Candy has a lifespan: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Raw ingredients are combined using secret recipes in giant factories or methods passed down for generations in a family kitchen; the resulting candies are packaged and distributed to where they find their final destination; and, of course, the hopefully delicious moment of consumption. It’s pretty easy to learn about the end of a candy’s lifespan - just grab it at the store and eat it. That’s the “research” I’ve been doing for most of the entries in this blog. Recently, I was fortunate enough to spend some time at a small agro-forestry farm (Maya Mountain Research Farm) in southern Belize learning a little bit about some of the earlier stages of candy production… how the ingredients themselves are harvested and prepared long before anything resembles candy.

The particular farm I visited, as mentioned, is an organic research farm near Punta Gorda in Belize that is focused on sustainable, diversified agro-forestry. Interns, volunteers, and researchers are welcome at the farm, and I thought a short stay there might provide me with some much needed insight into how candies are born (or perhaps conceived would be a better analogy?) I doubt many other visitors had the exact focus that I did, but Chris Nesbitt, the farm co-owner along with his wife Dawn Dean was more than happy to answer all my questions about how cacao, vanilla, and sugarcane are grown and harvested. Additionally, the farm does a bit of hand-processing of cacao, which I was able to actively take part in. In fact, I went from picking ripe cacao pods to enjoying hot chocolate flavored with beans I had toasted and ground myself.

Things started off with a tour around the farm. Different species of farmable plants lie almost on top of one another, with the goal being to resemble a natural rain forest, albeit with entirely useful plants. Vanilla vines circle cacao trees flanked by hardwoods such as cedar. Pineapple plants protrude everywhere… literally as they are quite spiny. Ripening bananas and mangoes hang overhead sugarcane. Every plant has a purpose, either as food, a salable product, a pollinator, or to help the soil grow fertile or recover from previous owners. It definitely isn’t a large-scale plantation, but instead a system designed to work within the mountainous Southern Belize region where infinite lines of straight trees are impossible.

The primary focus of my visit was on cacao. Mr. Nesbitt has lots of experience in the chocolate field, both as an independent producer and as an employee of the Mayan gold candy bar line for many years. Cacao is a valuable crop in Belize where it has been cultivated for long before the arrival of the Spanish forces. Today, it plays a relatively small role in the economy but an important one in agriculture; because it is a tree that requires several years to fruit, once a cacao field has been developed it prevents erosion, maintains a healthy topsoil, keeps temperatures down, and serves as a deterrent to slash&burn agriculture. MMRF has two different types of cacao trees. Slightly less than 15% of the trees are of the criollo variety, a low-yielding and difficult to manage tree that nonetheless results in a delicious, strong, and distinctive chocolate. These trees are the same that the ancient Mayans farmed and today criollo cacao beans fetch an extremely high price on the global market. The other tree, the trinitario cacao, is the most popular cacao type today. This is a hybrid tree that combines hardiness and productivity with a slightly less intense chocolate flavor, making it less prized by high end chocolatiers. Interestingly, one reason that the criollo trees struggly, particularly within the extreme cleanliness of a large-scale plantation, is because cacao trees are actually fertilized by midges that nest in mulch on the ground or pods that have been eaten by birds - both rarities in plantation conditions but common in a more natural environment.

Cacao pods are harvested from the trees when ripe and can then be opened and the fruit eaten. It’s delicious! A bit like passion fruit, very refreshing and sweet with a bit of tartness to it. Of course, the fruit is more commonly removed by fermentation, discarding the pulp and leaving the cacao beans to chocolate. Unfortunate that there is no good way to export cacao fruit along with the chocolate! Once the beans are separate, they are roasted (like coffee beans) and the outer covering removed. The beans are then ground - quite finely in American or European chocolate but not always, as Oaxacan chocolate showed!

At this point, my little chocolate making demonstration was largely done. To make the best chocolate, this is pretty much what the actual cacao should consist of. For most chocolate we eat, before turning the cacao into chocolate the oil is removed for sale to the cosmetics industry (cacao butter is an extremely valuable commodity) and replaced with vegetable oil. Ew!

So yes, I learned a LOT at the farm! It was amazing to be able to visually search through the trees looking for ripe cacao pods, taste fresh sugarcane, pineapple, and cacao pulp, and to try my hand at roasting and grinding the beans. Less amazing of course were the scary, enormous, biting bugs and some of the more interesting fruits: cashew and stinkey-toe (bakut) being two that I remember. While I wouldn’t say I was out there working the land or really connecting with my agricultural roots, I did get my hands a bit dirty.

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I have a guest entry on a different blog today!  You can read it and comment on it here.  That’s basically two entries in one!