From Cacao To Tablea
December 23, 2008Christmas mornings for me, are not complete without the good old favorites: ham, cheese, and a cup of hot chocolate. Not just chocolate, mind you. It has to be thick and oily tsokolate.
I’ve been making our own tablea for years. Having several cacao trees in the yard ensures a steady supply of cacao beans. It’s really easy making tablea. First, we pick the ripe cacao, suck the sweet flesh off the seeds, wash and dry them for several days until they are completely dry. Then when we roast them just so.
While still hot, we remove the peel from the seeds. That way, you only have to squeeze the seed a little to remove the cover. When the seeds are already cold, the skin sticks to seed and it’s very hard to remove unless you use a knife. The next step is grinding the roasted cacao beans. We have it ground at the market. The aroma is incredible at this stage. The house smells intensely chocolatey.
The ground roasted cacao beans, if roasted correctly, should be gleaming and have a paste-like consistency. Usually, I mix in condensed milk and sugar, but this year, I just molded it and stored it for cooking later on. When the tablea are still in the soft stage, I don’t let them touch each other as they will stick together when they harden and it’s hard to pry them apart.
