The Cocoa Tree
By Any Other Name – Chocolate
I love having new experiences, at a certain age, ‘firsts’ can be harder to come by, but the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens offered me a first – a look at cocoa pods hanging on the tree!
Looking up, at this tree, which appears rather ordinary, one would not easily guess that it offers us one of nature’s truest and most perfect delights – chocolate.
I think we were all quite surprised to come upon these heavily laden trees with their precious produce, which oddly grows from the trunk and the largest branches. As the pods do not ripen at the same time, they are picked by hand, with each tree being revisited until all of its fruit has been harvested.
Requiring intense heat and humidity, the tress are grown within twenty degrees from the equator; while originally a plant from the Americas, today it is grown in Africa, as well.
As the pods mature, they turn yellow or orange; they will be cut open, to expose the seeds and pulp, which must be sweated, before it can be processed. In order to make a pound of chocolate, approximately 400 beans must be dried, with each pod offering between 20 to 50 beans.
“Did you know that cacao beans were once so valuable in Central America they were used as currency? Covered in a hard brittle shell the beans are roasted, cracked and ground to make cocoa and chocolate – perhaps the most deliciously decadent commodity in the world.
Native to the Amazon the cocoa tree was cultivated by indigenous people before spreading to Central America where the Mayans and Aztecs mixed the pounded beans with chili powder and maize to make a drink called Kukuh – still popular in Guatemala and Belize. With the arrival of the Spanish in Central America, cacao was brought back to Europe where sweet hot chocolate became the rage of wealthy Europeans. Today, cacao plantations thrive around the world in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.”
