Chocolate Class at the Choco Museo in Antigua

We ground beans the old-fashioned way

A recommendation for anyone who is spending time in Antigua and likes chocolate! I took this two hour chocolate making workshop twice (once when my friends came to visit and then again when my aunts were here). It's pretty cool and super informative. It starts out with some information about the history of chocolate around the world and the process of making chocolate from the tree to the table. Here is an explanation of the workshop from the website:

"You learn all the steps from the harvest of the cacao in a plantation to the obtention of a chocolate bar. From the cacao beans you will roast them, peel them, and grind them into a paste. This cacao paste is used to prepare the first known cacao drink (invented by the Mayas). the traditional chocolate. In the end, from refined chocolate you will prepare your own chocolate that you can take back home." http://www.chocomuseo.com/

In the class we got to make two different kinds of hot chocolate: traditional mayan style and the old English style. Neither included milk or sugar. The way they traditionally made it here in Guatemala was a more bitter drink and often included blood (the recipe has since changed don't worry).

I also learned more about the differences between chocolates: dark, milk, and white. Dark chocolate is just ground up cacao beans mixed with sugar and the amount of sugar determines the percentage of the chocolate. For example: a 70% dark chocolate has 7lbs of chocolate to 3lbs sugar. Milk chocolate is the cacao mixed with both milk and sugar.

One fun fact that I learned in the workshop was about how expensive chocolate and cacao beans used to be. Cacao seeds were used as currency in the Aztec society and hot chocolate was so expensive that it was only drank by kings. For example: an avocado was worth 3 seeds, 30 seeds for a small rabbit, and 200 for a male turkey. A fun fact about chocolate in the U.S.: M&Ms were developed by the army as a chocolate that the soldiers could take with them without melting. Hence the candy coating. Brilliant.

Our enthusiastic instructor

Molding chocolate with my aunts

Molding chocolate with my friends