CHOCOLATE! real, raw, organic, as close to nature as you can get chocolate!
Fully ripe cacao pods are picked from the chocolate trees (called theobroma cacao) that grow wild everywhere in these islands. They are split open and the seeds are washed. If you like, you can suck the white, licorice tasting cotton candy covering from the seeds yourself. It tastes fantastic!
After the seeds are washed, they are laid on flat beds in the sun to dry.
At this point the dried cacao seeds are great to nibble one. We like to cover them in chocolate and eat them that way. They are not sweet, but slightly bitter, almost like a coffee bean. The locals here then pound the seeds into smaller pieces called nibs. The nibs, like the whole seeds, are great to just munch on. They also make a fantastic tea! Just steep in hot water and add a little honey to taste. You can mix it with peppermint for a chocolaty mint tea or, if you come visit me, I will pick ginger flowers from the rain forest for you and make you ginger cacao tea, my favorite! They great thing about the nibs is that they are so easy to carry with you to snack on through out the day for a quick pick me up that wont let you down and offers all that great antioxidant goodness that you KNOW is as natural as you can get!
After the seeds are crushed into nibs, they are put through a grinder. The grinding process naturally heats the cacao enough to make it pliable. So when the cacao comes out the other side it is a warm paste that can easily be formed into the patties that we buy and bring home to make our favorite, raw cacao, all natural goodies.
Cool fact: There is a group of Indigenous people in the Talamanca Mountains of Costa Rica that live live an amazingly long time. We spent an afternoon with a family there and the grandmother, who was in her 70's taught us about rain forest medicine. She says her people drink cacao every day, 5 or 6 cups of it. It is their secret to long life.
It was so cool to stand in her chocolate smelling barn and talk to her (in perfect English) about how to make the chocolate drink they swear by.
They don't use milk to make the chocolate and they don't sweeten it. They use an old fashioned cheese grater to grate the chocolate and then boil it and drink it, simple as that!
I drank it that way. Its bitter. So I did break down and add a little honey and sea salt. The result? A savory, slightly sweet drink that is so smooth and rich I could drink it all day!
Soon we will have this totally natural, totally hand made raw cacao now in our SUSTAINING FAMILIES SHOP. And when we do, every raw chocolate patty you buy will a family here in Panama. Help us help them.
Eat More Chocolate,
Laura
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