As I write, I am smelling cacao nibs roasting. It’s a rich earthy chocolatey smell, like super dark triple chocolate brownies baking. When I started roasting the beans, the first smell held a hint of fermentation, as if I had mixed some dark red wine or balsamic vinegar with the cacao. As the roasting proceeds (which it has done slowly, because the pilot light blew out there for awhile) the chocolate is taking over the slightly alcoholic smell. It’s a very very good smell.
This is how I made delicious cacao nibs from ~10 of our cacao pods.
Here is our cacao harvest, picked on March 27th. The yellow pods that look almost rotten were just right for harvest. The dark red pods are not yet ripe; they need to turn orange, more like the one at 10:00.
Cacao beans are wrapped in a sweet, white cottony fiber in their pod. The white stuff is delicious to eat and we often do just that (spitting out the beans and saving them to plant). It also is important to the fermentation. I also have heard you want the beans to have contact with the outside of pods to pick up yeast that causes the natural fermentation.
1) Open the pods by either scoring with a knife and then cracking open or banging against a rock. The goal is to not cut through the seeds.
Looks like a larva doesn’t it?
2) Place the beans in a large mason jar, leaving all the white cottony goo intact. Sprinkle in around 1 teaspoon of Brewer’s yeast (I used Red Star because it is gluten and corn free). Gently stir it in with a spoon. The added yeast helps ensure that fermentation will happen. You can also try using the bloom off banana leaves or fermenting them in banana leaves; the white bloom on the leaves is a yeast that aides fermentation. I want to try this next time instead of purchased yeast. (Update 1-25-14: I have used banana leaves several times successfully. Now I am wondering if I really need any “starter” at all – next trial will be to not even use banana leaves and see if they self-ferment.)
3) Put a cheesecloth held in place with a rubber band (or canning jar ring) around the top of the jar. Place the jar where it will be quite warm – I used our oven, which has a strong pilot light that kept it around 90 degrees. After a day, fermentation is already visible.
4) Stir the beans gently every day. The first time I did this there were active bubbles that rose an inch above the beans! It smelled like baking bread. Towards the end of a week I tested a bean to see if the inside was turning brown.
It was still too pale, so I left the jar in the oven to continue to ferment. When I needed to use the oven, I put the cacao jar in a cooler with two sealed jars of hot water and the lid on to keep them comfy.
There was a very thin layer of white mold on the beans on days 6, 7, and 8, which I stirred in. This layer was so thin it trapped the fermentation bubbles.
On the 8th day I cut open another bean, which was darker purple and turned brown after a few minutes. The beans were starting to smell lightly alcoholic, a change from the yeasty smell. You don’t want them to smell like ammonia.
Before spreading them out to dry, I tried to wipe a little of the gooey fuzz off on this kitchen towel (I know someone who washes them at this point). Toweling certainly wasn’t very effective but I didn’t want to get them all wet just to dry them again!
In this photo the bean doesn’t look as dark as it was – but in several hours it became dry and crumbly and tasted like a cacao nib! (I think it is the same exact bean pictured above). They are supposed to look dark purple to brown when ready to dry.
5) Spread the beans out one layer thick on drying racks. I made these by taping 1/8 inch pet screen over some grills I found lying around. You want to keep the bugs out, therefore the pet screen makes a good base.
6) Put in a sunny, well-ventilated place, protected from bugs, mice, and birds. I started drying these outside but, let’s be real, this is the Hamakua coast and it started to rain within a few hours. I moved them inside to a storage room and set up a dehydrator. But it was nice to get them dried initially in the sunshine!
7) Stir the seeds around every day. This seems most important at first to keep them from sticking. After one day in the sun and one day in the dehumidified room they looked like this (above). They started to get a light white bloom.
After 6 days of drying, they look like this (above). The light bloom never grew into a fuzzy mold.
The ~10 pods provided a little over 2 cups of dried beans.
8) Roast the beans. Preheat oven to 275, place on a baking sheet for ~30-45 minutes; keep a close eye so as not to burn them!
This is when they smell sooooooooo divine.
9) Separate the beans from the thin shells with a mortar and pestle, or a rolling pin.
See the thin shell in the middle? It is much lighter than the bean, that is, as long as the bean isn’t broken up into tiny tiny pieces. Now the aim is to separate this chaff from the beans, because it is bitter and dry.
I crunched them up in this little mortar and pestle. If there were more than 2 cups this would have been quite tedious.
10) Next, separate the skin from the toasted cacao. I lay a sheet on the floor and set up a fan. I put around a half-cup of the cacao in a bowl, set another bowl on the floor, and poured them against the current of the fan, letting the chaff blow onto the sheet and the nibs fall into the bowl. I did this over and over until there were no more obvious chaff pieces. Not perfect – you lose some cacao and there are some small pieces of skin left – but better than hand-picking it all out!
