Remy and the chocolate bean

Not everyone loves chocolate, but those who do feel it deeply. My son Remy is one of those people. For the last several years, he’s been researching the process by which chocolate is created from raw cacao beans. So, when we arrived in Hawaii a few weeks ago, he was ready.

Within minutes of arriving at my friend Ken’s lushly planted property, Remy had an oblong cacao pod gripped firmly in hand, freshly twisted from one of Ken’s trees. He carried that pod around as he took stock of the location of Ken’s other cacao trees, counting the ripe pods. Harvesting the rest of them was complicated by the fact that Remy was now working one-handed since it never occurred to him to put down his original pod.

Long before he’d unpacked his suitcase, Remy had harvested roughly 20 more golden pods. Moving with the calm steadiness of an expert despite never having touched cacao in his life, Remy opened the pods by whacking them with a hammer and extracted the seeds, which were covered in a sweet, white, fruity pulp. He then asked Ken for a container in which to ferment the beans.

They decided on a sun-tea maker, into which they placed the pulpy beans before leaving them out in the sun to ferment. For the next few days, we enjoyed the kombucha-like liquor that built up. It was fruity, alcoholic and decidedly non-chocolatey, despite being pure cacao.

Although Ken has a grove of cacao trees, he doesn’t bother with the laborious chocolate-making process. Instead, he has a hack to turn the beans into a tasty snack. He simply places the individual cacao seeds on dehydrator trays, pulp and all, and dries them into a crisp. The pulp shrinks down and hardens into a sweet leather that encapsulates the seeds, adding just the right amount of sweetness to balance the bitterness of the cacao beans — to my taste, anyway. If I had cacao trees, I would probably do the same with my beans.

But Remy was laser-focused on the smooth, refined chocolate you find wrapped in bars, with zero interest in shortcuts or hacks. After several days of fermenting his beans, he dried and roasted them on cookie sheets in the oven, carefully stewarding them into a rich, Oreo-esque shade of brown. The transformation was impressive: The beans developed a rich and deeply chocolatey flavor that Ken’s dehydrated beans lacked. Taking note of this, I began my own research project.

Since Remy had cleaned out Ken’s ripe cacao pods, I visited a nearby self-serve farm stand and grabbed a few, with which I made a batch of Ken-style seeds with a twist. Before dehydrating them, I tossed the seeds with sugar and vanilla. After dehydrating these seasoned cacao seeds, I roasted them to add that rich, dark, chocolatey flavor. At this point, they were perfect — a sweet, vaguely fruity and deeply chocolatey snack as crunchy as a corn flake.

Meanwhile, Remy was ready to grind his beans, but there was no cacao grinder in the house. So, he used Ken’s coffee grinder, shaking it like a maraca as it spun to prevent a paste from building up and sticking to the bottom, out of reach of the blades. It was a generous move by Ken to allow him to use the coffee grinder, which was never the same, to put it mildly. Before that heroic little machine overheated and died, Remy managed to incorporate cocoa butter, sugar and powdered milk in his mixture and grind it into a state of smoothness that was probably as silky as we were going to get without a stone roller to slowly grind away at the beans for about 48 hours.

Our choco-tourist proceeded to spoon his mixture from the broken-down coffee grinder into a rubber ice cube tray and put it in the fridge to harden. A few hours later, we enjoyed some damn good chocolate.

If you want to try any of these DIY chocolate methods, finding cacao pods online is significantly cheaper than a trip to Hawaii. But you don’t have to go to anywhere near those lengths in order to get creative with chocolate. Allow me to introduce my own hack that was created out of necessity one evening when I found myself needing chocolate but had only cocoa powder. I came up with a little recipe that’s so simple and easy that I fear I might have to go into hiding after telling you this so the Hershey hitmen don’t hunt me down.

I kid you not, people. All you do is combine cocoa powder, heavy cream and sugar — or the sweetener of your choice — and stir it until thick and smooth. You’ve essentially created an instant ganache, with way less effort and fewer dishes. Proportions don’t matter because it’s all to taste. If it’s not sweet enough, add more sweetener. If it’s too sweet, add more cocoa powder. If it’s too thick, add more cream. If it’s too thin, add more cocoa and sugar.

If you want to shape this divine paste into a cute animal, be my guest, but it will never be finger-friendly. This chocolatey goodness is definitely spoon material.