Chocolate Bar

BFREE would like to announce the creation of our first chocolate bar. We have harvested our cacao beans and fermented and dried them before, but this week marks the first attempt to make these beans into chocolate.

We roasted the beans, causing the kitchen to smell delicious, and then spent an hour taking the shells off the warm beans. Maya taught us how to winnow the beans to get rid of extra shells.

Although we did not have a matate and mano, the proper tools to crush the beans, we experimented with a Cuisinart and a blender and mashing the beans by hand to try to release the oils in the bean. We put the resulting mixture in the freezer and the next day, ate the first pieces of BFREE chocolate.

Marlyn Cruz (Front) and Jacob Marlin (back) shucking roasted cacao beans.

Maya winnowing the roasted and cleaned beans.

Cacao beans ready to be made into chocolate.

The final product, BFREE’s very own chocolate.