The African Nutmeg is not the culinary spice plant, though apparently the fruit is sometimes used in the place of nutmeg in African dishes. We are not getting any fruit set. The flowers are natively pollinated by the scarab beetle, which probably muscle their way into that central chamber to get at the pollen. Our flowers fall off the tree before they open completely and expose their stamen and pistil.

The first picture below is a full shot of the tree–those are the fresh, young leaves re-forming on the tree. It dropped all its leaves, bloomed, and started to re-foliate. They will eventually turn thick and waxy and green.

Magnolias are some of the oldest flowers around. They evolved before there were bees, and so have a rather primitive flower structure. They originated millions of years ago in North America and separately, in Asia. We grow mostly Asian varieties, though the one below is a dwarf variety of the beautiful tree you’ll find all over the Southern United States.

Earlier this year our Coco Magnolia bloomed for a short period of time, but it is showing new buds again! The first picture I took on my phone one morning while the flower was still open. The second picture was later that same day after it had closed up. The third is the next day, when I found the remaining bundle of petals on the ground. I was amazed the petals didn’t separate, but fell off like a porcelain urn.

The next photo is known as the Banana Shrub (Michelia figo), because of its distinctly banana candy scent–it is almost too sweet for my liking! We have two of these slow growing shrubs. As of this season, they both have bloomed. You might still see a few late flowers on this plant if you come this week.

Perhaps my favorite Magnolia bloom is our Pak Lan tree (Magnolia x alba). The pictures below are of our larger specimen, with white blooms. We also have a yellow variety which is probably the original Magnolia champaca. In the afternoon and evenings, the aroma of these flowers fill the valley. Our trees will probably remain in bloom for the next month, so come check it out!

Last August we posted pictures of our Caryota gigas with it’s giant, stunning young inflorescences. Well, the first set of those braided-looking bundles opened a couple months ago. Check out the pictures below–the open flowers are gorgeous, creating a vivid tapestry that is very attractive to the bees. In one of these pictures you can see another young green bloom peeking out behind the open flowers on the other side of the tree–those probably won’t open until this fall. It looks like we have a lengthy bloom on our C. gigas, and we will be enjoying blooms for months to come before the plant sadly dies. With any luck, those bees will have done their job and we will be able to harvest viable seeds to propagate more palms to take this fella’s place.

Our larger, more robust Medinilla magnifica blooms more frequently and has been in the ground a while. It’s also showing off right now:

We also have a little orange once keeping the M. magnifica company, but it’s still small and just hanging in there:

It was my (Jason) first experience processing chocolate, and though I’ve known for a year what goes into the processing, actually getting your hands dirty (or shall I say chocolatey) and doing it yourself provides a whole new perspective on the process.

It is a bit complicated, very delicate, and quite time consuming. Over this last weekend (July 29-August 1), it took 3 people 8 hours (and a lot of waiting) to churn out a little more than 7 pounds of chocolate!

If we were to actually sell our homemade 2 oz bars, we’d have to ask somewhere around $30+/bar to cover our costs. Yikes! Chocolate processing is economical only on the large scale, which is why farmers in poorer countries have to sell their beans to a cooperative that does the processing in much larger batches.

I filmed every stage of our process, and so hope to have a short video of the process, from “bean to bar,” within the next month or so. It takes a lot of editing, though, so please be patient. Below, I will provide just a few pictures and an abbreviated narrative of the steps of the chocolate processing.

1.) We had already fermented and dried many batches of beans which we stored up until we had the time to turn them into chocolate. The fermentation takes place at a low temperature, as does the drying.

Fermentation is the most vital part of the chocolate process. You can develop amazingly unique, gourmet flavor notes if you can perfect your fermentation process. On the flip side, fermentation is so delicate, one misstep and your entire batch is ruined!

2.) The dried beans are roasted at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. You don’t want to over roast your beans–it will ruin the flavor! However, you don’t want to under roast them either, or they won’t be quite dry enough and won’t grind quite as well.

The main purpose of roasting is to further release flavor notes and create a more robust flavor that will come out in the finished bar of chocolate when it is mixed with sugar.

