Help Us Make Hakalau Chocolate
Donation protected
Aloha!
This is the story of Rachel and Dan and our chocolate. We are both huge lovers of dark, rich chocolate and believe strongly in growing food that nourishes the earth as well as the people who eat it.
We moved to the Hamakua coast of the Big Island, Hawaii in 2010 from Olympia, Washington with a dream of becoming as food and energy self-sufficient as we could. We are fortunate to live on a beautiful piece of land on the flanks of Mauna Kea, with streams tumbling down through waterfalls and on to the Pacific.
We have come far in our dream.
Our organic, permaculture, off-grid farm, Kulike Farm, provides all of our electricity and most of our food, even our own delicious chocolate. We grow, harvest, ferment, dry, crack, roast, and make our chocolate right here on the farm.
We have around 75 cacao trees so far, planted in a permaculture setting, with plans to plant 100 more in an agroforest. Three trees are producing abundantly already, and many more will fruit in the next two years. We tend our trees by hand, feeding them compost derived from on-island sources and mulch from nitrogen-fixing support trees.
We make our chocolate using a stone-grinding machine called a melanger; we take our winnowed organic chocolate nibs (seen in picture above) and grind them together with organic cacao butter, organic coconut or cane sugar, and locally grown organic vanilla. We add local organic spices such as our own Hawaiian hot chili pepper, Hawaiian sea salt, and candied ginger.
Our chocolate tastes amazing - like a nourishing food, rich and robust, with a complex and satisfying nutty flavor, and is low-glycemic due to using primarily coconut sugar.
For the last two years we have hand-tempered our chocolate - this is the step that makes the chocolate solid at room temperature, so the bar snaps when you break it, and has a shiny finish. We have a nice granite countertop for hand-tempering, but the high humidity of our local environment makes it very difficult.
Our dark-chocolate-loving friends all rave about our chocolate and want more than we can produce!
Right now we have enough cacao ready to make 180 bars of chocolate (@3 oz/bar), but need the equipment to do it properly. We could sell our beans to another chocolate maker, but then they would be mixed in with non-organic beans, and we couldn't guarantee the quality of the ingredients.
By purchasing the rest of the equipment needed to be a small-scale chocolate-maker, we can provide you (our friends and customers) with delicious, all-organic, low-glycemic, sustainably grown, ethically manufactured tree-to-bar chocolate.
How your funds will help in our chocolate-making process:
We will buy a cacao bean roaster*: We have been roasting the beans in small batches in our oven, but a proper roaster will help us make sure the beans are roasted evenly, without getting hot burned spots on one side.
We will buy a tempering machine*: Our major bottleneck is in tempering. As soon as we receive $1700, we can order the tempering machine. Right now we are making chocolate and storing it untempered.
We will buy a vibrating table*: We have been hand-vibrating the bars - this is done just after pouring the warm chocolate into molds, to remove little bubbles.
We will design and purchase packaging to preserve the quality and flavor of our bars.
(*All of this cacao-processing machinery will be powered by hydropower, which is our source of electricity. Even the car we take to run errands is a hydropower-charged electric car!)
Thank you so much!!
We are enormously thankful to all of you who pitch in to help us get our small-scale, high-quality, entirely scrupulous chocolate-making business going! Read on to see the great gifts we have for you!
To see details about the rewards we offer to go with your donations, see the blog Rachel writes documenting how we are learning to grow and eat food from the land:
- https://marketlessmondays.wordpress.com
Reward notes:
* Please provide your email so I can send you the photojournal.
* After April 20th, 2016, the chocolate bars will probably be from our winter 2017 batch, so you will have to wait a few months longer to receive them.
This is the story of Rachel and Dan and our chocolate. We are both huge lovers of dark, rich chocolate and believe strongly in growing food that nourishes the earth as well as the people who eat it.
We moved to the Hamakua coast of the Big Island, Hawaii in 2010 from Olympia, Washington with a dream of becoming as food and energy self-sufficient as we could. We are fortunate to live on a beautiful piece of land on the flanks of Mauna Kea, with streams tumbling down through waterfalls and on to the Pacific.
We have come far in our dream.
Our organic, permaculture, off-grid farm, Kulike Farm, provides all of our electricity and most of our food, even our own delicious chocolate. We grow, harvest, ferment, dry, crack, roast, and make our chocolate right here on the farm.
We have around 75 cacao trees so far, planted in a permaculture setting, with plans to plant 100 more in an agroforest. Three trees are producing abundantly already, and many more will fruit in the next two years. We tend our trees by hand, feeding them compost derived from on-island sources and mulch from nitrogen-fixing support trees.
We make our chocolate using a stone-grinding machine called a melanger; we take our winnowed organic chocolate nibs (seen in picture above) and grind them together with organic cacao butter, organic coconut or cane sugar, and locally grown organic vanilla. We add local organic spices such as our own Hawaiian hot chili pepper, Hawaiian sea salt, and candied ginger.
Our chocolate tastes amazing - like a nourishing food, rich and robust, with a complex and satisfying nutty flavor, and is low-glycemic due to using primarily coconut sugar.
For the last two years we have hand-tempered our chocolate - this is the step that makes the chocolate solid at room temperature, so the bar snaps when you break it, and has a shiny finish. We have a nice granite countertop for hand-tempering, but the high humidity of our local environment makes it very difficult.
Our dark-chocolate-loving friends all rave about our chocolate and want more than we can produce!
Right now we have enough cacao ready to make 180 bars of chocolate (@3 oz/bar), but need the equipment to do it properly. We could sell our beans to another chocolate maker, but then they would be mixed in with non-organic beans, and we couldn't guarantee the quality of the ingredients.
By purchasing the rest of the equipment needed to be a small-scale chocolate-maker, we can provide you (our friends and customers) with delicious, all-organic, low-glycemic, sustainably grown, ethically manufactured tree-to-bar chocolate.
How your funds will help in our chocolate-making process:
We will buy a cacao bean roaster*: We have been roasting the beans in small batches in our oven, but a proper roaster will help us make sure the beans are roasted evenly, without getting hot burned spots on one side.
We will buy a tempering machine*: Our major bottleneck is in tempering. As soon as we receive $1700, we can order the tempering machine. Right now we are making chocolate and storing it untempered.
We will buy a vibrating table*: We have been hand-vibrating the bars - this is done just after pouring the warm chocolate into molds, to remove little bubbles.
We will design and purchase packaging to preserve the quality and flavor of our bars.
(*All of this cacao-processing machinery will be powered by hydropower, which is our source of electricity. Even the car we take to run errands is a hydropower-charged electric car!)
Thank you so much!!
We are enormously thankful to all of you who pitch in to help us get our small-scale, high-quality, entirely scrupulous chocolate-making business going! Read on to see the great gifts we have for you!
To see details about the rewards we offer to go with your donations, see the blog Rachel writes documenting how we are learning to grow and eat food from the land:
- https://marketlessmondays.wordpress.com
Reward notes:
* Please provide your email so I can send you the photojournal.
* After April 20th, 2016, the chocolate bars will probably be from our winter 2017 batch, so you will have to wait a few months longer to receive them.
Organizer
Rachel Laderman
Organizer