Travel Features

My Very Own Bar of Chocolate

According to Science Daily, chocolate is the most widely and frequently craved food on the planet. No surprises there, then. But what is amazing is that hardly any of us know exactly what it is, or how it is made. 

Of course, there is chocolate, and there is chocolate. The industrially made stuff remains a mystery for me but recently I was staying in St Lucia at the amazing Anse Chastanet and Jade Mountain resorts where I learned all about how to make real chocolate. And I use the word ‘real’ in the same way British beer drinkers talk about “real ale”. Something that is made by hand with basic ingredients. 

The twin resorts, located near Soufriere, in the fabulously scenic southern part of the island, are part of a large and very beautiful demesne known as the Emerald Estate, upon which there happen to grow more than 2000 cocoa trees

“Since 2010, our resorts have hand-crafted Emerald Estate Chocolate for the enjoyment of our guests. And with the opening of the chocolate laboratory, guests are now able to not only taste but participate in the making of the chocolate,” I was told.

Saint Lucia has a long connection with the cocoa industry which dates back to the early 1700’s. There are many plantations on the island that have been harvesting and producing cocoa for eons, supplying the local market. In celebration, August has been declared the “Month of Chocolate” on the island.

Anyway, I took a tour of the estate’s remarkable gardens in the hills just behind the scenic little seaside town of Soufriere and saw how the cocoa is harvested in season, after which it is held in fermentation bins before being eventually laid out in special drying racks that can be wheeled in and out of the bright Caribbean sunlight. 

It’s an interesting process. You can break open a cocoa pod and pull out one of the white beans and pop it into your mouth. Your taste buds will be treated to a rather pleasant sweet-sour experience that tastes nothing like chocolate. And I mean nothing like - you get no hint of this plant’s eventual culinary destination at all. But you MUST NOT bite into the bean itself or you’ll be treated to a rather nasty bitter surprise.

Seasons vary from region to region, but the process of turning the plant material into chocolate begins when the pods are cut open and the white pulp containing the cocoa beans is scooped out. 

The pods and pulp are placed into wooden containers where the pulp is fermented for five to seven days. During the process, the beans are turned regularly to help them ferment more evenly and there is, by-the-way, a bye-product of all this fermentation which is a kind of vinegar that the chefs at Jade Mountain now use in their kitchens. 

Next comes the drying when the beans are laid out on large racks. All over the Caribbean you will find old buildings that appear to have a kind of railway built into their foundations. These are the rails upon which the big heavy racks can be wheeled out into the sunshine and quickly pushed back again when it’s raining or at night. 

Next, away from the estate gardens and up at Jade Mountain’s chocolate workshop, comes the roasting process which is followed by another process which removes the papery skins. The eventual ‘cocoa nibs’ are then ground with stone rollers until they are reduced to a paste. This cocoa mass or cocoa liquor is a pure, unrefined chocolate which contains both cocoa solids and cocoa butter - the natural fats present in the bean.

In large chocolate factories the raw material then goes through another process sometimes called ‘conching’ in which things like that sugar, milk powder (for milk chocolate) and other flavourings are added. The chocolate at Jade Mountain only contains cocoa and locally sourced cane sugar. Which is why you could describe it as “real chocolate”. 

At Jade Mountain’s lab’ we were able to make our own chocolate bars by working the cocoa mass and sugar on the cold marble topped table until the whole thing reached a smooth silky consistency. We then were given moulds and a choice of other ingredients like chopped nuts which which we could embellish our own individual bars. 

A day later I found my pistachio flavoured bar in the fridge in my ‘sanctuary’ at Jade Mountain - and very wonderful it was too. This is the sort of chocolate people were going crazy over a couple of centuries ago - very different indeed from the commercial bar in a European sweet shop or even one of the “single estate” specialty bars of chocolate you can buy in most supermarkets now.