Cacao Farm Tour and Tasting in Hawaii!

 

Hello, beautiful readers!

I'm so excited to tell you all about my visit to Garden Island Chocolate, a small, sustainable cacao farm in Kilauea, on the northern shore of the island of Kauai, Hawaii. They're one of the only places in the U.S. that is truly a "seed to bar" chocolate business. They grow the cacao trees from seed and care for them with an environmentally-friendly permaculture model. After harvest, they break open the pods, then proceed to ferment, dry, roast, crack, winnow, and grind the beans. They add any extra yumminess, then mold the chocolate and sell it. It's so cool to see one family-run business (with four adults and three kids) put so much care into the process from start to finish!

Cacao pods

My novel, WILD CHOCOLATE, is coming out Jan 1, 2019 (with Scholastic Press, ages 9 and up)-- so I've been filling my life with all things chocolate these past couple years of research and writing. Grueling, I tell ya. ;-)  I've already done research with the fabulous Nuance Chocolate's factory and shop here in Fort Collins (which you can read about here and here)... but I really wanted to explore a sustainable cacao farm so that I understood the whole process. Here are my notes from the tour, interspersed with photos-- I thought I'd share them with you!

Koa's son

Koa, owner of Garden Island Chocolate, was our tour guide for the morning. He explained how he and his crew start seeds in pots, since the saplings are very delicate and you really have to baby them. Once they're established, Koa and the crew transplant the tiny trees into the ground. They plant them in dappled shade that comes from strategically placed taller trees, so that the cacao trees will be sheltered from wind and strong sunlight. Some of the trees that co-exist nicely with cacao on their farm are cinnamon, allspice, acai palm, breadnut, lychee, coconut, jackfruit, lahala, aku, avocado, zapote, and tamarind. (We also got to sample the spice and fruit from several of these trees!)

Cacao trees protected from too much sun and wind by taller trees

A few cacao pods might appear when the tree is two years old. By the time the tree is about five years old, it is producing about 20 pods per tree. By eight to ten years of age, it's producing about a hundred pods per tree. The pods are about the size of a Nerf football, and they grow directly from the branches and trunk of the tree. They are gorgeous colors, from garnet red to lemon yellow to pale green to deep purple. You can do a scrape test with your fingernail to see if the pod is ripe--  If it's yellow where you scrape it, it's ripe; green means unripe.

Cacao trees mostly grow in tropical climates, close to the equator. Hawaii is one of the only sub-tropical places where cacao is grown successfully (farther from the equator). Kauai is a pretty rainy island (especially when we were there in March), but cacao can handle 200-300 inches of rain per year. The harvest is done between December and June here. Since the trees are fairly fragile, only about 16 out of every 20 trees survive.

Koa's other son

I was impressed with the permaculture model that Koa's farm uses... it's the idea that if you plant the right combo of plants and trees in the right conditions, that they can pretty much take care of themselves. For example, the larger trees provide sun and wind shelter for the cacao trees... and trees like tamarind, which are nitrogen-fixing, can provide a rich soil balance. Banana trees that have already produced fruit can be left up as a place for wild yeasts to thrive (useful for fermentation later.) Nothing is wasted-- for example, the chaff from the winnowing of the cacao beans (at a later stage) can be used as fertilizer and mulch. And as far as threats like wild pigs damaging saplings, well, you just suck it up and make peace with them.

Splitting open the cacao pods with a mallet

Garden Island Chocolates has a mixed variety of cultivars, largely hybrids. Koa was able to point out some pods that had criollo features, like white beans, a pointy shape, red and bumpy skin. (The main categories of cultivars are criollo (sweet, floral, light, disease-susceptible), Nacional (highly prized, rare), trinitario (hardy hybrid), and forastero, with a great many sub-varieties and hybrids, which makes any kind of standard classification difficult.) The farm allows wild midges (tiny flies) to pollinate the cacao, so there's plenty of cross-breeding and delightful randomness that defies categorization.

