Matagalpa, El Castillo Del Cacao and Selva Negra

We let outselves sleep in from the somewhat tiring biking day from Ocotal, so we didn´t get to Matagalpa until almost 11.  We pretty much squandered the day cause we didn´t plan ahead.  That was ok though, days of rest are nice.  We ate lots of food, did research internet and did some reading.  We quickly found out the tour operators in town were a rip off unless you have a large group.  The larger the group the cheaper the tour, because the transportation costs are split.  It would have been just me for the weaving tour, and at $70 I decided it wasn´t worth it.  They also wanted to charge $30 for the chocolate tour!  In the lonely planet it says the entrance to the chocolate factory is $5, but says nothing else.  And on the website for El Castillo del Cacao under the visiting section, they have only a logo for Matagalpa Tours.  So I wasn´t sure if you could show up or not and if the $5 admission was only gonna get me into a gift shop or something.  I decided to try just showing up cause $5 is a whole lot better than $30. 

It ended up being just fine.  Craig hadn´t planned on going with me, but in the end decided to and was glad he did.  We also had an older Canadian lady tag along with us.  We met her in our hostel in Matagalpa and her Spanish was awful.  I ended up being the translator for the tour.  It was a nice feeling to know my Spanish skills are still good enough that I could do a chocolate tour!

Below is a tour through the factory with pictures.

Yay! I´ve been waiting months to come here!

It all starts with cacao (that´s the chocolate fruit) beans/grains (don´t actually know how they are called in English! grains in Spanish!).  At this particular factory they use locally grown cacao that is produced in the north of the country.  It is one of 3 factories in Nicargua, and the only one that makes dark chocolates! Apparently Nicaragua has the best quality cacao of Central America.  The trees need to be between 900 and 1200 meters of elevation for optimal growing conditions.

Granos de cacao

Once the beautiful organic chocolate grains have been acquired they are put in the machine below and toasted.  I don´t remember the exact temerature but it was somewhere near 100 degrees, and they stay in for 30 minutes.

Toaster

Once the grains are nice and toasty they crumble quite easily and are hand ground on one of these tradtional Mayan grinders.  The purpose of this step it to remove the shell from the grain.  There are only 3 ladies working in the factory and each day they do a different task, one day toasting, one day grinding and another day making chocolate!

Hand grinder

On the left are organic grains and on the right non organic, you can see the color difference!



Once all the chocolate has been crushed, it goes in a machine that blows air.  The heavy cocao goes to the bottom of the machine and the light shells are blow away.  Each batch is put through 3 times.  The shells are then composted.  There can be no more than 10% shell in the ground cacao for a good quality chocolate.  But their machine is so good that only 5% is left!

The machine below makes chocolate paste.  It is a mixture of just the toasted cacao and sugar.  No liquid is needed because the cacao is fatty enough.  So at this point you determine what percent of darkness you will make.  For 50% dark, you use half sugar half cacao, for 60% dark, you´d use 60% cacao and 40% sugar, etc.  The cacao and sugar go in the top (under the lid) and out the bottom comes paste.  Some companies, such as Hershey, buy just paste and do the rest in their own factories, other companies buy the cacao grains and do it all on their own.

This machine melts the chocolate paste and cools it.  This helps with keeping the chocolate from melting too much later, like when it is in your hand for example.

 The liquid chocolate is then taken from the machine and put in molds and frozen for 1 hour.

All the packaging is done by hand.  Each wrapper is individually made and sealed using a roll of poly propylene and a hot iron press thing.

Then the ladies hand place each label and glue them shut with glue sticks!

This is the factory from the outside, it´s really a castle!  How fun! :)

So many chocolates! I of course took a few off their hands!

After the chocolate tour we headed towards Jinotega to a German run farm called Selva Negra.  They grow coffee there and lots of other things.  They also happen to be on a lovely plot of land up in the cloud forest that includes a biological reserve full of hiking trails.  They also run a hotel and restaurant as well as youth hostel.  We decided to just come for the day and do some hikes.  We were charged a $4 entrance fee but that was fine cause they let you apply it to food in their restaurant.  We spent about 3 hours hiking.  It was gorgeous forest with lots of lovely trees, but super muddy.  It felt like walking on mashed potatoes!  After the hike, we enjoyed organic hamburgers in the restaurant.  I had coffee with my meal, even though it´s not something I normally enjoy.  But since I was on a coffee farm I gave it a try, and it wasn´t bad!

Coffee plants. very lovely surroundings

View of Matagalpa from the top of the hike

We were very muddy at the end

Craig in a super cool tree.  We have pics in about 15 similar trees

It was about 5 when we left Selva Negra.  We got a ride in the back of a truck the 1.5 km back out to the highway.  And we were back in Matagalpa by 5:45.  We barely missed the last bus to Esteli.  So we got on a Managua bound bus and planned to get off at the junction with the Pan American Highway and get another bus on to Esteli.  Normally this would have worked, but some kind of agricultural protest was blocking buses coming from Managua.  So people were parked all around the juntion in there cars offering themselves as taxis!  We finally figured out what was going on and grabbed one.  They told us 100 cordoba all the way to Esteli (44km) for both of us and there were 2 others they were taking so this sounded reasonable.  When we got there however, the price jumped to 600!  (23 cordoba = $1 US) I didn´t want to argue with them and risk getting in a fight so we paid them. It sucks be we are lucky, if this is the only bad thing to happen to us all trip, we are very lucky.

We were up early the next morning on our 2 day ride to Granada.  More updates to come.