Friday morning we left bright and early and headed for north western Costa Rica to visit an organic chocolate farm. The farm also produces its own organic chocolate bars, an initiative made by the wives of the farmers to create job opportunities for themselves, and increase their profits. It is also the future research site of one of my peers on this program (lucky, lucky her). We learned both about the growing process of the cocoa farm, and the manufacturing process of separating it from the pod, fermenting the beans (who ever knew chocolate was fermented?), roasting them, and then creating chocolate liquer (misleading, especially because of the fermenting process. there is absolutely no alcohol involved, its basically just baking chocolate). And now some visual aids to explain the process:
Rows of Cacao trees. Unfortunately they don't grow chocolate bars.
Opening it up - surprise! Weird white mushy stuff!
Cacao pod, once we had made a good dent in the seeds.
The inside of a cacao plant. You can suck on the seeds, but eating them promises indigestion. The white gooey stuff is good, it tastes a bit like a very slimy, a tiny bit sour marshmallow.
Another interesting topic of dscussion were sloths. A strange change of subject it seems, but actually was logical. Sloths are an extremely informative species to study, but have the knack of hanging out in very tall trees, in very dense forests, and not really moving ever. This makes them a bit difficult to find. However, cacao trees are very low to the ground, and still a desired hang out spot for sloths. Thus, cacao farms are the ideal place to study sloths. Our program coordinator Chris has been involved in a long term study here in partnership with UW Madison. And sure enough, within fifteen minutes of being in trees, we found a sloth friend and her baby. I have concluded that sloths are one of the cutest animals alive. However, I also don't really think they are real. They are robots, like ET is a robot used in a movie. Someone made a bunch of robots for a movie, and then let them go as a joke. Now we have sloths. I will show you what I mean.
This is a sloth(robot) and its baby(robot).
We got really close to the robots (sloths). They're really quite indifferent to you.
After our chocolate growing adventure, we moved on to the chocolate bar making process. The women ushered us into a small building the size of a one story house, where eight of them work to make these chocolate bars that are exported all over the world. It is the best chocolate that I have ever eaten in my whole entire life. Yum. The women were wonderful, and also had a feast waiting for us for lunch.
Lunch. Feast.
The woman who started the chocolate bar factory. She has a great laugh.
Explaining the process of chocolate with lots of samples.
]Yum yum.
After lunch, we reloaded our giant coach bus (the large size was required since we were traveling such large distances. Thus, with only seventeen people total, we each had a row to ourselves for quality siestas) and drove to the rain forest. We were visiting tirimbina, a large preserve of national rainforest that is used mainly for research and some eco-tourism as well. Our night included a bat talk (they make a fifth of the world's mammal population - who knew?!) as well as a night walk to hear the intensity of a rainforest as night. My morning began with a run in the rain forest, and then just got better from then on. We had another chocolate tour, but this included more information about the history of chocolate, and the process of making chocolate by hand. After a presentation which included tasting chocolate at every single stage, we walked off the gluttony with a guided tour of the rain forest. Thank goodness we had a guide or I would have missed many an animal in the dense foliage, along with probably stepping on a snake or getting bitten by the biggest ant I have ever seen in my whole lifetime. We then had a delicious lunch (food here is always yummy I have discovered) and drove back to San Jose. A birthday in our group led to a night of celebration in San Jose with many of the group and host siblings. All in all it was a great two days.
Different varieties of cacao pods.
Stone mortar and pestal for making chocolate, with a little added raw sugar and cinnamon.
Speeding the process up a little bit with a slightly more modern machine.
so much rain forest.
deathly ant. unfortunately it looks rather small here, so i sound stupid. its almost 2 inches long.
Today was my first day without a field trip or class so I slept in until the late hour of eight thirty when my host niece knock "Con permiso, Jessie" and we began watching morning cartoons. I had plans for a productive workday. Instead, I made crepes with my host mom. Then I thought it was my turn to teach them some American food traditions, so I made them Puppy Chow. It was a slightly adapted recipe. Chex is a rarity, as are chocolate chips. So, it was Corn Flakes and dove chocolate instead. Also, peanut butter is like gold here. It's in the price range of expensive Nutella. But, it was still a success and the whole entire batch was consumed. The rest of the night was spent coloring, using glitter pens, and other such crafts. I also walked the dog. And now I am blogging. Homework is sometimes less exciting than usual when you're in a really cool new foreign country.
Tomorrow I head back to the classroom and school. Wednesday includes a day trip to a coffee farm, and next weekend will include a visit to my new research site and to visit my new host family.
I am also trying to put more pictures of my adventures on my picasa website, and hopefully will get to a facebook photo album sometime. But for now, here's the link.
bullet ant?
ReplyDelete