Chocolate a la Guatemalteca

---

One of the activities at my Spanish scool (El Mundo en Español) is chocolate making in the traditional Guatemalan style, run by Cyndi who has her own small chocolate company. But Guatemalan chocolate is very different to what you buy in bars in England, and has only two ingredients. So here's how to make your genuine Guatemalan chocolate:

1. Sort the whole cocoa beans by size and toast them on tortilla griddles until they are dark in colour and making occasional crackly noises.

2. Cocoa beans are about the size of a Brazil nut and encased in a papery brown skin. When the beans have cooled a little, this skin can be crumbled off, leaving behind the bean, which is internally divided into irregular nibs which come apart with a little pressure.

3. Drop the dry cocoa beans bit by bit into the top of a hand mill, grinding them into a grainy, dark paste. The more times the mixture goes through the mill, the more smooth the chocolate will be. At this point, the sludge tastes intensely bitter.

4. Clean out the mill with a spoon of sugar, then mix the rest of the sugar directly into the cocoa paste, using an equal weight to the weight of beans. To make weaker (and cheaper) chocolate, many Guatemalans add egg at this point to enable them to disolve more sugar into the mixture.

5. Mill the whole lot several more times until it is smooth and glossy. Here you can add some cinnamon or other spice for a little bit of flavour variety. At this point, the mixture tastes simultaneously bitter and sweet.

6. Form the chocolate by hand into whatever shapes you please, and leave out to dry.

7. Relax with a delicious cup of hot chocolate, simply made from your chocolate, heated up with milk. Enjoy this best by dunking bread into it, then wonder what happened to all the chocolate that you made.

---