From Beans to Bar

Cusco, it's pretty amazing and annoying all the same breadth.  Here, you get solicited for things to spend your money more per meter walked than any other place I've been in South America.  I guess it’s what you get when you mix rich tourists with third world homeless.  Anyways, it gets to be just like advertisements, you just start to block them out and say ‘no gracias,’ without even listening or looking.  But for some reason, the flyer for the free entrance to the chocolate museum caught our attention.

It turned out to be a great decision, as they have a ‘create your own chocolate bar’ workshop deal, where you start with the chocolate beans and end up with your own chocolate to eat.  It was well worth the 66 soles. 

We went through the basic process:  the cacao tree, the fermentation process (which is super important and has to take places only hours after the pods have been picked), the tossing of the beans (basically mixing over heat until the beans start popping), and the removing of the skins to reveal just the cocoa beans.  We all tried eating the beans before and after tossing – both were pretty bitter, but we learned if you eat enough of the uncooked beans you begin to hallucinated.  Then we got out the mortar and pestle (my specialty) for a little bean grinding competition.  We all had 2 minutes to turn the cocoa from beans into a smooth paste, the way the Mayans used to do it.  After 2 minutes of pretty hard work our pastes were judged, and I won (nbd...) the prize of a bag of cocoa tea.  It tastes a lot like chocolate – delicious!

Then we used our hard earned chocolate paste to make two kinds of hot chocolate.  The first was the method of the ancient Mayans, just cocoa paste, boiling water, and cayenne pepper… as predicted, it was terrible.  Then we made an American version, cocoa paste, cinnamon, cloves, warm milk, and lots of sugar.  The latter was much much better.

Finally, we saw the final steps to making chocolate: mixing the paste with sugar for 48 hours until it is perfectly smooth, then pouring into chocolate bars.  This was the best part, as we got to pick out any mold we wanted for our chocolate and then add flavors: mint, coffee beans, nuts, coconut, whatever we wanted really.  By the end of the 2 hour workshop we all felt terrible like a kid after Halloween.  Having an empty stomach that was filled with pounds of chocolate was not a great choice before dinner.

The finished chocolate went in the refrigerator for an hour before it was ours to take home.  The consensus was clear: the tour – great, the chocolate – amazing!

PS. The girls took all the photos of this event, so I’ll add them once I get them…