Lavaloha Chocolate Farm Tour

3/1/20

    I’ve finally gotten around to processing my vacation pictures and starting on the scrapbook pages. This was one of my favorite days — touring a chocolate farm, and tasting every step of the process. Unfortunately, I was so busy listening and looking that I didn’t document the tour like I should have. I even had to snag the inside of the pod from Pixabay, as I was tasting the beans without and with their white, gelatinous outer covering. (Bitter without, sweeter with.)

    After being separated from the pods, the beans to through a fermenting process — in what looks like insulated wheeled trash bins. After that, they are spread put too dry. Workers clean the last of the residue from the beans (I cleaned the one shown. The beads are now beginning to taste like chocolate.) Next the beans go into small roasters for a while. They come out broken into pieces and are called cocoa nibs. You can se the cracks on the pre-roasted bean where this must happen.

    From there, the nibs are ground, much like nut butter. The resulting paste tastes like rich dark chocolate. The sample spoons were a little small ;-) Some of the paste is pressed to get cocoa butter (for white chocolate) with the residue going to powdered cocoa. The rest of the paste is mixed with varying amounts of sugar and milk to make chocolate bark, at this farm, anyway. They add a few streaks of white chocolate colored orange and red to represent lava - the farm is on the side of Mauna Loa.  Extra dark is 90% cacao. Dark chocolate is 70% and milk is 50% — still richer and darker tasting that what we’re used to in a commercial chocolate bar.  Brand names have carnauba wax added to prevent the bar from melting so easily.

    Lavaloha Farm makes a wide variety of flavors: hot pepper, orange zest, sea salt and macadamia nuts. Samples all around. Yum! Yum! Yum! 

    Sadly, I finished the last of the Hilo chocolate the other day. I may need to order more . . .

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