With wood or plastic shovels, you turn your cacao. “The next morning, at around 8 or 9 o’clock in the morning, you switch the cacao from one box to another, we call it ‘turn’. “It’s crucial to have them filled… Your fermentation begins when sugars start get concentrated and the temperature rises up to 58☌. He advises that the fermentation boxes should be filled at around 4 or 5 pm on the same day as picking. Tuta explains that you can’t see witches’ broom while harvesting, so they remove affected beans while filling the fermentation boxes. When filling the boxes, producers look for witches’ broom, a deformity caused by a fungal disease. The small size yields up to 180 kilos of wet cacao, filling a 0.5 by 0.6 meter box The big box is double that size, one by one by 0.6 meters.” “Cacao is fermented in wooden boxes the same day the harvesting happens. Learn more! Read How Does Fermentation Affect Coffee Flavour Development? Without fermentation, we could never have chocolate. Fermentationįermentation is when sugars and starches are broken down into acids or alcohol. Now that the cacao has been harvested and sorted, it’s ready for the next stage: processing. Two pickers break the cacao pods to separate high-quality and over-ripe ones. I use specific varietals to distinguish flavor profiles and aromas.” Rogerio Kamei, a producer and chocolatier at Mestiço Chocolate in Bahia, says “We have a lot of varieties on my farm, so we started producing varietal chocolates.
Having many varieties on one farm isn’t uncommon. Tuta says, “There are many varieties on our farm, but we can identify their shape and best ripeness points.” It takes expert knowledge to understand cacao ripeness. What is a variety? Find out in Geisha vs Bourbon: A Crash Course in Coffee Varieties We also have Trinitario hybrids… when ripe, some are yellow, greenish-yellow, red, or gold.” In Bahia, we have all kinds of cacao varieties.
He says, “It’s a challenge to inspect the crop to determine its ripeness. Tuta Aquino is a cacao producer from Vale Potumuju /Fazenda Santa Rita in Brazil. Pods don’t ripen at the same time – even those on the same tree. The International Cocoa Organization (ICCO) explains that over-ripe ones will start to germinate.
Under-ripe cacao won’t have developed all its flavors and aromas. And one of the biggest challenges lies in telling when the pods are ripe. Checking for RipenessĬacao picking is a difficult task.