Monday, 3-11-2014. Day 75.

The Secret of White Chocolate: Revealed!

Today we took a trip to Pod Chocolate, an organic chocolatier about an hour’s drive from our villa. At 9:30 a.m. we were picked up by a good-natureed gent named Putu (a very common name for first-born Balinese).

Putu was not our usual driver, and he loved to talk about the frangipani that grows all over the island. He talked quite a bit as we drove, in fact. We learned a good amount of information about Bali from him.

Pod has a pair of sun bears on display there (although they call them honey bears and only one was out). I’m not sure why they have sun bears (which are not native to Bali), but they do. They’ll let you take a picture with the bear if you want, but that’s not really our thing, so we graciously declined.

Pod is also right next door to The Elephant Camp which keeps a small herd of Sumatran elephants that you can ride, but we passed on that, too. We did see plenty of elephants in the area, though, both with and without riders.

Enough about animals. Let's talk Chocolate.

When we arrived, we were seated at a table and presented with a cold chocolate drink garnished with shaved chocolate flakes. It was delicious, as you'd expect a drink crafted entirely of chocolate to be. The drinks went so quickly we didn't have time to photograph them.

Making Chocolate

After we finished our drinks, it was on to the business of chocolate-making. We got to wear some fancy, branded aprons and jumped right into making our chocolate elephants.

You get to choose milk or dark chocolate and up to three add-ins. Then they bring you a plastic tray, sort of like an ice cube tray, and you squeeze your selected chocolate into the elephant-shaped spaces, then add your toppings. But you put them on the bottom, so they're more like bottomings.

From Pod to Bar: How Chocolate is Made

After we finished our creations and they were taken away somewhere mysterious to solidify, we took a tour of how Pod made their chocolate. It all starts with the cacao pod, which holds many fat-rich cocoa beans inside its thick rind.

Our tour guide gave us a few of the raw cocoa beans to suck on. They were slick with a fatty membrane and tasted a kind of strange, both tart and a little sweet, but nothing like chocolate.

To make chocolate, these beans are removed, then placed in these wooden boxes for a week or so to ferment.

After fermentation, the beans are spread out in the sun to dry. This can take four days, sometimes longer if it's rainy. They're sorted to get the best beans of the bunch, then dried for another four days.

When the beans look like an almond on the outside and coffee on the inside, they’re ready for roasting.

The beans are roasted in a big, constantly rotating drum for 30 minutes at 150°C. When they cool, they’re ready for grinding, after which the beans are now what most people will recognize as cacao nibs.

The nibs are pressed, which separates the cocoa butter from the cocoa solids. The solids are used to make chocolate, while the cocoa butter is used to make white chocolate (so there's no chocolate in white chocolate).

From there, varying proportions of the remaining cocoa is mixed with milk and sugar to produce the different bars. Pod has a little display to help show what those different percentages on the wrappers of the chocolate bars mean.

Pod needs 30 cacao fruit (pods) to make 1 kilogram of chocolate, which will make about seven bars. A farmer is paid 30,000 rupiah (about $2.47 U.S.) for those 30 pods, which is about 4,285 rupiah ($0.35 U.S.) per bar. And that’s a fair trade price.

After the tour, our chocolate elephants were presented to us, wrapped up neatly in little plastic bags. But by the time Putu drove us to a restaurant for lunch, the Bali heat had turned the elephants into a congealed mass of chocolatey goo. They still tasted good, though.