Day 9: Chocolate!

Monday, January 11

If I haven't mentioned it before, I should have: Guatemala has the best chocolate in the world. Like seriously, I'm going to cry every time I have a mug of hot chocolate in the United States because it doesn't compare to the magic that I drink here.

Last week we learned how to make chocolate by hand from Hannah H's and Grace's host mom and grandma. They also have machines that make it faster, but it's cool that they remember and share how to do it the traditional way. 14 of us crowded into the kitchen of Mira and her mother, Estela, which already smelled of rich, warm chocolate.

This is a cacao fruit. Not to be confused with coco, which is coconut, or coca, which is cocaine. 

A cacao bean. The shell is really hard to get open, and the bean doesn't taste much like chocolate at all. It's bitter and tastes like bark.

Estela roasted the beans over a hot, flaming stove. This makes the shells come off easily and the bean taste like chocolate.

Then we shelled the beans...

...and ground them up into a powder. Once a pile of chocolate was fine enough, Mira added handfuls of sugar and that mixture was ground together. Eventually, it turns into...

...this. Since cacao beans contain butter, the friction from the grinding stone turns the cacao into a paste. With solid sugar added, it becomes dough. Play-dough, actually. We got to make chocolate sculptures and sneak bits of dough into our mouths. This is the product Mira and Estela sell, with your choice of vanilla or cinnamon mixed in. Unfortunately, it's harder than a brick after it cools, so it doesn't make a convenient treat.  

The chocolate's intended purpose is to become a beverage. Guatemalan hot chocolate is made by dissolving a chocolate brick in hot water. That's it. You can ask for milk, but really, it doesn't need it.

That night my roommate and I tried to reproduce the magic hot chocolate with a microwave. We didn't know how to break the chocolate apart so we tried scraping it off with a knife. It wasn't very good. Later, our host mom showed us how to do it right. You just plop the whole thing in a pot of water and get it real hot, and stir it up. I guess the traditional Maya magic-chocolate just isn't compatible with microwaves.