23/04/2023
Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend a Craft Chocolate Drink & Chocolate Tasting Workshop. The workshop started out by explaining how and where cacao is grown and then how it is turned into chocolate.
Cacao has been growing in Thailand for over 50 years, but they have only been processing the fruit here in the last few years. It was brought to south east Asia by the Spanish, originally to the Philippines, then gradually spread all throughout the region. Cacao grows in all parts of Thailand. There are over 20,000 varieties of cCacao.
We began with a welcome drink of Chocolate Tea (I will explain what it is in a little bit). It takes about about 4 months to go from blossoms to harvesting cacao fruit. These trees bloom year round, which allows for a year round harvest. Cacao pods start out green, and as they ripen they turn to yellow, then red. When the fruit is ripe it is more sweet. You can tell if it is over ripe by shaking it; if you can hear it, it is overripe. We are currently in the dry season in Thailand, this makes the fruit better for fermentation, but not as good for eating.
Once the cacao pods are harvested, they are cut open to reveal the fruit inside. At this point you can eat the fruit fresh. It doesn’t taste at all like chocolate, I thought that it tasted a little bit like mango, someone else said mangosteen. Inside the fruit is a seed or bean, and if cut open you’ll see it is purple in color. To make chocolate, you take all of the fruit from inside the pods, and leave it to ferment for 5-7 days. In Thailand they add banana leaves to the fermentation container to help introduce extra microorganisms to improve the fermentation. Once fermented, they now have the chocolate aroma, and if cut open they are now brown.
Once fermented, they need to be dried for about 7 days. Once dry they can be stored for a long time. In order to turn them into chocolate, they now need to be roasted. You can easily roast small batches (25g at a time) in a hot air popcorn popper. We started with 12 seconds, then smelled the beans and they did not smell like chocolate yet, so we went 10 seconds longer. At this point they had a chocolate aroma to them.
Once roasted you crush them between your fingers to remove the husk. This husk can then be placed in a tea bag to make chocolate tea. The stuff inside the husk is cacao nibs. I have had cacao nibs before and felt that these were more flavorful. When you grind cacao nibs you get a liquid chocolate that contains both the solids and oil. About 50% of this liquid is oil or cacao butter.
From this point you can create chocolate. Unfortunately, we did not discuss how to separate the oil from the solids. We were able to try some liquid chocolate that was the whole chocolate plus milk and sugar, or milk chocolate. If you only add sugar, this makes dark chocolate, and if you remove the solids and only use the cacao butter with sugar and milk, this produces white chocolate.
They had several different varieties of pure chocolate from different regions of Thailand for us to try. We each chose one or a combination of varieties to make a chocolate drink. Here we took 150 ml of milk, heated it, then added 10-15 g of chocolate (finely chopped), and sugar if desired (recommended 10-20 g). They had several options for sugar - cane, white, brown, and coconut. We also had the option to add salt or Mak Kwan which is a Thai spice that they described as similar to Szechuan pepper, but I don’t think it’s as spicy (I’ve tried it before and like to eat it on my French fries). This definitely made a very nice chocolate drink.
I was very glad that I decided to attend this workshop, as I have always been interested in how our food is produced, or in other words knowing how food gets from the farm to our table.
Some of these photos were taken by the event organizer and some I took.
