When Life Gives You Overripe Cacao Fruit
Forrest Gump famously said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
And when what you get is lemons, the thing to do is make lemonade.
But what do you do when you get cacao fruit that’s overripe?
Well, you can make chocolate.
Confused? Well, here’s a little story about what I’m talking about.
A couple months ago, my wife Becca and I were on a mini adventure, exploring some of the different markets in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica. We went into a organic market just to see what they might have that we hadn’t seen elsewhere.
Our expectation was that everything would be expensive. It wasn’t. Nothing was horribly overpriced. And they had some pretty interesting things in there. Some very yummy, homemade popsicles, a few brands of Costa Rican coffee we had not seen yet, and CACAO FRUIT! The fruit that cacao/cocoa beans come from.
That is something I’ve been wanting to try for a long time. So, we bought one.
When most people think of cacao, they think of chocolate. Cacao nibs. The beans inside the fruit. But the fruit itself is apparently very delicious. The flavor is tropical, sweet, and tangy and often described as a cross between lychee, mango, and citrus.
We decided to eat it that night. It was dessert after our dinner of banana leaf steamed whole red snapper tostados.
When I opened it up, it just didn’t look right to me. There wasn’t much pulp. So, I did some investigating. I looked at pictures of cacao fruit online. The pictures I saw showed a lot of delicious-looking pulp. I was beginning to realize I might have a bad one.
I then took a picture of it and uploaded it to Claude. Claude said that the fruit appeared to be overripe. I obviously didn’t know what I was doing when I selected it.
That said, here’s where it gets interesting.
In the process of making chocolate, the fruit is often used to ferment the beans. That fermentation helps develop the flavor. And what had naturally happened inside our overripe cacao was that the beans had already started to ferment. They’d started to darken, which is the first step of making chocolate.
So, I asked Claude, could I actually just roast these beans and turn them into cacao nibs?
Absolutely!
So that’s what I did.
In our kitchen setup in Costa Rica, we didn’t have an oven. Roasting is not easy. I had to improvise.
I took a pan, put a strainer inside of it so there wasn’t direct contact between the beans and the bottom of the pan. Essentially creating a little oven in there. Then I covered it and roasted the beans for about thirty minutes.
Did they come out perfectly roasted? No. But you could start to taste the cacao. I’d say they were 75% there.
So, what’s the point of this story?
When I first opened that fruit, my thought was, we got a bad fruit. I need to take it back. That was a fear-based response. Fear alerted me. This wasn’t what I expected. Then love stepped in and asked, “What can I do with it?”
That changed my orientation. Instead of taking it back, I thought about how I could make lemonade out of lemons. Or in this case, chocolate out of overripe cacao fruit. Maybe that’s what the universe intended me to do. Maybe it was a little test for how well I’m putting this whole Heart-Strong philosophy into action.
At the time we were prepping to head back to the US. This starts with a 5-hour trek to San Jose. Becca would be making some breakfast cookies as it is an early morning shuttle. She decided to crush up those roasted cacao nibs and put them in there.
They were awesome!
And maybe this started a whole new exploration phase for me. Maybe I’ll start roasting cacao beans. Or even roast some coffee beans and experiment with that. Play with it. That spark of creativity never would have happened if I said, this fruit is bad and took it back to the store.
As I was writing this story, I got my Daily Stoic email. It was about the concept of Amor Fati. It is a mindset for making the best out of anything that happens. It is treating each and every moment, no matter how challenging, as something to be embraced, not avoided. To not just be okay with it but love it and be better for it.
Put another way, when life gives you overripe cacao fruit, make chocolate.
Learn more about the adventure at www.heart-strong.org.