Friday, November 22, 2019

Exploring Raw Cocoa Pods

So I'm in Colombia and came to a kind of food machinery trade show and the nice people at soltecal had all sorts of machinery for preparing chocolate - and they gave away one of the coco pods!


The inside was super wet and slimy, smelled fruity and the gooey part was super delicious and sweet.  The consistency was soft and a little fibrous and the flavor was very tropical.

The shell had a kind of sticky sap that came out in a web when you ripped apart the shell.

The seeds were super easy to scoop right out of the pods, and they tasted vaguely chocolaty, but still mostly tropical, kind of nutty and very bitter.
Fermenting is basically leaving the pods in a pile somewhere that they can drain, stirring sometimes ... will check back in ~8 days after fermentation is complete!

Note that I'm feeling a little left out here on the blog as far as cooking goes - so I'm going to take this post to inaugurate the Yoni Cooks tag, finally joining Aryeh Cooks and Eli Cooks.

Monday, November 11, 2019

Spotted in the air

I'm on my way to Bogota to try and level up my language abilities ... and Aryeh spotted my plane in the air! Fenomenal :)