I intentionally didn’t do a ton of research about this trip. I didn’t want to over schedule (or schedule, period) ourselves. We wanted the easiest of easiest-paced vacations. But a couple of activities caught my eye when I skimmed the travel guide ahead of our trip. One of them stood out as a clear must-do: Chocolate farming.
I told myself, “You know, for the kids,” but I know Aimee and I would be just as into it. Maybe even more so.
The Mayan district of Central Belize is a major chocolate producer. But you could easily miss the thousands of acres of farms hiding in plain sight. Cocoa trees like shade, so they’re usually hidden banana trees or simply natural forest growth.
Both cocoa farming and cocoa touring are big business out here, and we were more than happy to play a part in that. So we arranged a van to take us 10 miles inland from Hopkins to one of the bigger plantations. It’s the Che’il Mayan chocolate farm. The name loosely translates into Wild Mayans, and it pays homage to one of the several world-altering contributions of the early Mayans.
Current farming practices have changed remarkably little since those days, and the collection of cocoa seeds remains extremely labor intensive. Learning about that was the first stop on our tour. We went out with local farmer, Darcelio, into one of his fields (among 3,000 acres in total). While he animatedly extolled the incredible health benefits of “doing the chocolate,” which he defined as consuming anything above 75% cacao. Diabetes? Gone. Heart disease? Fixed. Anxiety? Over.
I don’t remember hearing it exactly that way in med school, but I wasn’t going to argue.
Then he took us a few steps into the forest to see the pods in their natural environment. He pointed out a handful of ripe ones, but the harvesting season is several months long and Darcelio typically harvests seeds up to 9 times a year to catch the pods at their best.
With a couple of pods in hand, he took us back to his classroom/hut to show us how he opens them. He then proceeded to bang a wooden stick against one of the pods, rotating it between blows. This approach was not just a show for tourists. Despite having modern resources available to him, his technique was nearly identical to what his ancestors perfected 5,000 years ago. Anything mechanized or using a blade would risk damaging the nearly-priceless pulp and the cacao seeds within it.
He then let us pick out a pulp-covered seed to try for ourselves. He advised us not to chew it, but let it just sit in our mouth. It had a remarkably sweet, melon-like flavor that tasted nothing like chocolate. The characteristic chocolate flavor comes from the bitter innards of the seed, but Darcelio warned us that they’re quite unpalatable raw.
After recollecting the seeds to prevent any wayward trees from sprouting up in his teaching area (the land out here is beyond fertile), he continued with his discussion of how they became the chocolate we all know. He told us that the seed/pulp mixture is collected in wooden boxes and covered with leaves to let wild yeast and probiotics ferment the pulp sugars and mature the seeds. The fermentation is a critical process and takes a week or two. From there, the seeds are slowly dried to a specific humidity level over about 6 days and then sent to the same production facility where we were headed next.
On the drive back, Aimee and I kept listing the health benefits of pure dark chocolate. Bad vision? Restored. Broken leg? Set. Bald? Check again. The possibilities were endless. It reminded Aimee of the hucksters she used to see on the busses in Nicaragua. They’d hop on and see if anyone wanted to buy their herbal cures for everything from arthritis to AIDS. These cocoa pods were probably no more effective, but infinitely tastier.
At the production facility, another local expert took us through the next steps. The fermented and dried seeds are roasted to perfection, then the seeds are crushed and pressed. The extracted oils are separated from the ground seeds and will naturally solidify in a day or two to become cocoa butter.
The remaining roasted seed pieces would be then sold as-is (cocoa nibs), further ground and dried (cocoa powder), or turned into bar chocolate. That’s the part we were doing. Our teacher had all of us process the seeds by hand on the type of grinding stone that our guide informed us is in every single Mayan households, passed down through the generations. This particular one was nearly 200 years old, predating the automobile and even the first steam locomotive in the Americas.
Some cocoa butter was then added back to our ground seeds and further worked on the stone for another 3-4 minutes. He said the chocolate they sell is ground for 3 hours to make it super fine (the only mechanized part of this entire process). He asked us what degree of dark chocolate we wanted to make (the group decided on 80% to ward of digestive problems, migraines, and COVID), and then added the corresponding amount of cane sugar (also grown on site). He poured the oily mixture into a rubber form and then put it in the fridge for a few minutes. As we waited, we tried the traditional Mayan chocolate beverage where it all began. It tasted like a more dilute hot chocolate with cinnamon and a few other spices added. No surprise, it was delicious.
Our host joked that this wasn’t like a cooking show where the chocolate forms are put into the fridge and then the finished product comes out at the same time. So we small talked for another couple of minutes until the bars were ready. He then pulled the form from the fridge and popped out a dozen or so bars for everyone one the tour. Despite the short production time and the amateur helpers, the chocolate was, hands down, the best I have ever tasted. By orders of magnitude. Nothing else comes close.
As any reasonable person would do, we then proceeded to buy a considerable amount of professionally made chocolate bars to take home. The staff said that even though they were producing massive amounts of cocoa seeds from thousand of acres of rich farmland, they barely have enough to keep their own on-site store stocked. They have a primo location on the entrance road to the popular Coxcomb sanctuary, the world’s only jaguar preserve, so they get plenty of tourist traffic. I can’t imagine anyone who goes past this place leaves with anything less than 5 bars, so I’m not surprised there aren’t any left to send elsewhere.
I can’t really think of a way to wrap up this post. We toured a cocoa farm, we made some chocolate, we ate it, we were cured of all diseases. Not a bad day.
