People ask me all the time how we landed on chocolate as the thing to grow here. Honest answer, it was kind of a joke at first. About six years ago Julia and I were trying to figure out what our main crop should be, and she said it, half joking, that we should just grow chocolate. My first thought was no way, that’s way too much work. But the more I looked into cacao the more it made sense, and here we are.
The Basics
Cacao, Theobroma cacao if you want to get official about it, is a small understory tree native to the upper Amazon basin of South America. Theobroma is Greek for food of the gods, which is a bold name to give a tree until you taste good chocolate and decide maybe it earned it. It has some odd relatives too, we also grow cupuassu and mocambo (also called jaguar cacao) on the farm, cousins in the same genus that taste nothing like chocolate at all.
Origin and Habitat
In the wild, cacao grows in the shaded, humid understory of tropical rainforest, tucked beneath a much taller canopy that keeps it out of direct sun and hard wind. That’s basically the environment we’re trying to recreate in our food forest here on the Hamakua Coast, minus the jaguars.
What It Looks Like
Cacao is cauliflorous, meaning the flowers and later the pods grow straight out of the trunk and older branches instead of out at the tips like most trees do. A single mature tree can push out thousands of these tiny flowers in a season, some counts put it over 5,000, but almost none of them amount to anything. The flowers are tiny, maybe the size of a fingernail, and bees mostly ignore them. They’re pollinated by midges, these almost microscopic flies that do their work at dawn and dusk when the flowers are open, which is part of why so few flowers, some studies put it as low as three in a thousand, ever turn into a pod.
Uses and Flavor
The obvious use is chocolate, but that’s the last step of a long chain. Fresh pulp around the beans, before any fermenting or roasting happens, tastes nothing like chocolate at all. It’s tart and sweet, kind of like a lychee crossed with a mango. Some people just suck on the pulp and spit the beans out. The bean itself is bitter and pretty rough raw, and only starts turning into something resembling chocolate flavor after several days of fermentation, followed by drying, roasting, and grinding.
Growing It Here
Cacao wants warmth, humidity, and shelter from wind, and it does not want cold or standing water. On our stretch of the Hamakua Coast that means giving young trees a nurse tree or two nearby, we like sesbania, gliricidia, and bananas, for shade and wind protection while they get established. Good drainage matters a lot too, since wet feet on a cacao tree is asking for trouble down the road. Elevation matters as well. Cacao really only wants the warm, frost free lowlands, which rules out a good chunk of the Big Island once you get up in elevation.
Pests and Diseases to Watch For
The big one here in Hawaiʻi is black pod, caused by a Phytophthora fungus that thrives in exactly the warm, wet conditions we get plenty of on this coast. It shows up as dark, water soaked lesions on the pod that spread fast if you don’t catch them early, and worldwide it’s responsible for a huge share of all cacao losses, not just ours. Mirids and thrips can also show up on stems and leaves. Good airflow, harvesting regularly so pods aren’t sitting around too long, and keeping the orchard floor clean all help keep it manageable.
Kenta’s Take
Tempering is still the part that humbles me the most, honestly. Get the humidity or the temperature even slightly off and the chocolate just won’t cooperate. We’re up over 160 cacao trees now, at least 20 distinctive strains by our count, mostly Trinitario and Forastero crosses with fine flavor genetics running through most of them. Everything gets mixed together in big batches, which is honestly part of what makes our chocolate uniquely ours, nobody else is growing this exact mix anywhere in the world. Read about the day I planted our newest cacao tree on Day 365, and if you want to meet a flower that flavors a chocolate drink without being cacao at all, check out Rosita de Cacao. There’s a running joke in our house about a club for anyone crazy enough to do the whole thing tree to bar, crack it, ferment it, dry it, roast it, grind it, conch it, temper it, mold it, wrap it. We’re proud members. Practice makes perfect, I guess. We’re still learning.