Enjoy a taste of Hawaii’s chocolate

Think of Hawaii and you probably don’t think of chocolate.

Perhaps you should. We squeezed in a trip to a chocolate factory during a trip to the Big Island.

The Original Hawaiian Chocolate Factory is tucked on the slopes of Hualalai Mountain. The altitude, weather and soil conditions, the owners say, make it perfect for growing cocoa beans.

Everything happens on site: The beans are grown, picked, sun-dried and processed, then made into chocolate, poured into molds and packaged.

Proprietors Pam and Bob Cooper are quick to point out that they’re the only company to use only Hawaiian-grown cocoa beans in their chocolate. Other companies may make chocolate on the islands, but they blend their locally grown beans with beans grown elsewhere.

We started our tour by sampling three types of chocolate — dark, dark criollo and milk.

The tour gives visitors an overview of how those pulpy, sweet potato-sized fruits are transformed into chocolate. The short answer? The pods are cut open and raw cocoa beans extracted. Those beans are fermented for about a week in “sweat boxes,” then placed on drying racks in the sun for about a month. They’re then roasted, shelled and broken into bits, called nibs. The nibs are ground into a concentrated liquid, then mixed with vanilla and other ingredients to make chocolate, which is hand-poured into bars and cooled.