Home chocolate project day 1 – opening a pod

I was lucky enough to be given two more arriba pods from Ecuador yesterday – to add to the now dried pair from a few months back. While photographing the pods while they still looked fairly fresh, I had the idea of opening one and trying to ferment, roast and grind the beans to make something like chocolate.

Here’s the arriba pods before the knife – almost fresh with just some browning going on.

For demonstrations and tastings I usually cut them open length ways, but this time I tried across the middle, to allow the beans to come out uncut in one long blobby caterpillar. I chose the browner, fatter one above – just because something banged around inside the other one when you shook it, and for no good reason I figured maybe this had dried out more inside.

Here’s the cut fat pod:

Having done this it was hard to resist trying both the pod and the bean covering, which I was told would still be edible. The bean covering was lightly sweet, with a taste a little like bread dough, but astringent afterwards. I also tried some of the inside of the pod, which was very delicately flavoured a little like lychee with the freshness of cucumber. The texture quite solid.

Fermentation – day 1

So now to begin fermentation! At first I had the idea just to leave the beans on a plate for a few days and see what would happen, as in this next photo …

I soon realised this probably wasn’t a good idea and have moved them into a bowl with a suspended sieve, to allow ventilation and the liquid to drain off.

This is my first attempt at this, so I’d welcome suggestions and comments. For now, please use the forum thread here http://www.seventypercent.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1035 . Sometime soon we’ll have the forum logins synced with the new blog software here so you can leave comments directly.

Look out for more tomorrow!