Climate and Environment

From Dirt To Bar: Growing Your Own Chocolate In SoCal Is Just As Hard As You’d Think

Published Dec 18, 2023 2:39 PM

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Anytime you snap a bar of chocolate, sink your teeth into a Reese's or sip Swiss Miss from a mug, the cacao that makes up the best part of each of those sweet treats likely came from within 20 degrees of the equator. As far north as Vietnam and Hawaii, and as far south as Madagascar and Bolivia.

A picture of a bunch of trees from the base of said trees.

Theobroma cacao, the trees from which chocolate comes, are picky about their environment. They prefer warm and humid conditions with a lot of rain, thriving in partial shade where they’re afforded a whole lot of protection from strong wind and sun.

All of which makes the environment here in Southern California — dry, windy, at times both brutally hot and cold — less than ideal for them if you’re going to try and grow them outside. Which is why I was surprised and thrilled when I found out that there are multiple people who've figured out how to both grow cacao and make chocolate from the beans nearby.

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Given that the cacao industry is threatened by climate change (and rife with abuse), might locally grown chocolate be a viable alternative?

After talking through the process with three different people, it’s not easy by any means, but maybe if you’re up to it you too can give it a go. I know I’ll be trying in my backyard (with the proper greenhouse setup) sometime soon.

Think of this less as a how-to guide and more so a post meant to get you excited to go on an experimental cacao journey of your own.

The intrepid DIY-ers

One of the things I love about the rare fruit-growing community here in Southern California is that it attracts all kinds of different people interested in ridiculous experimentation in less-than-ideal environments.

When it comes to cacao trees, I found two groups taking on the challenge of going from dirt to bar.

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The open entrance to a lab, where one can see cacao trees growing in steel drums.

The first group is down the street from the LAist studios in Pasadena, in a nondescript warehouse. Seamus Blackley, physicist and creator of the Xbox, is growing several trees with his creative partner Asher Sefami, a trained microbiologist. They took on the process as distraction to get their minds off of the other super-secret engineering work they're doing at the same location.

Meanwhile, up in Santa Barbara, Mike Orlando, the owner of Twenty-Four Blackbirds, has been making boutique chocolate since 2009. He recently began importing cacao pods, sprouting the beans and growing his own trees in a nearby greenhouse.

So, what can we learn from them?

Step 1: Growing the trees

First, you need to get your hands on some trees.

You can pick them up from rare fruit nurseries in L.A., like Mimosa, or you can sprout your own.

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Colorful pods and seeds with white stuff around them are being worked on and handled by a pair of brown hands in this top-down shot.

If you get your hands on some fresh pods, pull out the seeds, wash off the pulp, peel off the outside skin and stick them along with a moist paper towel in a plastic bag. Keep them in a warm environment, somewhere between 80 to 90 degrees, and wait.

Seeds of various colors rest on a brown towel.

Each pod has 30 to 50 seeds, so you'll have a lot of opportunities.

Once you have your cacao tree, you need to plant it.

Sefami stuck theirs in oil drums with standard potting soil.

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In a well-lit environment, cacao tree sit in small drums on a table.

Orlando planted his in a greenhouse.

One of the most critical components of this process is controlling the environment the trees live in, as they prefer moist and warm conditions with dappled light.

Orlando shoots to keep his greenhouse from 60 to 80 degrees at about 70% humidity, though he's seen the trees survive in 40-degree weather.

In Blackley's climate-controlled lab, a nearby water jet keeps the humidity up and grow lights above the trees give them at least 12 hours of sunlight. They had a problem with aphids, so they tried to remedy the issue with thousands of ladybugs before eventually just using pesticides.

For fertilizer, Orlando sprays the leaves with a kelp mixture and sprinkles Miracle Grow Osmocote every three months or so, depending on how they look.

As you'll find if you start growing plants, a lot of it's a feel thing.