3.) Instead of getting small children to winnow our beans, and because we cannot afford a multi-thousand dollar winnowing machine, we have created our own system for separating the chaff (husks) of the beans from the cacao beans. Below, we first run the dried roasted beans through a “Crankosteen” which basically crushes them, leaving us a mixture of chaff and nibs.

4.) We need to separate the husks (chaff) from the nibs which will become our chocolate so we’ve improvised the system below. Air blowing up from one side, blows the light weight husks out one end, while allowing the heavy nibs to fall down on the other.

5.) We take the resulting nibs and push them through our Norwalk Juicer to churn out a peanut-butter texture paste, known as the “cocoa mass” or “cocoa liquor.” Sampling this and we can begin to taste the sort of quality we can expect from our finished bars.

6.) Large scale manufacturers will press this cocoa mass to separate the solids (cocoa cake, to become cocoa powder) from the liquids (cocoa butter, the fats and lipids that become an additive in chocolate bars, for white chocolate, and as a popular cosmetic ingredient nowadays).

We don’t have enough to justify this separation so we mix our cocoa mass with sugar and put it into our melange (below). We made about 79% dark chocolate: 79% cocoa mass and 21% dried organic can sugar.

This melange, with its polished stone wheels ran for almost 3 days straight, all weekend long, making the chocolate mixture creamy and smooth and releasing more heat and enzymes, changing the flavor again. Our melange is a modified rice grinder from India.

7.) After 3 days of grinding, out comes our beautiful liquid chocolate:

8.) Now for tempering, perhaps the most demanding and scientific process that can be done in the modern kitchen. It can take a lifetime for a confectioner to perfect their hand tempering technique. Tempering is a process of manipulating the temperature of the chocolate mixture to ensure the correct types of cocoa butter crystals form, while eliminating unwanted types of cocoa butter crystals.

When this is done correctly, the tempered chocolate has a longer shelf life, has a nice beautiful outer glossy texture that we all appreciate in a bar of chocolate, and because of tempering, the finished bar will snap apart firmly rather than crumbling soggily.

I’ll get into the details of this process when I put together that video I promised. We take our hot chocolate and use a chilled marble slab to temper it to the right temperature:

9.) We pour the tempered chocolate into our moulds…

10.) The molds are put in the refrigerator to let them chill and get the cocoa butter crystals to contract, thereby releasing the bar naturally from its mold. And voila! Our finished bars:

BEAUTIFUL! And of course, there is a lot of mess to clean up after all of that. The crew is so busy keeping the chocolate at the exact temperatures that cleanup while you go is almost impossible. But cleanup can be fun, too….YUM:

SO! You want some Ahonui Chocolate? Unfortunately, we will not be selling this chocolate commercially in any form. However, if you come on our tour, offered three days per week, you’ll participate in our small gourmet chocolate tasting and get to sample a small morsel of our homemade dark chocolate! We look forward to hearing from you!

First, we have the revered Rudraksha tree (Eleocarpus ganitrus). Westerners call this the “blue marble tree,” but the name Rudraksha comes from Sanskrit. Rudra is an incarnation of the god Shiva, while aksha means eye. The name Shiva’s eye refers to the brilliant blue fruit it bears:

Hindus say each blue fruit represents a tear that Shiva sheds in compassion for the miseries of the world, referring to the founding legend of the plant: It is said Shiva committed himself to 1,000 years of meditation and when he was finished and opened his eyes for the first time, a single tear of bliss fell to the earth and from it this tree grew.

The fruit is fascinating. The blue around the rudraksha seed is the only color known in nature that is created through an act of structural refraction, and not pigment reflection. What does this mean? Well, normally when we look at a color, the pigment of that color is absorbing all the colors of the visible light spectrum and reflecting back to our eyes the single color we see.

The blue/violet iridescence on the rudraksha fruit is caused not by an act of reflection, but through the physical structure of the fruit pulp: it absorbs the visible light and refracts it, like a prism or a crystal, emitting a unique iridescent blue. This is why the color seems to shimmer and shift almost violet when you move it in the sunlight.

