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I wasn't able to find anything really interesting to talk about for this week,
so I'm going to talk about apples.
Just kidding.
I've got a cacao fruit, yes. This is a cacao fruit that I picked up in Pinang in Malaysia.
Very, very interesting guy,
I actually have two! Here's another one, and this one's a little smaller.
This one... uh, I bought it first at the Tropical Fruit Farm, and you can see it's kind of like brown on the top,
so I was a little worried that this might be bad when I open it up,
and knowing I'm not probably gonna get another chance to eat this for a while,
I saw one of these at a fruit stand and picked this up too - it's much smaller, but this one is not rotting at all.
So if this is bad when I open it, we've got a Plan 2.
Or Plan B, but,
to give a little information, I think this is gonna be a thing now,
I'm gonna do a little research just so I have something interesting to say rather than just,
"Look at this, I'm gonna eat it, you can't have any!"
So, Cacao Fruit is how we make chocolate.
In order to make chocolate, first you collect these things off of the bark of the Theobroma cacao tree,
and "theobroma" is the Greek word for "food of the Gods".
It doesn't grow from the top like most things do,
it grows out of, like, the bark growing up,
and you pick these things off,
you cut this thing open, and inside there are supposed to be these little, like, white seeds.
We'll find that out in a second.
You take those seeds, you ferment them,
you take the fermented seeds, and you dry them and then you roast them.
Once they're roasted, you shell them and there's the cocoa nibs inside.
You take the cocoa nibs, and you grind them, and you add water and liquefy them,
and that's chocolate liqueur.
Then you take chocolate liqueur and you seperate out the oil,
which is, um, cocoa butter and the solids.
And then you take the cocoa solids and the cocoa butter, as well as milk and sugar,
and you combine them in different amounts to create the kind of chocolate that you want.
This is a very, very complicated process, um,
and it all starts with this fruit.
Uh, the fruit itself, you can juice it and create an alcohol out of it,
It's been used historically.
But most people, of course, always think about the seed, or the we call the "cocoa bean", where we get our chocolate from.
All right, we're doing some angles here. I'm gonna see if I can cut this thing open,
without hurting myself.
It's got a very, uh... well I didn't show you but, I dunno if you can hear that,
You can hear the fruit inside kind of shaking around,
so there must be a, uh, hollow space in there.
This is not really that easy to do.
It's very thick, but this knife is cutting in.
I think it's okay, kind of feels like I'm carving a pumpkin.
Alright, there it is.
So here's the inside, let's first smell it.
It actually smells kind of like a...
like a melon.
Hmm.
I think I might need to do this again with the smaller one,
because I think that this one's kind of dried out a little bit.
There is a little fruit in there, but it's not a whole lot.
I will show you my fruit before I eat it,
and this is what it looks like after.
Basically I'm just, like, sucking pulp off of these seeds.
It's actually pretty good. I mean the little that I'm getting,
it's very mild. It's sweet. It's got like a little bit of tang to it.
It kind of, like, has a slight...
melon-y taste to it?
But not really. Like, if you took a really diluted honeydew taste, maybe.
And no, it does not taste like chocolate at all. There's nothing chocolate-y about it.
Yeah. The seeds - tasting the seeds, like, as they are is not very good.
You can see what the inside of one of these seeds looks like.
So this is what it is. Here's where your chocolate comes from.
What I'm gonna do, is I'm gonna, um
end the video now, uh, this particular video,
and I'm going to film when I open this one up,
maybe tomorrow, or later today.
I'm gonna open this guy and see if it's any different
This one is harder to open than the more mature fruit.
Ah, there we go.
Feels like I'm opening up a melon.
There we go.
If we pull this fruit out, you see all those little beans in there stuck together.
On the more mature one, as you can remember, they are a little looser and more fibrous.
This looks like a little grenade.
So let me see if it tastes any different.
Maybe this is actually a little more flavorful.
It's not much sweeter,
or much sourer, but,
like... maybe a little bit. It tastes like it was a little stronger.
Generally, like, when fruits are smaller they're more concentrated with flavor,
and I think that might be the case here.
But, I say the most interesting thing about this one, compared to a more ripe, larger fruit, is that it just keeps all together like this.
It maybe has a little bit more fruit on it,
but still like hardly any at all.
So if you find the means where you can buy one or the other, go for either.
Honestly, getting a smaller one you're probably gonna get just as much fruit, if not more, than getting a larger one.
Cocoa fruit is very, very interesting, and the flavor is pretty nice.
I can't see this being a practical fruit for people to actually consume.
It makes sense that they make like a juice or an alcohol out of it, because if they're collecting it for the beans,
they can remove all that flesh and make something out of it. Just wouldn't produce very much.
I'd see why people don't eat this,
but it's not bad. This actually tastes very good.
Nothing remarkable, like I said, it's like a little bit tangy,
little tangy, little melon-y honeydew kind of flavor to it,
but these little beans here, they are the real little magicians,
because you could make something so amazing with it.
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