The K Experience

Cocoa Revealed: The Pod

Past - Ghana

Monday, 18 February 2008

Ghana is the second largest producer of cocoa, exporting well over 650,000 tonnes per year. It's products are consumed by hundreds of millions of people everyday in nearly every country in the world in its various forms. But how many people know what it looked like before it was made into their Mars bar, or their Starbucks hot cocoa? How many people care about what it took to make it, and indeed how much it cost to make? Is fair trade really fair? I want to make this a two part entry, the first explaining the ins and outs of the cocoa pod, and the second explaining the ins and outs of the cocoa industry...

Ready Made So I start with the easiest and more fun part of the two part entry, the pod. Living in the Slough Trading estate in England, right next to the Mars Factory gave me a unique experience of cocoa. The smell of chocolate was always in the air, and I had the opportunity to work in the factory during some summers, making Bounty's, Mars Bars and the like. For some this was a dream come true, and for others, the experience put them off chocolate for the rest of their lives. It was nice to go around the country and indeed the world and see packets of Mars products which were made in that one factory, and with the insider knowledge I had, I would often be able to tell the date, and shift that particular product was made, not that anyone would find that piece of information interesting.

With all that knowledge and experience, I had no idea what the chocolate was like before it reached the factory, or how it got there. Living in Ghana for a while enlightened me a little in that respect. While I was there, I took the opportunity to purchase a couple of cocoa pods, and explore the mystery. Not that I thought I would find bars of chocolate in the pods, but I was slightly intrigued by the discovery.

The first thing I did was cut the pod in half. This was not an easy task as the pod was about 10mm thick. Once I was able to cut through it the cocoa beans were revealed, and seemed to be surrounded by a thick gooey pulp which the South Americans call 'baba de cacao' (Brazil and Ecuador are among the world's largest cocoa bean producing countries)

You can actually notice in the picture that the beans were connected to each other with a thin vein-like network of strands which were also covered with the pulp. I removed the beans from the pod and tasted the pulp, which was extremely delicious. I also ate the strands which loosely connected the beans together, and totally emptied the cocoa pod, scraping out whatever bits of the sweet pulp I could extract from the insides casing.

As I have already said, the pulp was absolutely delicious, and I made sure that each bit was extracted from every bean. This left the pulpless gooless beans on the right. Each bean had a thin skin covering it, which once removed, revealed the beans true colour. A close-up of the naked bean shows it's mozaic like formation.

I shall now confess my true ignorance of cocoa as my initial intentions were to create some kind of chocolatey recipe with the beans I had extracted. Little did I know just how bitter and disgusting the actual raw bean was to taste, but I soon found out when I ate one.

As anyone who is familiar cocoa processing (or anyone who has at least seen a documentary about it) will know, after the harvesting, the pods are cut open, and the seeds are layed out on mats with the pulp. This is where the seeds are fermented and they also undergo a processes called 'sweating' where the pulp liquifies, and drains away from the beans which eventually dry out. The pulp is sometimes used by the cocoa producing companies to distill alcoholic spirits, but usually is just left to drain away and is wasted, which is such a shame as at this stage it is the tastiest part of the cocoa. The fermenting of the cocoa is the most crucial stage as if it is left too long, or not long enough, the taste is affected, and the beans are rendered useless.

Even though I wouldn't have had to wait for the pulp to liquify and run off, (I had already licked that off) I wasn't prepared to wait for the 6 to 7 days it takes for the beans to ferment, before making it into something edible. Not that it would have been edible anyway, I am sure it would have needed some other form of treatment or processing before cooking. So, the cocoa that I bought went to waste, and the only thing I got from it was the lovely sweet delicious pulp. I did also get the invaluable experience of taking a cocoa pod apart which was fun.

For pictures of my cocoa discovery see the Cocoa Pod Pictures in the gallery,

or you can see Cocoa Revealed: The Industry for information on Fair Trade, Child Labour and the revenue that the big chocolate companies are making.

Picture of chocolate in cocoa pod taken from Souperior Food Blog. Information on processing taken from Albert Uster Imports.com and Wikipedia's Cocoa entry.

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Xuehong

|02-20-2008 14:43:04

I've never thought about where chocolate comes from. We for sure take many
things here for granted. BTW, great pictures!

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Jen Teeter - Chocolate

|02-20-2008 19:12:47

What an awesome experience! Since chococlate is such a laborous process, why
don't we pay the harvesters more, eh?

Take a look here if you want to see how
some ways to make the fair trade choclate movement spread like cocoa
butter:
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/cocoa/
http://www.fair
trade.org.uk
http://www.papapaa.org

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