Freshly bashed-open cacao pod

The pods are harvested with a machete or sharp blade, never twisted off (to avoid damage). They are then bashed open with a mallet. (Koa's tween/teen sons enjoy this part-- they demonstrated with gusto, and then the participants got a chance to try. ;-) We got a chance to taste the interior of the pod at this point-- it's basically a bunch of beans/seeds in goopy mucilage. I sucked on a bean to taste the goo, which was a little sweet. Koa said that different varieties have different tastes... some more lemony, some more of a honey melon flavor.

Cacao beans still in the mucilage

After Koa and family and co-workers remove the seeds by hand (which usually takes an entire day per batch), it's time for fermentation. The crew does a wild ferment, which uses naturally occurring yeasts from the shells/skins and from the banana leaves the beans are covered with. Sometimes Koa adds wine yeast to give the chocolate a fruity flavor. He says that fermentation is the most important step in the chocolate-making process. He and his crew put the beans in a mahogany box with slats on the bottom so the liquid can drain out. He describes the smell of fermentation as a mix of bakery, brewery, and locker room (mmmmm...) He knows when fermentation is done by smelling the beans, and making sure they're brown all the way through. During fermentation, the naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria eat the sugars and convert them to alcohol and acids, a process that brings out the flavor precursors so that the final chocolate flavor is complex and layered. The fermentation stage lasts about a week at Garden Island, but could be shorter or longer elsewhere, depending on the types of cacao and environmental conditions.

Goopy cacao beans freshly scooped from the opened pods

The next stage is drying. Since northern Kauai is so rainy, which brings a threat of mold, Koa uses a dehydration machine; however, farms in dryer areas might spread the beans out on mats and let the sun and air dry them. After the drying stage, the cacao is ready to be roasted. Koa usually roasts a batch about once a week. I won't go into the details of the next stages here, since I discussed them in detail in earlier blog posts about my visits to Nuance Chocolate's small factory and charming shop in Fort Collins. To summarize, the beans are roasted, winnowed (husks separated from beans-- Koa uses a hair dryer!), cracked into nibs, ground in a melanger, mixed with other ingredients like honey or sugar, tempered (controlled heating and cooling), and poured into molds. For Garden Island Chocolate, all these steps-- from harvest to finished chocolate-- take about a month for one batch...

Cacao beans that have been fermented and dried

And voila... chocolate! The intricate flavor of chocolate depends on so many factors... the soil the cacao was grown in, the yeasts that fermented it, how long it was fermented, how long and at what temperature it was roasted, how long it was ground in the melanger, and of course, what ingredients were added to it. We got to taste over twenty samples of Garden Island chocolate during the tour, with palate cleansers of apple-banana and bread in between. Koa makes most of these especially for tour groups, and changes up the recipes all the times, depending on what's in season and on hand. He uses locally grown, organic ingredients, and sweetens them with honey. Our favorite was the lemon-coconut-honey chocolate. Some of the other samples we tried were: crystallized ginger, coconut milk curry, hemp seed, coffee, hazelnut, macadamia nut, cranberry, bee pollen, 5-chile spice, 99% cacao with salt and vanilla, and milk chocolate. It's so much fun to try to distinguish and describe the intricate layers of flavor in each sample. We washed the taster flight down with Mayan hot chocolate made with vanilla, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, coconut milk, black pepper, and turmeric. Yum!

Ready-to-eat chocolate samples!

Garden Island Chocolates grows many of the ingredients they add to their chocolate, including fruits, nuts, spices, and honey from their hives. They also use cacao and other ingredients from other farms in their co-op in Kauai-- many of these farmers have other professions, but produce these foods as a hobby. Koa has been making chocolate for about 10 years and growing cacao for 14 (along with all kinds of other tasty foods). During his tour, his passion and curiosity come through-- delightful qualities I've noticed in other chocolate makers. If you find yourself in Kauai, I highly recommend you swing by for a tour... more info here.

Garden Island also sells their chocolate at this cute stand at their farm in Kilauea. Koa and his boys were kind enough to share their library of chocolate books with me... including this awesome pop-up version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! I was enchanted by the original version by Roald Dahl as a kid... and I'm super-excited to contribute my own kids' book to the realm of chocolate-themed kid lit... WILD CHOCOLATE, coming January 1, 2019 with Scholastic (cover art in progress). I had so much fun weaving all my chocolate research into the novel (along with my Amazon rain forest research)! You can read more about WILD CHOCOLATE here. It's technically a kids' novel, but truly for lovers of chocolate and forests of any age!

