture, and I think it turned out great.

At the end of the day, they had a delicious lunch set up for us overlooking the hills surrounding Los Botados. We had rice and spaghetti (those things go together here, don’t question it) with chicken, tostones (fried, flattened plantains), vegetables, and chocolate balls for dessert. We also got to try cacao wine (it’s incredibly sweet) and cacao jelly (it tastes almost like molasses). It was a great meal with great company and a great view.

Here’s Tim planting Titico. Adán dug the hole with a machete, of course. I’m beginning to think that the machete can do anything. Who needs multiple tools when you have the mighty colín? Apparently the name colín comes from the company Collins, who made machetes.

When the cacao fruits are yellow or red, they’re ready to be cut down. To tumbar a cacao fruit, you need a sharp blade on a stick, which is what you see here. All you have to do is grab it around the stem, pull, and watch your head.

Here’s our harvest. Notice the different colors. The different colors indicate different flavors, both of the fruit and the bean. Some are sweeter, some are more sour, and one tasted like pumpkin.

Adán used one fruit to bash open another, and this is what fell out. The whitish goop that covers the seeds is actually delicious. You’re supposed to suck off the goop, but don’t bite down on the seed unless you want a bitter surprise. The thing they’re all clinging to is called the placenta, or gomo in Dominican. There is a different word for literally everything here. To harvest the beans you just squeeze the beans away from the gomo and into a container.

Once the beans are harvest, it’s time for fermenting! They’re separated into different categories based on the type of bean and its quality. The farm in El Seibo grows two varieties—Hispañola and Sánchez. Hispañola beans are the ones that go into food, and Sánchez beans are the ones that go into cosmetics. There are beans that are certified organic, beans that are meant for different processes, and even beans specifically set aside for Switzerland. They have abbreviations—HB, SB, SS, HS, etc.—for all of this to make sure the right beans make it into the right bags.

The fermentation process happens in these wooden boxes. The beans start at the top and are aged for 48 hours. Then they’re moved down to the next level and aged for 72 hours. Then it’s down one more level for 24 hours. The beans have to be kept sealed tight the whole time. The cacao bean is pretty delicate, so any smell or taste that it’s exposed to while fermenting will end up in the end product. Adán used the example of dog pee—nobody wants that.

Once the beans are fermented, they need to be dried. The traditional way to dry them is by using sunlight. The beans are spread out on long tables under greenhouse roofs and allowed to dry naturally. This takes a few days and is dependent on what the sun’s like those days. If it’s bright, great! If it’s cloudy, too bad.

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