For the Chocoholics
Dont you just wish chocolates grow on trees? They actually do, but not after undergoing a laborious process: a series of drying, roasting and grinding of the cocoa beans taken out of the cacao pod.
My parents yard is now surrounded by cacao trees. We dont earn from it at all. But my father must have preferred it over coffee, so he replaced the existing coffee trees (grown by his grandmother) with cacao when we moved back home in 1983.
Since they’ve started bearing fruits, my mother has been making chocolate balls or blocks out of those cocoa beans we locally call tablea, that usually make good pasalubong for friends and family and of course a very useful cooking ingredient.
In the Philippines, there is an existing industry and scientific research on cacao that I didnt know about.
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as a child, i used to ’suck’ the meat from the cacao beans before my lolo dried the beans under the sun. then we roasted it before grinding and molding it into a ‘tablea’. the highlight was drinking hot tsokolate in the morning with ‘markasotes’ (woodoven baked cake from legaspi city).
misis 14: we too! until now actually. my mother just make sure to wash the sucked cacao beans first before drying them. he he