James, my Dad, Mike & I headed back down the jungle track to the highway and drove the few clicks to the farm. It is owned and operated by Alex & Jutta Mena, he being a native and she being an ex-pat Austrian. Jutta met us in their open-air cabana and my Dad and James spent a fair bit of time drooling over the hand made teak furniture. Alex explained later that he'd built if from stuff that was just 'lying around', which made my Dad just shake his head. Anyhow, Alex joined us and then took us on a tour of his farm.
It...was...awesome. In addition to cocoa, he grew bananas, pineapples, papaya, starfruit & cinnamon (it's from a tree! weird to not see it in a bottle). The most impressive, though, was that he was leaving a fair chunk of his lands as untouched primary & secondary rainforest. He told a story of how the monkeys were eating his cocoa pods. Not wanting to kill them, he asked his neighbours how to cope with it and they advised him to plant a perimeter of a particular banana around his cocoa forests because the monkeys were wild for this type of banana and would leave the cocoa alone. He did this and apparently it worked! So he's happy & and so are the monkeys.
At first, he took us around his 'yard' showing us banana trees & plantains and other fruit. He also had so many tropical flowers it looked like a florists shop on a good day. Then we went into the cocoa forest and I finally understood why Muslims get so excited about Mecca or Catholics get so excited about the Vatican. I could practically hear the chorus of angels when I first laid eyes on the cocoa pods. Then, of course, I realized that I was at the source of what was forcing me to go to the gym so much and could no longer hear the singing.
He walked us through the forest and then plucked a pod from a tree and sliced it open with a machete. Inside was this network of white pods. He gave us each one and told us to suck on it for a bit. We did so and we found them to have a fairly sweet taste. Within these pods is the cocoa bean. So they take these pods with the beans in them and let them ferment for a while. Then they take the seeds, dry them, roast them & grind them. At that point, you have a paste that is 100% chocolate and that's what the chocolatiers are buying and then working into either excellent chocolate, on one end of the spectrum, or the Hershey bar, which is decidedly on the other end. For Alex, his problem is not finding buyers - it's not having enough cocoa paste to meet the demand.
After the tour, we went back to the cabana. Jutta had prepared an unbelievable spread of their fruits and chocolate sauce for dipping. As I said: it...was...awesome. I ended up buying some of their crushed cocoa beans. When sprinkled on Costa Rican ice cream (so good, I won't even try to explain), it makes you go to your happy place with pretty much no mental effort.
Cocoa tree, with magical, mystical pods
I kept having to tell myself not to think of them as skin tags
Roots of a ficus.
Pod Poser
Inside the cocoa pod
Dried, roasted cocoa beans
Tasting the paste
After the tour, getting our strength back so that we could return to the house and spend the rest of the day lounging under the forest canopy, savoring Costa Rican rum
2 comments:
I know what you mean about the ice cream.. I have vivid memories from a trip in 1994. It took half the trip to work up the courage to eat "a milk product" in a third world country due to paranoia about stomach bugs. I felt dumb and enjoyed the ice cream. Was the brand you had "Dos Pinos" ? (Two pines?)
You know, I can't remember the brand. I was so focused on devouring the contents that I paid no attention to the outside of the bucket. As for third world milk products, we had great pistachio ice cream in India - made from water buffalo milk. It was deeelicious!
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