Mark Thorson > wrote in message >...
> Castlef wrote:
>
> > Im sure nobody has done this before....... because supposedly the heat
> > from the fermentation after the harvest of them kills off the germ.
> > BUt i think it would be interesting to get unfermented raw cocoa beans
> > and sprout them!!!!
> >
> > One day i will find them! :P
>
> I've bought whole cacao beans at a Mexican food store
> (beans imported from El Salvador, actually), and in every
> bag there were always a few unfermented beans. What
> did you think you could do with them? Cacao only can be
> grown at tropical latitudes, and the supply is abundant and
> cheap.
>
> Unfermented cacao beans have very little chocolate flavor.
> Fermentation is absolutely necessary to developing that
> flavor.


Its not so much the taste i'm interested in, its the health aspects of
the chocolate. Even the ancient aztechs drank it, and the europeans
found it to bitter to taste, but perhaps it's an aquired taste. What
i'm interested in, is either sprouted cocoa beans, if thats possible
or fermented cocoa beans that are unprocessed and i want to grind them
up with a pestle or something and drink it(without heating them to
high temperatures)!!!