Step 2: Pollinating tiny flowers (the hardest part)

In the wild, cacao trees are often pollinated by biting midges, which don't exist here. So, you'll need to pollinate each tiny flower by hand, using pollen from different plants.

Orlando hasn't quite gotten to this point in the process, but Sefami and Blackley have, after about two years of trying to figure it out.

"The first pod we got, we were through the moon," said Sefami. "And it got to about the size of a Tic Tac and then it just falls off. And it was like ... it was one of the most painful moments."

This up-close shot shows a small branch with cacao flowers growing on it.

"The hard part is when you have tweezers and you're trying to decide if this plant and this plant are different enough genetically, they might work. And you spend half an hour pollinating, and maybe it works or maybe it doesn't, and you don't know what's going on, and the tree is dying, and you're not sure why," said Blackley.

"Basically you need to take the flower apart into its constituent parts. We remove the pollen and then we have to rub it on the other flowers in a way that just touches where it needs to go,“ said Sefami.

"The flower needs to be at just the right stage of development. Within about a day, they fall off. It’s really hard to get it right."

Turns out the biting midges are quite effective, said Blackley.

Step 3: Harvest and ferment the beans

If you get to the point where you're harvesting the pods, next you've got to ferment them.

Blackley and Sefami pulled the beans out of the pods smushed them into a bowl and stuck them in a proofing box.

They kept the beans at about 83 degrees Fahrenheit, around 80% humidity and mixed them once a day. There was so much microbial activity that the temperature of the beans climbed to 115 degrees before dropping down over the course of about a week.

"At first it smells ... doughy and bready. And then the fermentation process gets taken over by bacteria that produce essentially vinegar, so it starts to smell kind of sharp," said Blackley.

"And then one day you open up the fermentation chamber and it starts to smell like chocolate. It's completely strange."

After they were done fermenting, they dried them to 3% moisture to get them ready for roasting.

Step 4: Roast, grind and temper the cacao

While you can purchase all sorts of different specialty roasting equipment, Orlando recommends you just throw them into your oven at about 250 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes until they start to smell like brownies.

Then, separate the nibs from the shells, blend them in a spice grinder and then grind them into as fine a liquid as you can get them to in a mortar and pestle. This is when you'll add your sugar — 30% by weight will give you 70% dark chocolate.

Alternatively, you can purchase a wet grinder, which uses stone wheels to pulverize the cacao into a smooth chocolate liquor.

"If that was your first time making chocolate, you'd be pretty impressed. It tastes pretty good," said Orlando.

Step 5: Make the bars

Finally, you can temper your chocolate, which gives a bar its characteristic snap when you bite into it.

You then pour it into molds, wait for it to harden and enjoy.

Step 6: Taste the chocolate

If you get this far, you've probably since spent years of effort and thousands of dollars for something you could've purchased at the store for about $12. And we should be friends because it's the kind of absolutely insane experimentation I love.

"I'll tell you, growing chocolate from seed is quite an adventure, but it's the kind of thing you should do in your life. Don't you want to know how to do that? Make chocolate from dirt? Come on," said Blackley.

So how did their chocolate taste?

Absolutely delicious! It was fruity with notes of cinnamon and I could've kept eating it. Though, considering the investment each square was probably worth its weight in gold, they only gave me a tiny piece.

If you want to just buy already-made chocolate, you can also check out Twenty-Four Blackbirds in Santa Barbara.

Two workers filling a plastic tray with chocolate.

Resources for DIY-ers

This is far from a comprehensive guide, but if you do go on a dirt-to-bar chocolate journey, there are some great resources out there to guide you through the chocolate making part in particular.

Chocolate Alchemy is a reliable resource with links to equipment suitable for a DIY-er.
Making Chocolate: From Bean To Bar To S'more written by the creators of Dandelion Chocolate illustrates the process well.
California Rare Fruit Growers has chapters throughout the state, filled with people passionate about growing unconventional plants.

If you do any of the above, let me know! I'm always looking for excuses to get paid to go eat chocolate.

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