You might think there’s nothing much going on in Vanuatu, but you’d be completely wrong. It’s home to robust agriculture of all sorts, including cacao. Being fans of local food, we decided to get down to the bottom of the Vanuatu chocolate business. So we went to both of the two chocolate producers in town, Gaston and Aelan (the latter pronounced ‘island’, which is what the name means). And – because we are nothing if not obsessive greedy dutiful – we also travelled out of town, to the Aelan factory, to take a tour and learn how chocolate is made.
Vanuatu Chocolate Production
Mamarosa, our tour guide at Aelan, seemed surprised to see us, even though we had booked a tour online. Or, we thought we had. No matter: the chocolate flows like water in these parts! Once we had paid a steepish fee of $1000VUV (=$8.35 USD = £6.5 = € 7.66 – not that those latter currencies will do you any good here), we were on the move. (But see below – this turned out to be a bargain price!)
Cacao pods grow on four of Vanuatu’s 83 islands (Epi, Espiritu Santo, Malakula, and Malo). Trees take about six years to mature, and a fruit takes five to six months to ripen. When ripe, they are red/orange (or sometimes yellow). The pod is about hand-sized, hard and rough to the touch.
After harvesting the pods, chocolate makers open them to reveal the cacao beans, which sit in a white pulp that smells floral. Then they ferment for about a week, and try out for about another week, ideally in sunlight. Workers then clean the dried cacao beans and roast them, for roughly an hour. They then put them through a winnowing machine that removes the husks. During this process, the beans usually break up into nibs. The beans are heated again, then ground down into a paste. The paste is further refined, and air and sugar, plus any other ingredients are added.
Finally, chocolate-makers temper the chocolate, which give it its shine and smooth snap. They then pour it into molds. Or, when nobody else is around, right down their throats…
Chocolate Eating
Talking of which, it’s about high time to try some chocolate, isn’t it? The Gaston store allowed us to try samples, and we left there with two we loved. Gaston makes both milk and dark chocolate, while Aelan makes only dark. Indeed, Aelan makes four single-source chocolate bars, one from each of the islands. Each is 70% cacao, and their flavours are interestingly different, ranging from almost bitter to rich and fruity. Both also make flavoured chocolates, which is our jam.
Choosing favourites was very difficult. Before venturing out, we had set a strict two-bars per brand limit. We liked Gaston’s milk chocolate and olive oil, as well as their rum raisin dark. And, obviously, the dark chocolate ginger. But we ended up going home with bars of dark chocolate and orange (one of our perennial favourites) and with caramelised nangae nuts and sea salt in dark chocolate. Nangae is a local nut that tastes like a cross between macadamia and almond.
At the Aelan factory, the tour included tasting every one of their eleven Vanuatu chocolate bars. And, friends, the samples were not stingy. We like to think we can gorge with the best of them, but by about sample number seven we were splitting a single piece.
Here too, the flavours were intriguing. We liked the coconut much more than we expected, which was also true for the coffee. But we ended up buying the crystalised turmeric and the (award-winning!) chili pepper. Both of them were unique in our experience: we’ve had chili-flavoured chocolate before, but this one was exceptionally rich.
So: we returned to our hotel, wiser and fuller. Indeed, just a tiny bit queasy from all that delicious knowledge. Now that we know how complicated it is to make chocolate, we think we’ll relish it even more. (Just, perhaps, not right away…)
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