Travel: Eladio Pop's cacao farm in Belize
Ever wonder where chocolate comes from? A visit to a jungle farm results in a culinary adventure.
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Eladio started farming cacao when he was 20. That is more than 30 years ago. It was also about the same time that he and his wife began having children. They have 15 children; at the time of our visit the oldest was 31 and the youngest was just over 2 years old. Even though the Pops straddle either side of 50, they are already grandparents several times over, with some grandchildren older than their youngest child. “The cacao has been good to me,” Eladio said with a grin. Even though we learned a lot about growing cacao that day, all I could think about was his wife bringing a new life into the world every two years. Every two years for 15 years. I can barely comprehend this productivity rate as a single, childless urbanite. Edit news files on an endless production cycle? No problem. Produce 15 children? My mind reels.
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Kendra Nordin is a staff editor and writer for the weekly print edition of the Monitor. She also produces Stir It Up!, a recipe blog for CSMonitor.com.
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But like any large farming family, the many hands have proved useful for harvesting the southern Belize jungle of its offerings. Every weekend the Pop family comes to the farm to gather bananas, mangoes, lime, cacao pods, sour plums, ginger, all spice, jack fruit, sugar cane, and more. As he led us through the thick brush, wending us up steep hills and under the low hanging banana fronds, we stopped to taste each one of these – fresh, tart, and sweet.
Bananas felled from the tree and sliced with a machete had the flavor of apples. Mangoes were thick and meaty. We sucked on large sticks of sugar cane, and ate “coco-soupa” (little coconuts) that tasted like cookie dough, a treat carried to school in the pockets of local children. Wandering through the tall grasses, Eladio came to an abrupt halt, stooped, and dug in the dirt to unearth fresh ginger root. We marveled, how did he know how to find it? With a shrug he said he remembered the spot of its plant before it shriveled to hay.
Ten years ago, Eladio sold 700-800 lbs. of cacao. In 2009, he sold 400 lbs. of cacao. Hurricanes and blight have taken their toll on the trees. All of his beans, like every cacao farmer in Toledo, are sold to the British chocolatemaker Green and Black’s and are used to make its Maya Gold bar.
The cacao grows throughout the jungle, all the trees at different stages of ripening in a perpetual cycle. The colors of a ripened cacao pod vary widely, from yellow-green to deep red.
We chewed on raw cacao beans, sucking on the sweet and tangy pulp before biting into the bitter bean. Cacao beans are fermented before they are roasted. They are covered with banana leaves for up to six days to build heat and drive the sugars from the pulp into the bean. Every second day they are stirred. The fermenting process varies from chocolatemaker to chocolatemaker. Taza Chocolate takes their fermenting process very seriously. You can read more about their process here.
At the end of the jungle tour, Eladio climbed with us into the back of the bus. We bounced in our seats as we bumped over rutted roads to his family’s compound where his wife and oldest daughter, dressed identically in turquoise cotton dresses, were preparing our lunch. Eladio got philosophical. “The jungle,” he said, patting his chest and gazing out the windows at the blur of passing green, “is my heart. It is my house, and my church.”
We silently nodded. No one wondered what he meant.
Related posts on Kitchen Report: Lunch at the Pop compound and learning how to make a delicious Mayan chocolate drink, The Jungle House at Cotton Tree Lodge, Taza Chocolate Tour
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