Final product … delicious dark chocolate nibs that can be ground and pressed into a bar, or mixed with coconut and sweetener, baked with, or just nibbled on.
References I used:
Making Chocolate from Scratch – Skip Bittenbender, Cooperative Extension in Hawaii, Jan. 2009
Harvesting, post-harvest handling, fermenting, and drying for small farms in Hawaii – Skip Bittenbender and Tom Sharkey, powerpoint
Now fermenting cacao beans, Dokmai dogma blog from Thailand
February 20, 2014 at 1:51 pm
[…] that newsletter – http://www.hawaiihomegrown.net/ . This process is updated from an earlier blog, Chocolate, posted on April 27, 2012; see it for more […]
July 7, 2014 at 11:08 pm
Thank you for posting such interesting and helpful info! My husband and I live on Kauai have a small but ambitious cacao tree. I’ve tried fermenting small batches, but I’m not sure how successful I was. Can you tell me more about using the banana leaf or flower? We have lots of banana trees,but I’m not sure I used the right part when I tried (I sort of mashed up and folded the leaves and beans inside a jar). I also haven’t figured out a spot that is consistently warm… Did you experiment any more with just the beans (no banana leaf or yeast?). Thank you for any additional insight you can offer… Yours is the best resource I’ve found so far!
Mahalo,
Julia
July 13, 2014 at 4:41 am
Hi Julia,
What I have done for small batches with nice fermentation results is to choose a nice healthy banana leaf with a lot of the white powdery fungus underneath. I lay this on my counter, fungus side up, and open my cacao pods onto it. I gently rub the beans in it, and then place the beans in the Mason jar, with all their pulp and juice. Lately I have also been putting a strip of banana leaf in the jar before putting the beans in – I leave this in for just a day because it gets in the way of stirring. I place the jar in a mini-fridge that we have rigged with a light bulb on a thermostat set at 80 degrees. After a day, the pulp is full of frothy fermentation bubbles.
I tried it once without the banana leaf and they still fermented but the bubbling wasn’t as vigorous. Not very scientific but, since each batch is so precious and since it is such a simple step, and also fun and pleasurable, I always do it now. All this is based on the traditional use of banana leaves to cover the fermentation boxes – I just made up this “rubbing” method.
I hope this helps, and look forward to hearing how your next batch goes!
You also saw this post, right? https://marketlessmondays.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/from-tree-to-nib-making-a-small-batch-of-cacao/
July 13, 2014 at 1:07 pm
Thanks Rachel! I’m excited to try this again….
January 4, 2016 at 11:55 pm
Hi from tropical Cairns in Far North Queensland, Australia. Thanks so much for this great info, I’ve just picked my first cocoa pod from my young backyard tree but sadly couldn’t resist eating the flesh off the seeds. (Yum!) I will save the next pods for nibs and report how I go. thanks again for the most useful info I found on the “interweb”!
April 28, 2016 at 9:38 am
I just started to ferment my 5 pods. I made an error in the container. I put more yeast in the container. It looks better. I tried to put them in a cooler but couldn’t get the temp up to 90 degrees. They are in the dehydrator with a towel over it and a cup of water for moisture. What is the temp did you use to dry out the cacao seeds. I live in Kaneohe and it rains a lot here.
April 28, 2016 at 3:34 pm
Hi Cindy. So it’s not clear if you are still fermenting or if you are ready to dry them – if you are trying to ferment them in the dehydrator by adding a cup of water for moisture, which I have never tried, I would continue to aim for around 90 degrees. Within the mass of fermenting beans you want the temp to get as high as 105, but this comes from the action of fermentation, not from external heat. Then for drying, the temperature of a hot sunny day is what I’d aim for, 90-100 degrees, maybe a little warmer. You don’t want to dry them too fast, because lots of flavor development occurs during gradual drying.
April 28, 2016 at 9:30 pm
Dear Julia:
I needed to add more yeast and water to my beans. I got the temp in better control in the dehydrator. I decided to cover the sprouting jars with cheesecloth as well as a kitchen towel. Since the fan is blowing so hard, I put a foil to block the wind. I will check on them in the morning.
Sincerely,
Cindy
July 14, 2023 at 6:35 pm
Hello,
I know it is a very late comment but I wanted to ask you. Have you had any issues with the cacao nibs tasting too acidic? I have been trying to do my own nibs for a while and pretty much follow the same steps as you but they turn out too acidic. Let me know if you have any recs on how to make them taste better!