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About Us |
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Growing |
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Processing |
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Sustainability |
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Farm Tour |
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Chocolate Bars |
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Aloha
E Komo Mai to Garden Island Chocolate
I founded this small company with the vision of making the world’s best chocolate. Garden Island Chocolate’s goals are to bring to the visitors and local residents of Kauai an organic chocolate bar made from locally grown cacao. This will greatly stimulate the local economy by providing jobs and a viable and sustainable agricultural crop. As an avid farmer and father I had a dream of sustainability and always looked to the land and sea to support my wife and children. We plant organic gardens to feed our bodies and enrich our souls. Clean healthy organic food, pure untreated water, and pristine ocean air in our opinion is true wealth. I spear fish along the reefs and forage for fruit in the jungle whenever possible. When our first son Makanakai was still a baby we made money by wild-harvesting avocados, coconuts, and bananas and with the help of some friends built a small fruit stand by the side of the road. We camped and lived off the land for years making fires every night, listening to the surf, nurtured by the Aina. This was a blissful and simple time. Living off the land is an education unparalleled by any university.
I spent 9 years in various colleges, traveling the world, receiving my undergraduate degree with honors from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Masters in Polynesian/South East Asian Art History from the University of Hawaii. On my extensive travels I delighted in the different regional foods and always visited the local markets. My friends called me a picky eater, I like to think of myself as a gourmet foodie. We eventually moved off the beach into a little house where we promptly put in a garden and had a surplus of produce. I then started selling at the local farmer’s market in Kapaa. We had a Macadamia nut tree and coffee plant on our property and with lots of patience we figured out how to properly process these. I am not even a coffee drinker, but I was determined to make the best coffee I could, and with a little research on the Internet and a $20 Presto Poplite popcorn popper from the local big box store we roasted our coffee perfectly.
A lot of people ask how I got into growing and making chocolate. When I was a kid some of first memories are of my mother using cocoa butter on her skin. I remembered the rich delicious smell and soothing creamy texture and how my skin soaked up the butter and turned a golden brown in the tropical sun. Later on I leaned that cocoa butter melts at the exact temperature of the skin and is the best thing for stretch marks and rejuvenating damaged skin. I can remember my first encounter with a cacao tree while foraging in the jungle on Kauai over ten years ago. I instinctually knew it was a special tree and had a very strong suspicion is was a cacao tree. I had never seen one before and I was compelled to pick one of the bright yellow pods. Believe it or not plants have a consciousness. They are very intelligent and if you ask they will reveal much to you. I cracked open the pod and tasted a seed. It did not taste like chocolate. I left the seeds to dry in my old rusted out island car where they eventually got lost between the seats. So much for my first encounter with cacao seeds. I was always mystified how they got chocolate flavor out of the cacao beans but this mystery was left to incubate in the recesses of my consciousness. Then a few years later while on a vision quest in Waipio valley on the Big Island I met a Kahuna and we got to know each other while working in his ancestral lohi. Next to his hale I noticed a very healthy cacao tree with a few ripe pods. My curiosity was reignited and I tried to roast the fresh beans in a cast iron skillet. Still no chocolate flavor. When I returned to Kauai a friend who lived up the street had two beautiful fruiting cacao trees. She did not know what to do with the pods and I hated to just see them rot so one day she gifted me with a box of pods. I knew this was the universe telling me something.
No one on Kauai was making chocolate so I went back online to do some research. Even with the plethora of information available I was still not able to find out how to make chocolate. I learned that fermenting was a crucial step in the process to develop chocolate flavor and my first few attempts resulted in moldy bug infested beans. In school I leaned a lot of fascinating esoteric knowledge about ancient civilizations, but nothing that would help in my quest to make chocolate. I did develop a skill at research, so I doggedly kept at it, knowing the answer was out there somewhere. The libraries and book stores on Kauai had nothing to help in my research on cacao. Online I started buying chocolate books and amassing a small library, not knowing if the book was going to be useful or not. After a year of searching for old used, out of print and very expensive books I finally found out the techniques for proper fermentation. Now all I had to do was adopt them to the unique climate of Kauai and with a lot of experimentation we did it. And so it went with all the steps in the chocolate making process, until we perfected it.
We have seven different varieties of cacao on Kauai and each one has to be fermented and roasted separately. The pivotal moment came when I was making a batch of 100% Criollo and everything just fell into place. All the steps were implemented just right and the alchemy was magical. The resulting chocolate bar was simply divine. I have a confession to make, I am not a chocoholic. I like chocolate but my annual consumption was rather low. It was determination and unrelenting curiosity that led me to unravel the mysteries of making chocolate. Once I tasted chocolate done right I realized I had been eating inferior low grade chocolate my entire life. It is no wonder I never liked it that much. Now that we grow and make our own I just love it. But too much of a good thing is dangerous. The chemical content and potency of freshly made cacao is very high and often when I am making chocolate I stay up all night with my hand shaking from being overly stimulated. What keeps me going is not the drugs in chocolate (they help) but the fact that there is so much left to learn about this amazing plant. We are in a renaissance of chocolate making. The ancient Mayans and other Mesoamerican cultures were far more advanced in their understanding and use of cacao. We are just scratching the surface in terms of chocolate being used as a medicine and sacrament. After all these centuries we are just beginning to relearn the secrets of chocolate. It is the current slow food, organic, fair trade movement that is facilitating the awareness of where our food is really coming from and how it was treated along the way.
Ultimately the cacao grown on Kauai will become part of a sustainable agricultural crop that will nourish generations to come. Cacao enables us the opportunity to become closer to the land, to understand the complexities of the natural environment and how we fit into the web of life. When each of our sons was born we placed their placentas under a coconut sprout, so the tree will grow strong and provide food for the life of our children. When I die a mango tree will be planted over my body so that the tree will produce sweet fruit and cool shade for my grandchildren.
Koa Kahili
Garden Island Chocolate
PO Box 998
Kilauea HI 96754
808-634-6812
