Follow the Journey

¨Watching Willy Wonka as a little girl and giggling at the umpalampas never prepared me for the real cacao, the ashy skins and haunted history of this scared plant. In an open-air jungle kitchen, we gripped sticky blocks of cane sugar and rushed them back and forth over a cheese grater, creating mini mountains of molten, oozy sugar. We ground coconuts upon a hand grater on the counter, a simple slab churning inside to create a milky solid thick cloud of coconut. Beating bananas until they were merely an aromic lush soup, we simultaneously toasted cocao beans until the peels were charcoal black. Gathered around a center table, we all peeled the pods, tossing the lava rocks back and forth like hot potatoes in our hands to keep from being burned. Each charred skin revealed a smooth bead which would later be ground incredibly fine to create a heavenly mud-thick, molten chocolate sludge, slowly transforming from what was once just ashy chopped cocao pieces. As only a boiling pot can do, everything bound together under the equalizer of the fire-sugar, cacoa, banana, coconut-creating a huge pan of heaven, spooned by eager mouths with black hands coated in ash from the cacoa. Like building the belly of a snowman, we rolled small balls of chocolate in powdered peanuts creating perfect truffles, topped with a little extra cane sugar and sea salt.¨

-Excerpt from the journal of Julia