cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/52901772
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
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Cacao isn't too bad. Eat the fruit, spit out the seeds into a pile, ferment a few days, roast, peal, grind and you got it. There are some details to the ferment but it's not more complicated than any other ferment d food.
As I understand it, the hard parts are removing the bitterness and getting the texture to be anything other than unpleasantly gritty. The traditional Meso-american cocoa was a spicy bitter drink; what we think of as "chocolate" today wasn't invented until fairly recently and requires a fairly involved process.
I mean I grow it and have taken it to the nib stage and it came out quite tasty. Really not too bad in terms of process. It's a few day/ week of fermentation followed by drying and roasting. I process it a few times a year, when I've got enough to actually process (I only have a handful of cacao trees).
Compared to most of what I grow, which is Vanilla, cacao is a walk in the park. Vanilla requires manual pollination, care monitoring of conditions, and a fermentation and curing process that has many steps, some daily , for months.