Laundry, Macadamia nuts, and Chocolate

 For the past 10 days, the weather forecast was for rain today, so we decided to stay home and do laundry. We have another 12 days to go before heading home and we were both running short of clean clothes. But come the mornings, checking the weather forecast, no rain in sight — maybe in another 10 days.  Still, we needed clean clothes and so we did that in the morning.

But once that was done, we headed back towards Hilo to the Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Visitor Center. 

The web site was a bit vague about what was there and it turned out to be mostly just a sales showroom with all of their products.  Part of the problem seems to be that it is off-season, so there really are not any nuts to process.  We drove past acres and acres of trees.  The visitor center did play a video, on a continuous loop, that showed how the nuts grew.  When they are ripe, they fall to the ground.  Then they are picked up, and run thru a series of steps to clean them, remove the outer husk, crack open the shells to get to the seed inside, which is then air dried for 9 days before being processed into the end product.  Generally this means roasting and salting, but also they can be dipped in chocolate, and flavored in various ways.

After the video, you could walk by the outside of the processing plant to look in the windows, but since it’s not the right season, all you saw was a bunch of idle stainless steel equipment.  

But on the drive out, I pulled over and walked into the orchard, picking up two nuts off the ground that were missed during their harvesting.  I figure I’ll take them home (to Texas) and see what I can do with them.



Since we finished up some quickly at the Macadamia nut place (nothing really to see), we had time to go to a chocolate farm!  We signed up for a tour at the Lavaloha Tree-to-Chocolate tour outside of Hilo. The web site says that this farm, up on the hills overlooking Hilo and the Pacific Ocean


used to be a sugar plantation, but when the sugar market went bust, it was purchased by a group that tried to figure out what they could grow on it.  They tried a number of things, but found that cocoa trees grew well here, and started doing that.  They also grow coffee.

Nick took us on a tour around the farm, showing us the trees, and the way that the fruit of the cocoa tree is processed to eventually make chocolate.  He was so engrossing that I forgot to take pictures (sorry).  The fruit of the tree is this big pod, and you have to cut it open to get at the seeds, which have a white pulp around them.  So they have to be cleaned and separated and then the seeds have to be dried. That stage looks a lot like what they do to dry coffee — in fact they had one drying table which was coffee, not cocoa — but unlike the coffee farm we saw, which dried the beans on the floor, the cocoa beans were dried on screen tables.



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