HOME-MADE CACAO CHOCOLATES

Everyone knows that pure chocolates are made from cacao seeds. Cacao is a tree whose red contoured fruit is filled with nothing but rows of thumb-sized seeds.

Looking at these seeds as they appear, one would never know that these could become the best chocolates there is.

Here’s how: (let’s start from the very beginning to be very detailed about the subject)

1. Cacao fruits turn yellow when these are ripe and ready for harvest, pick only the yellow fruits.
2. Break the fruit open and remove the seeds.
3. Wash the seeds in a pail of water to remove the juice sticking onto the seeds.
4. Lay the seed on a mat placing them side by side, if possible not one on top of the other.
5. Expose the seeds to the sun for 1 or 2 days until the seeds are dry.
6. At moderate heat, roast the seeds in a pan or roaster until the color of the beans become dark brown. Avoid overcooking the beans (seeds) for they taste bitter when overcooked. Whisk the cooking beans with a ladle to prevent the seeds at the bottom from burning.
7. In order to know if the seeds are cooked, get a sample from the pan, let it cool and break its coating open. If the coating breaks easily, it is already cooked.
8. Transfer the beans to a bigger, more open container to let them cool fast, once cool, its time to break the seed coating. Separate the coating from inner seed, the inner seed is the we need.
9. Bring the clean seeds to the supermarket or a grocery store that has a cereal-grinding mill and have the beans milled or ground.
10. The heat of the mill will melt the ground cocoa beans when it exits the mill’s outlet, giving off the sweet chocolatey aroma.
11. While still warm and soft, you may place the chocolate in little moldings in order to give them uniform shapes and sizes. The chocolate will harden when cold.
12. You now have a home-made original chocolate. You can make a chocolate drink by adding your chocolate nuggets to boiling water. Add sugar to sweeten as necessary.

Note: You can also buy dried cacao seeds at the grocery store. You don’t have to start planting the tree. It takes 3 to 5 years for the tree to bear the fruit.

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