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Sprouting cacao beans ?
at Sat, 20 Dec 2003 03:22:40 GMT in
>,
(Castlef) wrote :
>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.
Remember that the Aztecs both fermented and roasted their beans - this is
how the Europeans learned to process them in the first place. Unfermented,
unroasted cocoa beans have different nutritional characteristics from the
fermented, roasted product, and are much less digestible. In raw state,
it's common to eat the pulp and spit out the bean or seed, much as you
would eat a peach and spit out the pit. Peach pits aren't especially
digestible, much like cocoa beans.
> What
>i'm interested in, is either sprouted cocoa beans, if thats possible
Remember that cocoa beans are nothing like ordinary beans (i.e., legumes).
Cocoa beans are a type of hard-shelled pit, again, a bit like the pit of
stone fruit but most closely similar to a nut. A walnut is another close
analogy. You can surely sprout an unshelled walnut if you want, but it's
not going to be any more edible in that format than the unshelled walnut
would have been - you're just simply trying to eat a tree sprout.
>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)!!!
High temperatures destroy some compounds in some foods (especially Vitamin
C and C-supporting flavonoids), but enhance others (such as lycophene in
tomatoes. So it's not a given that high temperatures are damaging. If
you're worried about fat changing under heat, remember, cocoa butter is a
saturated fat, i.e. it's very stable under heat. Eating an unroasted
fermented cocoa bean I think might be an interesting experiment, but I
wouldn't assume it's more nutritionally sound.
--
Alex Rast
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