Making Raw Chocolate video takes you through the steps to make your own home made chocolate. Use the recipe or just use the natural nibs in smoothies, on chocolate or just nib-ble them. .
Making chocolate for yourself is as easy as following these 10 steps. You of course must get your hands on some cacao trees but after that it’s smooth sailing (read entire post). We also have a photographic tutorial of just making cacao nibs that will show you some detailed images of the cacao tree and fruit. We decided to take our beans to the next level and make chocolate. We were perplexed for the longest time because the information we had access to tells you to separate the cocoa butter from the chocolate and then add it back in. We didn’t want to make gourmet chocolate, we just wanted a nice hearty, healthy chocolate treat that we could make by hand.
Here are the *DIY Instructions for making the Solar Food Dryer and the DIY Outdoor Cooker used to roast the cacao beans.
Our Chocolate Recipe (not raw)
The Ingredients:
- Powdered Milk
- Cinnamon
- Sugar
- Condensed Milk
- Vanilla
- Cacao Beans
Our ingredients are as natural as we could get, with the exception of the condensed milk. There is a way to make your own “type” of condensed milk, but this post isn’t about that. Besides, we only harvest cacao twice a year so we don’t feel guilty about eating so little of it. I hand measure everything so each batch is unique. The video shows you when to add the ingredients. Be creative.
Growing Cacao
If you live in a tropical climate you can grow your very own chocolate trees! You can plant a single bean to start a cacao tree or you can do what we did and get your starts from a university that has done the research of the climate in your area and used the best organic soil to give the little trees a good fighting chance.
Cacao trees do best in shade with dappled sunlight. They like moist soil so we planted ours along a stream. The trees almost always have several lower branches and a primary branch that grows directly up. If you cut the primary branch the tree will then send its resources to the lower branches, making harvesting easier. The pods grow directly on the trunk and branches.
Costa Rica Cacao Initiative
If you live in Costa Rica the Ministry of Agriculture has a program available that helps farmers to start cacao operations. The services include a Farm Assesment – They have a calculation based on the size, layout and altitude of your farm that sums up how many trees you can plant and what your average yield will be. A nursery or vivero where you can buy cacao trees for $2 a piece and ongoing business support which includes contacts in the cacao export industry. Organic and Non-organic information is available.
We chose to buy 30 trees, that when added to our existing 30 trees should give us a personal supply of nibs and chocolate for a long time to come. We believe that everything should be planted in moderation and that mono-cultures are unsustainable. Costa Rica used to be a major cacao exporter until a disease took out many of the farms that existed in the 1970’s. Had the farmers used inter-cropping techniques the disease might not have destroyed entire farms.
If you are interested in the history of chocolate this article offers a great deal of information from the Heritage Daily
All of our Fruits and Foods of Costa Rica