Photo Credit: click photo (Wikimedia)
Last month I was privileged to meet Lisa, a mom of three who, with her husband, raised their children on the west side of Ivory Coast. The stories she shared about the cacao (cocoa) trees were fascinating.Here’s her story:
In the region where we lived were many cacao growers. They plant the trees and manage them. The cacao trees produce in around four years. Cacao is the French derivation for cocoa. Ivory Coast is a French country where French is the business language. They harvest the beans then they are fermented I think for about 7 days under banana leaves. Then they are turned and covered again for another 7, or so, before laying them out in the sun to dry. The people then sell the harvested beans to the Lebanese, who are the middle men. Then they are sold to the large companies like Hersheys who will extract the cocoa butter from it and process it.
We also put in some cacao trees and our kids harvested them and did the above. We then made chocolate cake with it. It was lumpy and we didn’t process it so it was rich. The kids also liked to suck on the cocoa beans when they first came out of the pod. They have a sweet/sour white pulp on them.
We had a dinner once where we invited around ten men and twenty showed up. (The men and women don’t eat together so we invited the men.) For dessert we served chocolate cake. They were astounded at it and said it was so sweet. We told them that it came from their cocoa beans. They exclaimed in delight, “Ah, so that is what they do with it.”
Lisa also lived among coconut trees…. read that post here.