Steelgrass Farms

I would be a great big asshole if I didn't at some point give proper props to the man that made Kauai fun, the inimitable Will Lydgate. This man took me all around the island, taught me songs on the ukulele, attacked me with an apple pie and in general rocked my world with his awesomeness. So here I want to give a shout-out to the man, the myth, the legend (and the chocolate farmer) William Hibbs Lydgate.

Will, in addition to being a kick-ass bass player, makes his living by Steelgrass Farms on Kauai, a farm that give the best ag tour of all time: three hours dedicated to tasting and talking about chocolate. You start the tour by sampling a little of the good stuff (a luxury at 9 in the morning), take a leisurely stroll around the farm getting educated about the unusual plants grown there (papyrus for one, vanilla orchids for another and a really strong variety of bamboo from which the farm gets it's name), tasting the tropical fruits and generally being entertained by the dry humor of your tour guides.

pretty little "poor man's orchid"

cute sister-in-law with the papyrus stalk


rambutan hair tie

vanilla orchid pods

cacao tree

Then you get to the part everyone's been waiting for, the star of the show: the chocolate. The unassuming little trees have these weird looking pods growing on the bark and these weird looking pod contain the real magic...the chocolate seeds. In case you didn't know, chocolate is made from the huge seeds of the chocolate fruit. How you might wonder? Let me tell you the long and intricate process of making that delictible dark treat that drives so many of us to ecstasty. First, you harvest the cacao seeds (that's right, the plant is actually called cacao, not chocolate), then you ferment them in banana leaves for a couple of days, dry them in the sun, and then send them to plants to process the beans. The next step is one of my personal favorites: they crack open the shell of the bean and extract the cacao nib. I think I just love any excuse to use the word nib. I'm sure I'll throw it in a couple more times in this post for good measure and my own personal amusement. So after you've extracted the nib, it gets all ground up and usually coco butter is added to make it extra creamy. Some fools add other stuff too, but we won't talk about that here...it would be blasphemy. It's mixed and ground up a lot to make is smooth (this is called conching) and then heated and cooled at precise temperatures to ensure that the molecules are all lined up in the right way.

So we saw the cacao trees, got the 411 on how to make chocolate and arrived at the last and most anticipated part of the tour: the tasting. We all sat down and got to try 11 different artisinal chocolates. Like wine, there are mass producers and then there are artists. All the chocolates we tried were single estate and all contained the same four ingredients: cocoa, cocoa butter, sugar and an emulsifier. But they all tasted amazingly different. I cannot believe what a foodie I am to be able to say this with a straight face, but you could taste the terroir of the chocolate. Feel free to guffaw at that statement, but it's true. Some of the chocolates were really sour, others bitter, some spicy or fruity or grassy. It was an amazing variety of flavors and they were all really good.

Here are my parting words for you chocolate fanatics: go to Kauai to pay homage to the cacao tree, give Will a high-five for me, geek out on chocolate at Steelgrass and always buy dark. It will change your life.