Chocolate is a treat enjoyed around the globe, not just in the narrow band of tropics where it grows! Our little rag-tag group of ecology students made our way to Costa Rica Best Chocolate in Sarapiquí, Costa Rica on a tour of a small cacao farm. While the farm does produce some chocolate, the main goal is to provide tours and spread the love of chocolate. Every year they host a chocolate festival that even draws international visitors who plan their trips around it. Our tour was incredible, and it was most certainly one of the top 10 days of my life.
We began in a small forest, filled with Theobroma cacao and other native trees. A short burst of rain earlier brought out dozens of Green-and-Black Poison dart frogs and lots of Strawberry Poison dart frogs. Our tour guide walked us through the entire process of making chocolate, starting with the pollination of the cacao flower by a small highly specialized Dipteran. After pollination, the thick, dense fruits begin to grow directly from the tree and can range in color from totally green to deep purple. One tree can produce 600-700 fruits a year and it takes 3-4 fruits to produce one bar of chocolate.
Chocolate began as a delicacy of the ancient Mayans, who used the beans as currency and in religious ceremonies. The process of making chocolate has 5 basic steps. The process begins with breaking open the cacao pods and letting the beans and some sugar and water, ferment inside a sealed dark vessel for seven days, too few days and the beans won’t have developed enough flavor and too many days risks the beans beginning to decompose. After fermentation, the beans are dried outside to lower the amount of water in the beans. Next, the beans are roasted, which brings out the chocolate flavor.
We tasted the beans at this stage and it was an amazing crunchy snack. They even sell the beans in this stage, sometimes covering them in a sugar and vanilla mixture. After the beans have been roasted, they must be separated from their shells, and this is achieved by grinding them and then using a fan to separate the much lighter shells from the denser “nibs”. With the shells and nibs separated, the nibs can be ground into a paste. We tasted the paste with a few different amounts of sugar and vanilla combined. My favorite by far was the 100% cacao paste, I have never had chocolate that had so many exquisite notes of flavor. After the paste came the “drink of the gods”, named by the Mayans for its importance in their religious practices. The paste was combined with hot water to make the drink. While the 100% cacao version was delightful, my preferred combination was a bit of cinnamon, a spoonful of sugar, and three drops of vanilla.
The tasting concluded with finished chocolate bars that had sugar and other ingredients added to them for taste and consistency. Eating chocolate without milk added was fantastic for my lactose-intolerant self and I had to restrain myself the entire tasting from eating twice my weight in chocolate. Costa Rica Best Chocolate truly lived up to its name!
