PUNTA GORDA TOWN, Toledo District, Belize – A sweet, pungent and slightly tangy scent drifts upward to the palm-thatched patio, mixing with the salty sea breeze here at the Chocolate Center of the Universe, otherwise known as Cottontree Chocolate. I contemplate the iced mocha melting on my tongue, and my newly discriminating olfactory can now discern an extra edge: Toledo has taught me why chocolate tastes and smells the way it does.
Cacao is Toledo’s biggest export, and I’ve seen it now in all stages of production. Last week I went to stay in a Mayan village through the Toledo Ecotourism Association’s guest house program and I got a tour of Reyes Chun’s cacao farm in San Antonio Village. Hiking with Reyes and his boys down a footpath through the jungle, I saw the football-sized pods hanging from the trunks of the trees; Reyes whacked at one with a machete and chopped it in half, handing it over to me to taste the tangy-sweet, almost cottony flesh around the seeds. It tasted nothing like chocolate. It tasted, in fact, like nothing else.
The boys each grabbed their own pod and sucked away noisily at the seeds as Reyes explained to me the process. These seeds would be taken home and cleaned, then wrapped in banana leaves and placed in a special wooden box for seven days to ferment.
“I didn’t know chocolate was fermented!” I exclaimed. “I’ve been eating it all my life, and I had no idea!”
“Oh, yes – that’s why it tastes the way it does,” laughed Reyes at my astonishment.
Later his wife, Jenny, treated us all to a cup of cocoa – and, even better, a demonstration of the process. It’s a good thing I didn’t know then that it would take a whole hour, and a workout worthy of an athlete; if I’d known what was involved, I’d never have asked.
First she built a fire in the ground-level wood stove, then placed a flat cooking sheet on top. Here she toasted the fermented brown seeds. She handed me one to taste; it was sharply sour, and I remembered the tang of extra dark chocolate, which I suddenly understood. She and Reyes took turns stirring them every few moments until they reached a point of crisp but not burned, then she handed me another. I peeled off the crust and tasted it. Aha, there it was – it took a bit of concentration, but deep within the bitter, sour bean was the distinctive taste of chocolate.
Now she scrubbed clean the metate, the four-legged rectangular stone device made smooth by years of grinding and pounding in the way Mesoamerican women have done for centuries. The grinding stone was the thickness of a baseball bat, and heavy. Jenny crushed the seeds into a rough crumble.
Now it was time to separate the cocoa from the chaff. Placing the beans into a large bowl, she began tossing them, letting the impact and the breeze blow the shells into the floor.
Back to the metate, she tossed in some black peppercorns and a few seeds of allspice, which grows wild in the rainforests here. She grinded for good while, sweat shining on her face in the sticky jungle heat. “It has to be very smooth,” she explained.
Earlier, she had placed a few tortillas into a bowl of water, and now she splashed some of the water on the cacao meal, continuing to grind. She worked the meal into a mushy ball; now it was time to do the same for the tortilla.
Finally, after nearly an hour of toasting and grinding and mashing, she had two sizeable balls of mush: one of cacao, the other of corn masa. Now it was time to pull out the calabashes, the gourds grown and dried just for this purpose, as the ancient Maya did. Modern-day coffee-cups would do for tea, Coca-Cola and orange Fanta, but when it came to chocolate, it must be served with style.
A big daub of cacao paste and a little daub of corn masa went into the calabash, followed by hot water from the teakettle, which had been steeping on the fire. A big spoon of sugar followed.
Undeniably, authentically chocolate.
Back in Punta Gorda Town, as the locals call Toledo’s diminutive county seat, chocolate was brewing in a more modern, but still distinctly Caribbean way. “Free tours” reads the sign in front of Cottontree Chocolate, a colorful coffeehouse, pizza parlor and mini-Willy Wonka chocolate factory all in one. The shop is the creation of former art teacher, sailor and social worker Chris Crowell, founder of Cottontree Ecolodge. The pungent, tangy scent drew me in.
Catarina, a young Maya girl showed me the steps of the process. No metate here – instead there’s a homemade grinder powered by an electric drill. An electric hairdryer expedited the separation process. Powdered milk and vanilla replaced the black pepper, allspice and tortilla. And a sophisticated mixing device stirred it all up overnight, creating a consistency that would be placed in molds and left to harden.
My mouth watered as I watched – and smelled – the process. Young Catarina handed me a wooden tasting stick to place into the thick mixture and I indulged. This was chocolate at its finest.
I headed upstairs to the colorfully painted coffeehouse to sample an iced mocha under the thatched roof and savor the sea breeze caressing my face.
Yes, there are certain advantages to modernity, I confessed, savoring every sip. Modern chocolate would be my choice today. But thanks to Jenny’s labors, this ancient Maya miracle will never taste quite the same.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
