Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/13/watch-this-guy-make-chocolate.html
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Neat. I have actually mulled over growing a cacao plant indoors as well as a vanilla orchid, but i haven’t jumped the gun on those yet obviously. Amusingly i bought a banana/plantain hybrid online yesterday night, eagerly waiting for it and i hope it survives going through the mail.
Anyway, i might just consider a cacao plant next.
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Alternative title: What it looks like when an honest bearded dude sets out to make chocolate bars from scratch, unlike those OTHER dudes" Mast Brothers Chocolate - Bamboozling Bearded Brooklyn Bean Bros
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This guy has a channel where he does everything from scratch, growing (and killing…) all needed. Very cool
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“Now, I leave it in a dirty cooler to ferment and then drink the juice straight from the dirty cooler. So tasty.”
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The raw liquids trend is really taking off. First regular water, now cacao water.
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Heard of Buns of Steel? This will give you Colon of Steel… if you don’t die of dysentery first…
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They don’t mention whether the profits from the chocolate bars offset the cost of all the marijuana consumed during their production.
[OK, that was a cheap joke. For the record, I believe everyone ought to smoke however much weed they feel like. Plus the cost of the pot is irrelevant since I can pretty safely assume they grow that, too.]
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Videos like this make me realize that a life full of modern conveniences has made me lazy. I guess subscribers to this channel will be well-prepared to survive the apocalypse. I’d probably last a week or two on canned goods & water, due to my brown thumb. I should horde chocolate to enjoy during my final sweet, sweet moments of existence, because there’s no way I’d follow this guy’s example.
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Yes. Life today is very comfortable.
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Dammit, this is my dream retirement set up. Cocoa farmer. In Hawaii. Making chocolate. Smoking weed.
I’m going to imagine anyone who calls themselves a “homesteader” on the Islands probably has their own patch of high test pakalolo for themselves, family, and friends.
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I’m all for doing things from scratch for fun and self-cultivation, but the associated libertarian bullshit makes me so mad. I mean the attitude that says “with my years of leisure time, I used the stupendous informational resources and global infrastructure of the modern world to make my own radio from scratch, and that proves I don’t need the rest of humanity and can recuse myself from whatever happens to it”.
Either you like the life that every other human in history has worked together to give you, or you want to live in a feral stone-age world and sleep with one eye open for the rest of your short, brutal life. Fantasising that you alone can have both is as pathetic as it is repulsive.
(was triggered by the term “institute of self-reliance”, though I may be misreading the situation in this one instance)
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I think you might be reading into it. I hesitate to say you’re wrong because it might be easier for someone with proper resources to be able to learn all kinds of self-reliance skills. However that knowledge isn’t exactly gated, it’s stuff that is actively practiced and freely exists, so really anyone can learn to be self-reliant and self-sustaining and i think it’s not only admirable but highly practical on some level.
I really wish i had taken interest in skills like wood working, gardening, etc. as i feel that it would definitely enrich my life. I’ve tried to pick up some knowledge over the years but its been slow going.
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Watching this makes me question all my life’s choices. Also makes me want some chocolate. Thankfully I can drive my car to the store and get some.
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People can learn to do stuff for themselves, yes, at least if wage slavery / domestic imprisonment / actual slavery doesn’t get in the way. But I’m saying, if you ever use a road you didn’t build, or survive a tetanus infection you didn’t treat yourself, or fail to be beheaded because the global political settlement prevents brutal warlords ruling your land, then you are not self-reliant.
To be clear, I regularly make furniture and books and circuit boards and clothes and, oh, all kinds of stuff – I am hugely into it and so should everyone else be – I just don’t pretend it makes me John Galt, or that I owe nothing to the rest of humankind just because I’ve learned to copy the end results of millennia of progress. If I had to make everything myself, I am well aware that I’d probably die in the first winter I couldn’t make new shoes quickly enough, and so I am roughly zero percent more entitled than anyone else to pretend that I don’t depend on civilisation.
In other words, what I object to is people making ludicrous right-wing claims about the moral value of their hobbies. Of the hobbies themselves, I am a great supporter.
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Last year I got a cacao plant from a grower in Keaau. It has doubled in size (I have it planted between my Gros Michel banana and a satinwood shrub) but it will undoubtedly be years before it starts producing.
@joey_bladb I wonder if anyone has considered making a marijuana spiked chocolate bar? i don’t know how tasty it would be, but you could take care of the munchies while getting your buzz on.
Pretty sure it’s a thing, considering how big the edible industry is in California and Colorado but since i’m here in Texas its not something i would have access to… legally 
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I was wondering how a homesteader was going to go about conching the chocolate liquor. Turns out, he uses a conche.
Can confirm that it’s definitely a thing, although in my experience edibles are better with sour/etc flavors that offset the very botanical/herbal flavor of pot.
We got those here in Oregon, and they can accurately titrate the amount of THC, so you get a very precise dosage, which is a luxury we never had making illicit pot brownies back in the day.
And boy, those edibles are something else. For one, the taste is pretty decent – there’s just a teency bit of barely detectable skunkiness and the bitter chocolate taste hides the pungent vegetative notes (plus I think they’re using THC oil which has been separated from the other plant material). For another, a couple of these edibles and I’m just lying back on my chair, my eyes closed, and tripping just a little bit.
The only thing that could make it better is relaxing in the shade on some eastside Maui beach.
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