Day 2 - Arequipa

Our walking tour yesterday started outside of a chocolate shop / workshop so we decided to book ourselves on to a chocolate making class. As you can imagine, we (mainly me) were very excited!

It was just me and Si in the class so we had a private lesson with our teacher Adrian. Adrian was a patisserie chef by trade and there wasn't anything he didn't know about cacao! The class was called from bean to bar so we started off by picking out some 'good' beans from an enormous box of beans he threw all over the counter, which we would later be roasting. For a bean to qualify as a good bean, the shell could not be cracked in any way. This ensures that the cacao doesn't get burnt during the roasting stage. Once we had a good amount of beans, Adrian popped them in a special oven to cook. In the meantime we had a bit of a history lesson on cacao. As part of this we learnt about the first ways chocolate was consumed. As you can imagine, back in the day, chocolate was reserved for only the richest Peruvians such as the King. Back then it was consumed in the form of a hot drink called chocolatl.

After 20 minutes, Adrian took the beans out of the oven so that we could proceed to the next stage in the process, peeling. Once we had peeled the shells off some of the cacao beans, we popped them in a pestle and mortar and ground them up until they turned into a paste. And there we had our chocolate! Adrian then made some chocolatl for us to taste. Adrian added the chocolate paste to some hot water along with a small amount of chilli powder and some sugar. It looked like muddy water and didn't taste very chocolatey. The chilli left an after burn in your throat though! Think I'll stick to the real stuff.

We then moved down to their chocolate workshop to make our own chocolates to take home. Now the stage we missed was the stage where they separate the cacao butter from the cacao mass. All chocolate is made from 3 or 4 ingredients. For dark chocolate, you need cacao butter, cacao mass and sugar. For milk chocolate you need the same but also milk powder. It always has to be milk powder as if you used real milk it would never set!

Downstairs they had some 70% chocolate ready for us to make our chocolates. We were given our mould and a selection of ingredients that we could mix and match to create our own flavours. There were almonds, Brazil nuts, quinoa, coca powder, chilli powder, sea salt and lots more. So Si and I set about making our concoctions and when we were ready Adrian gave us some chocolate to pour over the top of the moulds. We had to shake them to remove the air bubbles and then top the moulds up to the top where required.

Whilst we waited for our chocolate to set we went back upstairs to do some chocolate tasting. We tried 5 chocolates in total which we had to guess if they were real or fake chocolate as well as what percentage of cacao they contained. Needless to say, me and Si smashed it and got 5 out of 5. The scary thing was that the fake chocolates really didn't smell of chocolate at all. One smelt of absolutely nothing and the smelt strongly of vanilla. The vanilla one was made by Nestle. This is also where Adrian proceeded to tell us that Cadburys isn't real chocolate. Sorry Kevin!

At this point our chocolates were set so we popped them out of their moulds and packaged them up to take away with us. We both really enjoyed the workshop. It was really interesting and Adrian was an amazing and knowledgable teacher. I think I want to make my own chocolate when we get home!

After our chocolate workshop we headed over to the market to get some bits for lunch and dinner and then headed back to the hostel for a lazy afternoon, but not before trying some of the cheese ice cream. The ice cream was delicious and it turns out that the lady who makes it is famous. There were loads of newspaper clippings in her shop as she had won awards for her cheese ice cream!Read more