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Cacao trees with green and ripe cacao pods at the Original Hawaiian Chocolate Factory.

Tropical Treats from Hawaii

Foodies look for unique, delicious or locally sourced food, or best of all, all three characteristics in one. If this sounds good to you, you probably love the heritage tomatoes at the Saturday Marketplace in Moscow, sweet corn from your neighbor and zucchini from your own garden. You would also love the big island of Hawaii.

Plants that grow here have to like temperatures that vary from 60 on “cold” winter nights to 80 during the day, although temps drop lower at higher altitudes. Eleven of the world’s 13 climate zones are present here, omitting just the sub-Arctic and Arctic climate zones. Rainfall varies widely, but some plants can survive a wide range of precipitation.

The Original Hawaiian Chocolate Factory is a delicious place to shop or tour. Bob and his wife retired to Hawaii from North Carolina, so the climate is more temperate in the Kailua-Kona area. They bought a cacao plantation and set out learning all about chocolate. A tour of the orchard was a shady delight, as he pointed out the cacao pods and flowers. The cacao tree puts out way more flowers than it can support, and it automatically culls the ones it cannot support.

The cacao pods begin as small, green, elongated pods and turn colors as they ripen. Ripened pods are six inches or more in length and can be yellow, orange and red, purple and probably a few other colors. The pods grow directly on the trunk and limbs of the tree, and they must be cut off. They do not fall off and cannot be pulled off.

The rest of the process makes one realize how ingenious people have been over their history to figure out how to make something so delicious out of this strange, hard pod. The ripened pods are carefully split open, revealing a mass of seeds in a sticky white substance. The sticky white stuff has a pleasant sweet, citrus flavor, which tastes good and is loved by geckos.

The seeds are separated and put in wood boxes with spaces between the slats to allow for air circulation. While the cacao beans ferment, the white stuff disappears, leaving a bean that is now set in the sun for 22 to 28 days. After this the nib, the dark brown part, is separated and roasted. Now the rich chocolate flavor develops.

Milk chocolate and dark chocolate are processed at the OHCF in small-scale batches. Hershey and other companies have offered to buy their beans, but the factory prides itself on being the only orchard to finished product chocolate producer in the United States. Their gift shop has oodles of heavenly chocolates to purchase. The entire operation is a short drive from the major hotels in Kailua-Kona, and the tour costs $15.

People who have visited Kona, or whose friends or relatives have, know about Kona coffee. Just coming into vogue is K’ua coffee, which won the Kona coffee festival a year or two ago and has not returned. K’ua now has its own coffee festival.

Coffee has been grown in Hawaii for years, and it has grown to be very popular for its wonderful flavor. It is grown by old-fashioned, labor-intensive methods, with small orchards everywhere and large ones in many places. On the steep hillsides, the trees are kept trimmed very short for safety reasons. Safety? The shorter the ladder needed to work on the trees on steep hills, the safer. Every three years, the trees are trimmed down to the trunk, and anyone with more than a few trees does this on a three-year rotation. After three years, the trees produce markedly fewer beans, so trimming is essential for good production.

Coffee beans are hand-picked here, dropped by pickers into the buckets they wear attached to their waists and then dumped into burlap bags, which are sewn shut when they contain 100 pounds. This stage of coffee beans is called “cherries.” It takes seven pounds of cherries to make one pound of high quality coffee beans. Pickers receive about $2 per pound for picking, so there is $14 into the beans before any other costs are calculated.

The cherries are shelled, dried and roasted, becoming delicious Kona coffee. However, just because the label says “Kona Coffee,” be aware that it can be labeled Kona if it only contains 10 percent of Kona coffee beans. For the lucky shopper, many shops and stores give small samples of Kona coffee to customers, so a coffee lover can decide if the taste is worth the cost. Two pounds of Royal Kona coffee beans costs about $80.

Another treat from Hawaii Island is macadamia nuts. Many times coffee trees grow under macadamia nut trees, which shelter the smaller trees. In other places, the macadamia trees are planted close together so that their branches interlace, making them less susceptible to winds.

Macadamia nuts cannot be shaken off of trees on Hawaii Island, since they are so often planted among the lava rocks that cover so much of the western and southern sides of the island. Shaking the trees fatally weakens the roots. The old-fashioned method is to pick up the nuts from the ground, using hand labor. A little easier method is to sweep up the nuts and remove them from the dust and small rocks.

The nuts are then placed in a container with warm air blowing. In about two weeks, the nut shrinks away from the shell slightly. The shell can be cracked then without breaking or pulverizing the nutmeat. This hardest nutshell in the world requires 300 pounds per square inch of pressure to break.

Macadamia nuts were sent to China for decades for processing and roasting, but there are at least three facilities on the island that are in operation now. Increased transportation costs and higher labor costs are keeping this processing at home now, which is good for the Hawaiian economy.

Popular spots to sample and buy macadamia nuts and nut goodies are Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Company near Hilo, and Hamakua Macadamia Nut Company north of Kailua-Kona. Tourists were loving the plain macs and the nuts flavored with coconut, Kona coffee and butter rum. The tasters who loved the Wasabi nuts were fewer, and the Spam-flavored nuts are apparently uniquely loved by native Hawaiians. Cookies and chocolates with macadamia nuts were plentiful and in a great variety.

Aloha!