Cacao tree to chocolate. There's nothing like eating local like hand-making fresh amazonian chocolate. Read the full experience of our Amazon homestay here.
1. Harvest the pods from the cacao trees
Open the pod and remove the seeds. It's not how you expect it to look inside, we even did a poll over on instagram and no one guessed correctly what is was, and it is very slimy.
2. Fermentation
Beans and pulp are laid in fermentation boxes for 5 days.
3. Drying
Here's where we started in the process. Beans are then dried for 14 days out in the sun, that's where we come into the process, we helped inspect and separate the beans.
4. Roasting
Beans are then roasted for 15 minutes.
5. Timeout
Time out a baby bat fell from the roof.
6. Winnowing
It requires taking the shell off the bean leaving the nib.
7. Grinding
Beans are then ground on a traditional machine.
8. Conching
Conching the cacao is mixed at different temperatures to develop flavour, add ingredients including the desired amount of sugar and milk.
9. Tempering
The process of cooling and heating, if you're turning it into solid chocolate.
10. Eating
Our final chocolate was the richest chocolate we'd ever taste. They then brought out some witchetty grubs looking things, that were wriggling on a leaf. One of our homestay hosts grabbed one and ate it, they then tried to tempt us, no one was tempted, just yet. They laughed and took them away to cook and brought them back, this time a few members of the group tasted them. Some could stomach them, others not so much, one was even dipped in the chocolate to see if that would make it taste better, it didn't. We put up a video on our instagram and only 23% of you said you would have tried them.
Socks and Sandals