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Wednesday, October 9, 2013

CACAO TALK - PART III


Cacao seeds or cacao beans is the raw material for many food products.
Each seed contains a significant amount of fat (40–50%) as cocoa butter.
Their most noted active constituent is theobromine, a compound similar to caffeine.
There are so many home industry that process the beans into intermediate products, such as cacao pasta, cacao powder or cacao butter.
Really long process to be a prepared food.

Dry cacao beans
First process is sorting...
Only the best beans from the mature fruits will process to the advance product.
On big plantations or big traders, they use grading and sorting machine.
But traditional farmer use round bamboo tray.

traditional sorting

Second process is drying.
This process intend to reduce water content into 4-5 percents grade.
Third process is winnowing.
This process intend to discard the nibs (content of the seeds) from it's shell.
We use winnowing machine in this process, look like huller machine.

Cacao shells

Farmers usually process cacao shells into cacao shell powder.
The powder is used as poultry food.

Cacao nibs

Fourth process is roasting.
This process reduce water content of the nibs into 1.5 percent grade.

Roasting machine
Roasted cacao nibs
The last process is grinding.
The yield of this process is cocoa mass or cocoa liquor.
Cacao mass is well known as cocoa pasta.
Grinding machine
Cocoa pasta or cocoa mass
Cocoa pasta is used to make many food products.
Next... we will make cocoa powder from this pasta.
Please... enjoy this cacao talk.

10 comments:

  1. Very interesting! Are you a scientist? You sound very knowledgeable...
    Thanks for visiting my blog, btw.

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    1. Thank you Mark. Welcome to my blog. I'm not a scientist, I'm just an amateur gardener. I love to learn everything about nature, gardening and food processing. Just a country girl that live in an urban area.
      Thank you for stopping by, and please come back.

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  2. Replies
    1. Thank you Lisa. Maybe this cacao talk just give you a few information. Thank you for coming and don't miss the next part.

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  3. So much work but well worth it. Thank you for showing the process.

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, very long and complicated process. But the yields are very very worthwhile. Welcome back again.

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  4. Thank you for visiting my blog and leaving a comment. How interesting, it obviously has to go through many different stages. It's good that even the shells get used so no waste.

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    Replies
    1. Welcome to my blog. There are no waste on processing cacao. We use the outer skin for compos, the pulp for many kind of food, and the shell for poultry food. Please enjoy this cacao talk, and don't miss the next part. Thank you for coming by. Please come back.

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  5. Endah, I greatly enjoyed all the parts of your Coco talk. All the more so as I have just come back from the Nilgiris, where every household makes home made chocolates , which are a great attraction to the visitors. They get their cocoa powder from Indonesia..

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    Replies
    1. Our country export up to 75% of cacao product abroad. I think you all right, India is one of the main importer of cacao from Indonesia.

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