Kauai County, Hawaii - Day 4

Monday, February 17th, 2025. Today we did something really fun and unique. The Kauai Chocolate Farm Tasting Tour. When I heard it was 3 hours, that sounded really daunting but I had heard great things and I've been wanting to do something like this. It was so much fun! It was our 2nd (and final) day of rain but we walked around with umbrellas that were provided and went to different "tasting stations" which were covered.

Here are some things I learned on this tour ... chocolate comes from a fruit, the fruit doesn't taste like chocolate at all, the cacao bean isn't actually a bean (it's the seed of the cacao tree fruit), and, when cracked open, the cacao fruit looks like a lobster tail without the lobster (so weird - but fascinating!)

Come take the tour with us ... :)

We started the tour learning about the farm in general. Lydgate is run by a fifth generation Kauai family and they grow cacao trees, honey and vanilla along with many other types of fruit. Our first tasting was cacao juice and an apple banana from their farm. We smelled the aroma from their vanilla beans, passed around the cacao fruit to touch and feel and sampled their 70% dark chocolate.

It takes the cacao tree 4 years to grow the fruit to the size of the one in my hand in the picture above. That one fruit's seeds could produce a field of 50 new trees. For the process of chocolate, the seeds are removed and fermented for a week, sun dried for about 3 weeks, aged another 3 weeks, roasted and ground up. Then it's mixed with sugar and made into chocolate! That one fruit makes one chocolate bar.

Each cacao tree can produce anywhere from 30 to 100 fruit.

Here's some of the fruit we sampled from the farm: Top Left: White Pineapple - sooooo good and less acidic than your average golden pineapple. This was my favorite. Top Right: Soursop - this was unique and a little sour as the name implies. It's a green, spiky fruit and a popular ingredient for smoothies, desserts and teas. Bottom Left & Right: Longan fruit before and after it's been "squeezed" open. This was a sweet, mild fruit nicknamed "Dragon's Eye" because of the dark seed that can be seen through the fruit. It was fun popping it open!

Our tour guide showing us the careful way to crack the fruit with a machete and reveal the fruit. Do you agree? Does it look like a lobster tail to you? I totally see that. We all got to sample the fruit - it was "ok" but guess what? Loaded with antioxidants! If you needed to make a case for eating chocolate, there it is.

The tour concluded with the sampling of 10 different chocolates - 3 from the farm and the remaining 7 from different parts of the world which they referred to as OPCs (other people's chocolates). It was fascinating to taste the differences. One of the OPCs we tried was Hershey's Dark and after sampling the others, it was SO sweet! Much lower of a cocoa solid content than the others we tried. That just means more milk and sugar!

This was such a fun tour! I definitely would recommend it and I would go again. Yes, we purchased chocolate to take home ... how could we not?