Oh yeah... chocolate does grow on trees. I've found paradise. 
The bottom one, you're mine!! Two keen roommates (i.e. bored) join in the fun and it gets out of hand rapidly. Step one. Google the process. The fine art of chocolate making involves candy thermometers, drying cocoa beans in the sun for days on end, adding ingredients like lecithin (hard to come by in the middle of the ocean), carefully mixing and stirring the chocolate, etc. The images on the web are of indigenous women piling pods and grinding them in gorgeous tropical locations. I've got the ship's galley kitchen.
Bored, armed sailors. You should be scared. 
Hellooooo my lovely! oh yeah, that's cocoa. 
So my roommates and I came up with our next approximation to the real thing. No sunshine? No problem. Oven set at 220 Celcius- another quandry. How much is 220 celcius? who cares! Surely it will roast, it's at the top of the dial! Whereaby we skip that entire pesky roast-the-bean-in-the-sunshine-for-5-days step.
Wait - the cocoa pods come covered in a really sweet fruit! That obviously needs eating off first! (We insert our own step 2.) The white fruit tastes rather like litchie. Unfortunately, when you add a juicy fruit to the oven, the juices caramelize and don't become chocolate, the whole thing just burns.
Step 3. Add cocoa butter. Right. I don't have that on the ship. We'll skip that too. You can see where this is headed...not to successful chocolate -making.
We gave up and ate skittles instead, readily available in the ship shop, proving that lots of initial enthusiasm sometimes does yield before ignorance.
Skittles anyone? 
2 comments:
Lycia! You are TOO funny, darlin'! This was indeed a fascinating post. But I can't believe that you went from CHOCOLATE to SKITTLES! There just isn't a comparison. You'd better go look for some Ghiradelli in Atlanta!
Oh dear! You should have asked me! We used to make it in the Philippines and it was sooooo good! First you eat the fruit off the seeds. You spit the seeds into a bowl, then roast them. After they are roasted you grind them. The cocoa butter kind of separates over time and forms a yellowish layer. We boiled the cocoa to make hot chocolate and added lots of sugar :)
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