Roasted Chocolate Pods

<< Eleanor's Building Researched

06/06/05 - Chocolate Beans

- The secret of chocolate has been revealed.

We all know about chocolate and cocoa and cocoa trees and all that, but it always seemed that there was a bit of a gap between the cocoa nut on the tree and the chocolate bar in the supermarket. Having never seen a cocoa pod on a tree or in the produce section for that matter, we wondered just how big this gap was.

So, when we saw that Rose's Chocolates in Pike's Market was selling cocoa pods, we bought a bag of them. We finally got around to trying to roast them, and it was easy, even in our kitchen. You can see the high tech pizza tray we used on the left, and we are too embarrassed to show you the high tech oven we used for the roasting. Rest assured, you could roast cocoa pods in a toaster oven. It worked for us.

The skins of the pods are thin, so once they cool you can peel them by hand. Inside is bitter chocolate goodness. Now all we need is some sophisticated equipment to balance the fat levels, a set of cocoa rollers and molds, million dollar mixing systems for adding milk and sugar, and we could probably make our own chocolate bars.

But, why bother? These things taste great!

Keywords: food, science, seattle, milk