After the thin layer of blue fruit rots away, the gnarled rudraksha bead is revealed:

These beads are precious to hindus, and are often made into necklaces called malas, used for prayer (just like Western rosaries). Traditionally these necklaces are made with 108 beads (or a multiple of 108), an auspicious number in the Vedic scriptures. Indian Ayurvedic medicine believes that these seeds also have physical healing properties.

Some will soak the beads in water overnight and drink the resultant tonic the next day as a cure for a slew of different ailments. In the picture above, the necklace is made from a different, smaller variety of Rudraksha bead. These have been cleaned and polished, unlike the grey, larger seed from our own tree at the bottom of the image.

Our trees are still very young, but as they mature they will develop large buttress roots and aerial root structures. Here is a picture of the mature Rudraksha base taken in the old grove owned by the Hindu Monastery above Kapa’a.

Once ours get this long, we can kiss Lucinda’s picnic lawn goodbye!

Earlier this spring an equally stunning seed was produced for the first time by our Black Pearl Tree, also known as the Velvet Seedpod Tree (Majidea zanguebarica). This small tree has already produced a prolific number of its exotic seed pods.

These pods that are dull yellow brown on the exterior eventually burst open on the tree, exposing the luminescent seed nested in the shocking magenta of the open pod. Below, you can see the unopened pods on our delicate tree and then the ripe and open pods.

These seeds are true to their name and are covered with peach fuzz hairs, giving them a soft, velvet texture. This texture, paired with the hypnotic black shimmer makes these seeds a popular jewelry bead.

The empty seed pod is also useful: it is often employed as a potpourri filler after sprayed with the appropriate scent! In Eastern Africa, where this tree originates, it is known as the Mgambo

The people of Indonesia call it Mahkota Dewa, which translates directly to “God’s Crown.” Our specimen has been producing fruit for the last couple of months on the slopes of our Sacred Valley. It is still a small shrub (see below), but will eventually become a small tree, perhaps 20 feet tall in this particular location on a relatively steep slope.

Its fragrant little flowers (second picture below) eventually give birth to the bright red fruit (third picture). The fruit starts dark green and matures into the almost maroon color when mature.

For medicinal treatments the fruit, leaves and stems are used. The fruit is extremely poisonous when raw and must be prepared for human consumption. Generally, this is done by grating or shredding it and then drying the material for use as a tea. It’s properties are amazing. Native populations have used it to counter diabetes, liver diseases, vascular problems, high blood pressure, and cancer.

Modern research into it has proven its ability to control cancer, impotency, dysentery, hemorrhoids, diabetes mellitus, allergies, liver and heart disease, acne and high cholesterol. It contains anti-histamine, antioxidant and anti-cancer substances.

We have not yet begun to process plants such as God’s Crown, but in the coming years we hope to harvest our medicines and store them for use as teas or tinctures.

The shrub is still small and so is a little hard to make out, with the green on green. If you look careful, you can see a little red fruit hidden in the lower branches.

Phaleria macrocarpa flower:

God’s Crown or Mahkota Dewa:

I’d suspect they would be done by now in a warmer year. Our spring season is producing way more cherries than last fall’s bloom. The tree originates in the West Indies and Northern South America, but today can be easily found and cultivated throughout the tropical and sub-tropical world, including Southeastern North America.

The Acerola Cherry is delicious! The birds, of course, love them, and so often you pick the cherries a little young, making them slightly tart. For this sourness, in Asia, they are popular to process into chutneys and pickles. Allowed to ripen completely, however, and they are quite sweet and juicy with just a mild tartness. Inside are three triangular pits, which are difficult to propagate.

These cherries are extremely nutritious. The Acerolas can have 32 times the Vitamin C content of an orange! One cherry is often enough Vitamin C content for your daily needs. On top this the cherries are loaded with Potassium, vitamin A, Magnesium, antioxidants and lots of other good stuff. For this reason its great for the immune system. Other properties make it helpful in treating headaches, diarrhea and dysentery. Enjoy the pictures…