Day 6: Pure Imagination!

Hola, Will here to tell you what today was like. At the start we left to go to our new hotel and then the big thing that we did was going to the Nortico cacao plantation and chocolate factory. 

Our beautiful lunch destination en route to Nortico!



The first thing we did when we arrived at the plantation was get a brief history of cacao from chocolatier Aldo. He mentioned how most of the chocolate from big companies such as Hershey is sourced in Africa. The next thing we did was personally my favorite because we got to taste the many different types and variations of chocolate the first type we tasted was a fifty percent cacao that tasted the most sweet then we had a sixty five percent, then a seventy percent cacao which was a bit more bitter but still good then we had my least favorite which was a seventy percent with coffee and the final was an eighty percent cacao.

Guide Alex showing us the fermentation boxes!


A bitter review from Luke

After we finished tasting the different chocolates we went on a tour of the farm and we got to see the process of how they take the cacao fruit and transform it into the chocolate that we like to eat which first begins with opening the fruit removing the seeds inside and letting them ferment, then they take the seeds and heat them, after this they remove the shell and grind the rest which gets turned into cacao butter which is what they use to make the chocolate. 

The final thing we did was we made our own chocolate with some cacao butter and many different things to put in and then we could mix then and let them cool and then we had chocolate. Today was a lot of fun and tomorrow will be as well when we help rebuild a bus stop!



De-shelling cacao seeds


Grinding the cacao



Mix-ins for our DIY chocolates

Evie's came out great!

Mr. Thomas's were special!

Nortico won the National Cocoa of Excellence Contest in 2023!



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