Koa's boys with their mini chocolate-library

 Thanks so much for coming by!

xo,
Laura

The Lauras Go to Mexico

 

Hola, queridos amigos,

Just got back from a soul-filling writing retreat in Tulum with one of my closest friends, Laura Pritchett... and it was abracadabrant! In addition to sharing my name, Laura also lives in Fort Collin, also is in Old Town Writers' Group, and also gets the winter doldrums in February (and this winter's been tough-- snow on the ground since November, plenty of days in the single digits and teens) .... and we also both had airline vouchers just waiting to be used.... So we spontaneously decided to soak in some sea and sunshine and tropical greenery and warmth together last week to lift our spirits.

 SUCH a good idea!

Laura writes books for *grown-ups* although there's some crossover with older teen audiences.... her most recent novels are Red Lightning and Stars Go Blue, and they're fantastic and you should read them (along with her other 6 books)!  More that we have in common: celestial things like Lightning and Stars in our titles, and colors like Red and Blue/Indigo in our titles... and we both have 8 books out at the moment.... and we like old stuff and Mexico (and I could go on and on).  Suffice to say, she was the perfect retreat companion!

Here's where we spent most afternoons-- reading and writing ("working") on the beach and taking occasional ocean dips and beach walks.

Passion fruit ice cream!  I love this flavor so much-- perfect mix of tart and sweet-- and the crunch of the seeds is deeply satisfying.  Here, we're on the beach chairs of the Alma hotel, but our favorite evening place for food (and magical ambiance and live salsa music) was La Zebra.

 

Before this trip, I'd just finished yet another revision of my futuristic speculative fiction YA novel, which is set on a tropical island (specifically, on a a beach, in a jungle, and in a mysterious lab facility.)  So of course I was noticing all the subtle multi-sensory details of the water so I can describe it better when I do the inevitable *next* revision.

 Seaweed has some significance in the book...

I also jumped back into my new manuscript-on-progress, which is middle-grade (ages 8-12) and involves chocolate and the Amazon rain forest.  I love working on something in a new place-- I always get interesting ideas and think more outside-the-box.  I read that working in expansive places makes your mind think in a more expansive way.... and that was definitely the case sitting with my manuscript in the expanse of sea and sand and sky.

 

So, let's see... we *did* do some things beside write and read and walk and swim.  Laura visited the cool Coba Mayan ruins, where I've already been a few times, and wrote about in another post. I went to a yoga class in this studio on the beach... behold my view from the mat!

One morning, we visited a nearby cenote (a freshwater lake connected to an underground cave system, sacred to the Maya). This one was called Cenote Encantado, and was just down the road by a campground. It was surrounded by mangroves, and supposedly there were some baby crocodiles floating around nearby. We rented out a little boat and did some snorkeling and felt minorly freaked out by the baby crocodiles (which stayed hidden).

We stayed in a simple, sweet ecolodge called Las Palmas Mayas on the side of the road opposite the beach, which was just a one minute walk away.  Woulda been nice to stay right on the beach, but this place was much, much cheaper. And it had a kitchen where we could fix ourselves breakfast and tea and snacks, which made it very budget-friendly.

View from my window:

In the courtyard area:

 

Palmas!

Always fun to check out the folk art.... I got some smaller skeletons for Lil Dude-- a snorkeling skeleton, a dog skeleton, and a guitar-playing skeleton, since that's what he's into these days. :-)

It felt so good to soak in flowers and leaves and COLOR after being in the brown and white landscape of Fort Collins for the past three months.

So grateful to Ian for taking such good care of Lil Dude all week and taking time off work for sled-riding on the snow day.  (Did I mention there was a *blizzard* while we were gone?)  

Thanks for reading!

xo,

Laura

Nuance Chocolate Factory Tour!

 

Hello, dear chocolate-lovers!

Last week, I got a fascinating, personal chocolate factory tour, led by Toby Gadd, chocolate-maker extraordinaire and owner of Nuance Chocolate in Fort Collins.  His chocolate factory is located in Old Town, just a few blocks away from his storefront/cafe.  This latest adventure was part of my on-going research for my next middle-grade novel, which has a LOT of chocolate in it. 

