Thinking outside the pod
Going to the source for the most sublime chocolate you'll ever have

Not everyone loves chocolate, but those who do, feel it deeply. My son, Remy, is one of those people. He’s a skilled cook with the ability to think inside the dish he’s preparing. All cooking is an expression of love, but chocolate, more than most foods, confers the feeling of being loved. And for the last several years, Remy has been researching the process by which chocolate is created from raw cacao beans. So when we went to Hawaii a few weeks ago, Remy was ready. 

Within minutes of arriving at my friend Ken’s lushly planted property, Remy had an oblong yellow cacao pod gripped firmly in hand, freshly twisted from one of Ken’s trees. He carried it around as he took stock of Ken’s other cacao trees. Long before he’d unpacked his suitcase, Remy had harvested roughly 20 golden pods. Moving with the steadiness of an expert, despite never having touched cacao in his life, Remy opened the pods by whacking them with a hammer. He extracted the seeds, which are covered in a sweet, white, fruity pulp. He then asked Ken for a container in which to ferment the beans.

They decided on a sun tea maker, into which they placed the pulpy beans and left it in the sun. For the next few days, we enjoyed the kombucha-like liquor that built up as the pulpy beans fermented. It was fruity, alcoholic and decidedly non-chocolatey, despite being pure cacao. 

Although Ken has a grove of cacao trees, he doesn’t bother with the laborious chocolate-making process. Instead, he places the individual seeds in a dehydrator, pulp and all, and dries till crisp. The pulp shrinks down and hardens into a sweet leather that encapsulates the seeds, adding just the right amount of sweetness to balance the bitterness of the cacao bean. If I had cacao trees, I would probably do the same. 

But Remy was laser focused on the smooth, refined chocolate you find wrapped in foil, with zero interest in shortcuts or hacks. After several days of fermenting his beans, he dried and roasted them on cookie sheets in the oven, carefully stewarding them into a rich shade of brown. The transformation was impressive, as the beans developed a deeply fulfilling chocolatey flavor that Ken’s dehydrated beans lacked. Taking note of this, I began my own research. 

As Remy had cleaned out Ken’s ripe cacao pods, I visited a nearby self-serve farm stand and grabbed a few, with which I made a batch of Ken-style seeds, but with a twist. Before dehydrating them, I tossed the white pulpy seeds with sugar and vanilla, because nothing brings out the flavor of chocolate like those two. After dehydrating these, I roasted them to add that rich, dark, chocolatey flavor. At this point they were perfect. No further processing necessary. A sweet and vaguely fruity chocolatey snack, as crunchy as a corn flake.  I am munching on some as we speak, as I sip my coffee. A more pleasurable and potent combination of beans does not exist. 

Meanwhile, Remy was ready to grind his beans, but there was no cacao grinder in the house. So he used Ken’s coffee grinder, shaking it like a maraca as it spun so as to prevent a paste from building up and sticking to the bottom. It was a generous move by Ken to allow him to use the coffee grinder, which was never the same, to put it mildly. Before that heroic little machine overheated and died, Remy managed to incorporate cocoa butter, sugar and powdered milk and grind it to a smoothness that was probably as silky as we were gonna get without a stone roller to slowly grind away the beans for about 48 hours.

Our chocotourist proceeded to spoon his mixture from the broken-down grinder into a rubber mini ice cube tray and put it in the fridge to harden. A few hours later, we enjoyed some damn good chocolate.

If you want to try any of these diy chocolate methods, finding cacao pods online is significantly cheaper than a trip to Hawaii. But you don’t have to go to anywhere near those lengths to in order to get creative with chocolate. Allow me to introduce my own hack that was created out of necessity one evening when I found myself needing chocolate, but had only cocoa powder. I came up with a little recipe that is so simple and easy that I fear I might have to go into hiding after telling you this, so the Hershey hitmen don’t hunt me down and give me the kiss of death. 

I kid you not, people. All you do is combine cocoa powder, heavy cream and sugar – or the sweetener of your choice – and stir until thick and smooth. That’s really it – you have essentially created an instant ganache, with way less effort. Proportions don’t matter, because it’s all to taste. If it’s not sweet enough, add more sweet. If it’s too sweet add more cocoa powder. If it’s too thick add more cream. If it’s too thin add more cocoa and sugar. 

If you want to shape this divine paste into a cute animal be my guest, but it will never be finger friendly. This chocolatey goodness is definitely spoon material.