After checking into my hostel in Antigua, I went to explore the town. Antigua used to be Guatemala's capital before it was ruined by a series of earthquakes in the 18th century. Many of the old churches have been left standing in their damaged state. This is one of them:
In the next picture you can see some of the church's interior - of course it's not possible to enter the ruin, so I took the picture through a gate on the side of the church. Isn't it amazing how the remains of the interior decoration contrast with both the rough edges where the wall was ripped away and nature reclaiming its territory?
Continuing my aimless wanderings in the streets of Antigua, I suddenly had the most wonderful smell in my nose: chocolate! Looking around, I quickly found the source: a small chocolate museum. Of course I went in, chocolate addict that I am ;-) On the door, they had a sign advertising chocolate workshops. Since I had wanted to learn more about chocolate in the country of the Maya anyway, I decided that here and now was the right time for it - and luckily they had a space in their workshop that same afternoon.
The workshop started with an overview of how cocoa is grown, harvested and processed. I already knew that the process consisted of fermentation, drying, roasting, and grinding. What I didn't know was that Germany is the world's largest per capita consumer of chocolate - apparently, each and every German eats 114 bars of chocolate per year.
After the theoretical part of the workshop, the fun started: starting from fermented and dried cocoa beans, we did each of the following steps ourselves. First came the roasting which was rather uneventful: the process took about 15 minutes during which we only had to take care that the beans were roasted evenly and didn't burn.
Then we peeled the roasted beans, separating the husk from the cocoa nibs inside. We used the husk to make cocoa tea - the first culinary highlight of the day :-) The tea tasted like cocoa, but of course it didn't contain any actual chocolate. Calorie-free chocolate, anyone?
Then, we had to grind the peeled cocoa nibs. Today, there are machines to do the grinding, but we did it the way the Maya had done it - and the way the Spanish did it for the first 200 years after they got to know chocolate in America: manually. This is before the grinding...
... and this after:
During the grinding, the heat produced by grinding stone against stone liquefies the fat contained in the cocoa beans, so that the end product is not powder, but a thick paste. As soon as you stop grinding, the paste hardens again. That's why it looks slightly powdery in this picture (there are cocoa nibs on the top, husk on the lower left, and ground nibs on the lower right):
In industrial processes nowadays, the ground cocoa is then pressed to separate cocoa butter from cocoa powder. Cocoa butter can be sold to make cosmetics, and that's why cocoa butter is replaced by soy lecithin in cheap chocolate. Soy lecithin is the fat contained in soy beans, and available much cheaper than cocoa butter.
Cocoa butter is also used to make white chocolate. Since cocoa powder is brown, it is useless for white chocolate. Instead, cocoa butter is combined with milk and flavorings such as vanilla to make white chocolate. So white chocolate doesn't contain any actual cocoa! That was a bit of interesting news for me.
In the workshop, we skipped the pressing step and instead made hot chocolate, Maya style. The Mayans combined ground cocoa beans with water, chili, maize, a red spice for coloring, and honey or fruit nectar to make their hot chocolate drink, called the food of the gods. Only kings and priests were allowed to use honey, probably due to its scarcity; ordinary people used fruit nectar. To celebrate the occasion, we used honey (of course). The drink tasted incredibly good, very rich and chocolaty, and also very spicy.
When the Spanish came to America and discovered chocolate, they didn't care much for the spicy concoction of the Maya, and so they changed a couple of things. They left out chili and maize and instead added cardamom or anise and a bit of pepper, and they used sugarcane sugar instead of honey. After a few years, someone finally had the genius idea of replacing water with milk - leading to a drink tasting very much like the hot chocolate we know today. Of course, when you make it yourself with such fresh ingredients, the taste is much intensified compared to the stuff made from chocolate powder. I can only say, YUM!
To make chocolate that you can actually bite into, there are two more steps to do, conching and tempering. Conching reduces the size of the cocoa bits in the chocolate to produce a smooth feel, and tempering creates a smooth look by aligning the cocoa crystals in a heating and cooling process. We didn't do any of these ourselves - conching alone can take more than a day - but instead used some pre-prepared chocolate for the highlight of the workshop: making our own chocolates. The chocolate we used was 70% cocoa and 30% sugar, containing no milk or other flavorings - we were free to add these ourselves. We had a ton of ingredients to experiment with: macadamia nuts, almonds, raisins, coffee beans, ground coffee, candied ginger, grated ginger, powdered ginger, candied orange, chili powder, cardamom, salt, pepper, cookies, milk powder, cinnamon, sugar, etc. Somehow the process of filling liquid chocolate into small molds and adding one or more of the ingredients took me twice as long as all the other participants in the workshop... but then again, no two of the chocolates I made were the same, maybe that explains why I was so slow ;-)
When all of the chocolate was used, the chocolates went into the fridge to cool and harden - they were ready for pickup the next morning. Having tasted them, I can say that they were absolutely fabulous! Especially the ones I made with ginger and/or chili. So goood!