 

You might have read about my interview with him a few months ago here (and if you haven't, you should, because it complements this post!)  He kindly offered to give me a follow-up tour of the factory itself.  Technicolor visions of chocolate paradise swam in my head.... 

Alas, there was no chocolate river to fall into, but there was chocolate-tasting....

... and there was no slightly-creepy Gene Wilder or Johnny Depp in a velvet top hat, but there was super-friendly and knowledgeable Toby in his dapper hairnet...

And now, chocolate-loving friends, I'll take you on the tour...

Welcome inside, to the cool 62 degree interior of the factory, which is a collection of small-ish rooms a bit larger than the ground floor of my house (maybe about 1000 sq ft?) We began by de-linting ourselves and putting on hairnets. 

First, Toby brought us ("us" refers to me and a journalism major and cameraman from CSU) to the room of large, orange metal barrels where he stores the beans once they arrive. As you can see, they're labeled with date and country of origin.  Nuance sources their beans from ethical and sustainable growers and cooperatives, most of which are small, and they only use one kind of bean in each chocolate bar.  They can specially tailor the process to bring out the best of each bean, which makes the flavor rich and complex and fascinating, like fine wine.   

At this stage, the beans smell sour and acidic from the fermentation process.  Each cultivar of beans-- trinitario, forestero, and criollo-- has a different smell.  The fermentation process helps to develop over 600 flavor compounds, which is essential to the final taste of the chocolate, although the palette is further modified at every stage... as you shall see!

Can I just take a moment to say how lucky I feel to live just a ten-minute walk from his shop and factory?! Nuance has ***the widest range of single-origin chocolate IN THE WORLD!***

Okay, back to the tour... The cacao beans are harvested and fermented onsite in Latin America and Africa, then shipped here in giant sacs.  Toby and his wife Alix and their few employees then put the beans in the barrels, keeping them carefully separated.  In order to avoid any icky chemicals, they use natural dry ice to prevent any insect infestations during this stage.

They are also continually getting in new shipments of sample beans from potential growers to work with.... they come in wee batches (see above).  Toby and Alix make a small, test batch (1-5 lbs) of chocolate with the beans to see if they're good enough to order in bigger quantities to use in the chocolate they sell.  Only 15-20% of the beans they try out pass this test... the bar is high!

So, next, the cacao beans are roasted at 250 to 350 degrees for 20-40 minutes, which further develops the hundreds of flavor compounds. Toby and Alix spend lots of time experimenting with the best temp and length of roasting for each kind of bean they use.  If they over-roast, the chocolate becomes bitter, for example.

I can't show you pictures of the roasting process, because it involves some *top secret stuff* and I am sworn to secrecy.  (I couldn't help thinking of those spies in Willie Wonka's factory when Toby was swearing us to secrecy. ;-)

Okay, so next, the cooled, now-brittle beans are cracked into nibs and separated from the husks.  Toby is also a self-taught inventor and creative collaborator of sorts-- important skills for small-batch chocolate makers.  With the help of resources online, he came up with a cool, hand-made machine to do the cracking and winnowing.... involving a Champion juicer, a specialty vacuum, and a blade device custom made on his 3-D printer (all approved by the FDA and the CO health dep't!) The core component of this winnower was designed and made by John Nanci (the godfather of small batch chocolate).  Toby's modifications included the additional 3-D printed parts and other parts.

Much of his equipment are cool inventions using re-purposed equipment. And this is necessary because small-batch single-origin chocolate production is such a new and creative endeavor-- a blend of art and science lovingly done by just a handful of small, often family-owned, businesses. I felt so inspired learning how these folks re-envision uses for machines and equipment, to make them fit their own purposes.

Moving right along... so, the husk by-products are then stored in plastic white buckets (see above), which can be used for tea, body scrubs, brewing beer, etc.... Toby and Alix often pass these husks along to breweries or other local small businesses they work with. It's so heartening to see how these small, artisenal and hand-crafting companies work together creatively and promote each other's products. (At Nuance's recent birthday party at a local brewery, I had the most amazing, deep, rich chocolate beer.)

