"It's a fantasyland of chocolate! The Big Island Chocolate Festival inspires our pastry chefs. It encourages our farmers to grow cacao. It shows our chocolatiers that chocolate can be a viable business...our chocolate is on its way to being ranked among the finest in the world" - Farsheed Bonakdar, president of the Kona Cacao Association
There was so much to do and learn during the days of the Chocolate Festival...from cacao farm tours to culinary student competitions to demonstrations and lectures...all capped by a magical Gala on Saturday evening!
More about the Gala in a future post, but for now, I am still reeling from all the things I learned while attending the day events.
As I mentioned on my first blog post, I was not able to attend the cacao farm tour on Thursday, but did attend the Saturday morning seminar presented by Greg Colden, owner of the Kokoleka Lani coffee and cacao farm and the Kona Natural Soap Company.
Originally a gravel quary site, the 1,200 foot elevation 5 acre farm is planted with a variety of food producing trees (cacao, coffee, bananas, mangoes, avocados, etc) as an understory with an overstory of natural nitrogen producing trees...and because the area had barely any soil, the leaves of all of the trees are left where they fall to build soil, and a whole army of chickens are left to roam to pick and scratch on all those leaves, control bugs and fertlize...which in turn helps build up more soil.
Gregs presentation was titled "Cacao as a Value Added Product for Business"...and yes, besides selling cacao to other chocolate makers and their coffee through a market place and on-line, the farm turned to making soaps with ingredients that include organic and Hawaiian grown exfoliants, Hawaiian cacao, Kona coffee, pure Hawaiian rain water, and oil from the kukui nut (Aleurites moluccanus or moluccana), the candlenut tree - which is one of the plants known in Hawai'i as "Canoe Plants" (brought over in their canoes by the early Polynesian voyagers who settled these islands)
As an added bonus, Greg learned to make paper from pulp made from the bark of the cacao trees - good use for the limbs and twigs when you have to trim your trees!
Their operation is 100% Solar Powered and Green Business Certified.
I will be writing more about the farm and the soap making later on (after my visit to Kokoleka Lani Farm later this month) but wanted to leave you with a link to their Kona Natural Soap Company on Facebook page.
The next presentation that day was an extraordinary confection making extravaganza by Valrhona Chocolate Chef Vincent Bourdin, President of the Asia Pacific Pastry Cup Board from Singapore.
There is a lot to cover, so it will have to be a separate post.
Meantime, this is what we had for lunch at the seaside Hale Kai Restaurant after eating dessert on Saturday...
If you missed the previous posts about the festival, click below:
3rd Annual Big Island Chocolate Festival
