Chocolate!

We've been making chocolate for almost 2 years now. Hard to imagine but true. It's a lot of work to take the fruit from our old heirloom cacao trees and transform it into the bars you see above, but it's good work. Four years ago today I wrote a post about harvesting our cacao:

http://theislandfarm.blogspot.com/2009/11/cacao-harvest-time.html

so I won't retell that story :) But after it's harvested, fermented and sun dried, roasted, milled and winnowed we turn it into bars. I'll save the explanation of that magical process for another post. Just to say it takes 3 days to go from bean to bar. We do the entire process ourselves, from harvest to selling the bars at the farmers' market. In all that time there are no more than 4 people who handle the chocolate, and it travels no more than 1 mile from tree to market stall. It's quite wonderful really, the process. And the bars? They're very good, rich, dark, fudge-like texture and rewarding.

We want to stay as true to the roots of chocolate as we can. We have three flavors: vanilla, rosita de cacao and allspice: all 3 are traditional indigenous additions to cacao: meaning they were added to cacao drinks before the Europeans appeared.  Vanilla comes from the Veracruz area of Mexico - it's native to much of Central America, but it was the Totonac Indians who first cultivated it. Our vanilla bars are 1%  organic vanilla (we grow organic vanilla), we call them Totonac Bars. Rosita de Cacao needs its own post. We love it, it's a pretty little white flower and comes from the Oaxaca area of Mexico, we call our Rosita bars Olmec after the Olmec Indians, and the Allspice bars are named K'An which is the Mayan glyph for Allspice. The Mayans used Allspice for cacao, as a medicinal and as a ritual plant.

As a special request we also make a really delicious milk chocolate. Shh . . .