Day 16: Lucia

Title: Sugar & Chocolate

Between rain showers, we spent this morning participating in the chocolate making process and extracting juice from sugar canes. Both of these plants grow abundantly in our host community. We learned that there are countless varieties of cacao tress, with fruit ranging from orange, to pink, to red. There are also at least 8 types of sugar canes, each used for unique purposes because of their different levels of sweetness, fibers, and juiciness.

 

Chocolate

My first introduction to the cacao fruit happened earlier this trip. Under the instruction of two young cousins (Yenani and Keili), I twisted the football-shaped fruit off of a low hanging branch. After bashing it open against a rock, the fruit opened up to reveal dozens of white, goop-covered, beans. We took turns plucking the beans out of the thick shell, sucking the almost mango-tasting pulp off, and spitting out the hard middle.

In our class today, we learned the steps of how this bitter bean is turned into the chocolate we all know and love. The beans are removed from the cracked-open cacao fruit and put out for 6 days in order for the pulp to be fully removed, and then they spend an additional 4 days in the sun to dry out. After they’ve been toasted for 45 minutes, the cacao beans are ready for the next step: grinding. We each participated in smashing the beans with a circular rock to remove the shells. The bean shell is then shifted out by expertly tossing them in such a way that the shells fall off of the platter and on to the ground. Finally, the beans are ready to be milled into a paste. To try the fresh chocolate, we mixed this paste with condensed milk and dipped bananas into it. It was delicious!

 

Sugar Cane

The process of extracting juice from the sugar cane was surprisingly complex and active. We used a large wooden contraption comprised of a heavy stick (used to smash the sugar cane) and a slanted table with grooves (for the juice to run down and into the pitcher). In groups of three, we passed the sugar cane through the contraption in different ways. The first pass, we used the stick to press down on the nodes. For the second, we smashed the entire cane. We did the same the third time, except we were twisting it. The final time, we wrung out the sugar cane with an additional stick to get every last bit of juice out of it. We drank the sugar juice mixed with lemons, which created the best tasting and freshest lemonade we’d ever had.














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