(Time lapse-- I just have to tell you that I took a little break from writing this blog post to make myself a cup of hot chocolate, which I am now enjoying.  *Sigh.* I knew something was missing...)

Okay, moving right along.... So, the cute little nibs go into the grinder next, and come out with the texture and consistency of peanut butter-- this is called chocolate liquor (and has nothing to do with alcohol, incidentally.) The machine Toby uses is the red cube above, whose original purpose was supposed to be a nut grinder, but which Toby uses exclusively for nib-grinding.

Next phase of the journey-- the melanger! This is a French verb meaning "to mix." This machine has a granite stone bottom disc and vertical granite wheels.  Interestingly, it was originally supposed to be an Indian spice grinder. Again, creative re-purposing to the rescue! 

The chocolate liquor and sugar are poured into the melanger (see below) for between 60 and 90 hours, depending on the particular kind of bean.  For days, the particles of cacao and sugar are ground down to between 20-30 microns (itty-bitty), so that the chocolate feels silky-smooth on your tongue. This process also helps release the volatile compounds and aromatics, while aerating and oxygenating the chocolate.  Note the chocolate's temperature here-- just pleasantly warm, a touch above room temp, but not hot.

Toby let us do a taste test here (!!!)-- we tasted chocolate from one melanger that was only done half of its final 90 hour timeline.  We noticed that it tasted kind of fruity and bright-- it still tasted of some compounds that interfered with the intended final, smooth, rich taste. It also still had a slightly gritty texture.

We tasted chocolate from another melanger (there were several in the room), which had completed about 75 hours already.  That was much smoother-- all silk-- and tasted heavenly. Toby said he was going to stop that one soon.... if you mix it for too long-- over 100 hours, for example, then it could taste flat, losing its fruity brightness altogether.  It's a lot of trial and error, art and science. Toby and Alix work hard to figure out the perfect process for each bean to maximize its delicious potential. 

If Toby's making milk chocolate, this melanger stage is where he adds the powdered whole milk, specially ordered from Europe. You can see it's lighter in color than the pure dark chocolate above.

So next, they pour the smooth, sweet, warm chocolate out of the melanger machine, and let it dry and cool into hard chunks.  Since the chocolate is still untempered, it looks mottled white and deep brown and striated. The chunks are stored in carefully labeled plastic bags until the next step.

This is the final step-- tempering, which means the controlled melting and cooling of the chocolate.  Here are the tempering units, with extremely precise temperature controls. The chocolate can stay in here for about an hour, or, can be set on overnight mode.

Check out this one-- the EZ Temper.  It was invented by a research doctor turned chocolate maker who re-purposed incubator equipment for tempering.... very creative, no?

So now that the chocolate has the right gloss, snap, melting point.... and feels like paradise on your tongue... it's ready to be poured into the molds! They make the molds using 3-D printer-- Toby also has a design background-- he created the Nuance logo and other design elements himself. These sweet little stars are used for the tasting flights Nuance offers in their shop. They also make chocolate bars, hot chocolate mix, and truffles (using extra ingredients like spices and fine liquor from other local food-crafters.) They also make some killer hot chocolate that you can sip and savor in their cafe-- perfect on a winter's day.  

Alix and Toby aren't doing wholesale at this time, which means you need to go to their shop to procure and enjoy their chocolate.  This means that they can be as experimental and creative as they want, and continually try out new processes and recipes, like true scientist-artists.

Nuance shop/cafe is located at 214 Pine St, in Old Town Fort Collins, CO. Toby, Alix, and their awesome employees are always happy to talk with you about their chocolate- making process.  It's SO much fun to do the taster flight of chocolate-- it's like wine-tasting, but yummier, and more kid-friendly.  You learn to distinguish among the complex notes and flavors that vary from bean to bean.  This is a super-fun activity to do on a date, with friends, with kids, when family is in town, or by yourself for a treat.

If you haven't read my first chocolate research post, please check it out here so that you can get the FULL chocolate-making experience....

In case you're curious, I've got my chocolate book outline done in delicious detail, and I've written and revised about half of it.  The novel is partly set in a small, family-owned chocolate shop in a small mountain town in Colorado, and partly set in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador. I can't wait to finish it and share it with you! Thank you for swinging by....

xo,

Laura