Dunfords and the Chocolate Factory

What would Willy Wonka do without this wonderful fruit or indeed most of the world if we couldn’t have our favourite chocolate fix from time to time? 

Cortez originally brought this plant from the Aztecs and introduced it to the Caribbean, where coming from the Aztecs only the High Priests and Tribal Chiefs were permitted to indulge themselves in this sweet seductory satisfaction! The Dominican Republic is very proud of its cocoa, which is one of its main agricultural exports.  Cultivation began in the 1980's, and the country is considered one of the best producers of high quality organic cocoa in the world. The country is filled with miles of cocoa trees, particularly in the area around San Franciso de Macoris in the middle to northeast part of the country.

So when the humanitarian missionaries here, the Haws, invited us to visit a possible humanitarian project and then tour a cocoa plantation, we jumped at the chance.

The Cocoa plantation

A great lunch

Our fellow visitors - the Haws and folks from
San Francisco de Macoris

So we'll now take you on a tour of the plantation itself.   

This is the planting area.  The beans are placed in the flat, moistened, and then covered with heavy paper until they begin to sprout.  The spouted beans are then just planted in the ground until they become big enough to move to a good location on the plantation to become another cocoa tree.

Can you see the little purple pods?

Here's a closer look.

Here's a big one!  There are several different kinds of
beans growing here.  

The tree bears an oval pod about the length of a hand which grows directly off its main branches.

The pods all have to be harvested by hand.  The husks are used as fertilizer to be used in the plantation.  A great use of green recyling, right?

When you cut this the pod open,you will see five rows of nuts or beans embedded in a white pulp. They gave us each one to suck on  - the white fleshy part was kind of non-descript.  If we'd bitten into the bean, we're told it is really bitter.   Twenty pods deliver about two pounds of bitter-tasting beans

 The beans are left to ferment for three to six days which will loosen them from the pulp and oxidize to a brown colour. These drying rooms rest on movable tracks to that the beans can be brought out into the sun if the day is clear. 

We then went to the processing area.  This was only a mock plant for visitors to the plantation.  

Here we are getting ready to enter the processing area -
cute little hats, huh? 

The dried beans are roasted for about thirty minutes at temperatures up to 140C, then broken and ground up to produce chocolate or pressed to make cacao butter..

Then the beans are run through a kind of grinder to break them up.

The mixture is then mixed with sugar and milk and it goes through the extruder to make it finer.

We then entered the refinery area where the mixture is kneaded in the Concha which looks a little like tha kneading process that you might have seen if you visit one of those fudge making stores in Helen or Gatlinburg.

Here the finished chocolate is heated to the right temperature
before it is moved out to a marble counter for more kneading.

When it's the right consistency, the chocolate is then poured into molds or made into other products.  In the gift shop, you could buy a chocolate facial scrub and chocolate soap - hey, what a great way to keep clean, right.  There were also truffles and wonderful chocolate bars to purchase of all levels of sweetness.

One of the guys had this great leather hat made in Haiti that I
made Rob put on - isn't he cute!

There were a lot of other things growing on the plantation.  They had a large group of turkeys growing in a pen. We were surprised to see them - we thought that the turkeys we see at the stores in November were from the States, but, obviously, not necessarily so.

A pile of chinola fruit - passion fruit back home

All in all, it was a really sweet experience!

This is guayaba - it tastes a little like grapefruit.