Cocoa-sta Rica (Cocoa in Costa Rica)

Cacao tree

Fun fact: "cacao" and "cocoa" are exactly the same thing. Cacao is just the Spanish name for cocoa. Last weekend, I watched a demonstration of how this native Costa Rican plant was utilized by the indigenous population into chocolate products. Since fancy chocolate uses the original name and I just feel like I'm talking about Swiss Miss when I say "cocoa," I'll refer to it as cacao…

Cacao grows on a strange, bent tree with tiny pink flowers that turn into a hard, yellow, gourd-esque fruit. Cacao isn't the fruit, but rather the white seeds inside. The indigenous people believed that cacao was a gift from the gods. They believed it would be disrespectful to bust it open with an axe or the ground, so accordingly they used their foreheads or elbows to bash it. Originally, people found that sucking on the seeds had a slight mood-elevating, energizing effect (there is some caffeine present naturally). After they had sucked on it they would just toss it on the ground, contributing to the spread of the plant through Central America. They never ate the seeds because the inside is extremely bitter and even eating one seed will give you serious diarrhea. This is actually why it has the name it does. The Spaniards found out these side effects the hard way, so they gave it a name derived from "caca agua," literally "poop water" but meaning more like "watery poop."

Below is a video of my boyfriend bravely volunteering to eat a roasted seed. It won't destroy your stomach, but it still tastes awful.

Roasted seed

Through the habit of tossing the sucked-on seeds onto the ground, people discovered the benefits of fermentation. The saliva provided the anaerobic bacteria and water necessary to start the process, and left alone in the equatorial heat the seeds ferment quickly and have a very pleasant aroma. The lower social classes were expressly forbidden from utilizing this process, because cacao was considered sacred. The upper-class folk (kings, shamans, etc.) refined the seeds beyond fermentation. The seeds were then dried in the sun, roasted over a fire, and shelled. The insides of the shelled seeds are edible, but still way too bitter for me to handle more than a lick.

The insides were then put in a large, curved standing bowl—usually made out of volcanic rock. With a smooth stone heated in a fire, they spent 6-7 hours grinding the shelled seeds into a fine, dark-brown powder. The Spaniards brought mechanical grinders from Europe that really accelerated the process. This
powder can be refined into cocoa butter, or in different ways into chocolate. We tasted it at this stage with some raw sugar and cinnamon mixed in, and it was really good but still quite bitter.

The indigenous used this powder to make a chocolate beverage by mixing the powder with either hot or cold water (the Spaniards preferred milk). To flavor it, they would mix in some of the following: vanilla, nutmeg, black pepper, or chili powder. The indigenous favorite was vanilla and chili powder, and many students in my group liked it well enough. I went with vanilla, nutmeg, and some corn starch (to thicken it) myself, and it was definitely delicious.

From here, the refining of cacao was developed to make chocolate bars in the 19th century. Cacao has been cultivated at a modest scale in Costa Rica, but they technically don't make chocolate, because it isn't refined into bars here. According to one of my professors it is fairly low quality in global terms.