Cacao fruit can do so much more than chocolate
Like sorbet, cocktails, fruit snacks, and much more
The fruit part of cacao — yes, the same fruits that contain cacao beans, the crucial ingredient in chocolate — can taste like a tangier version of lychee or even green apple with a hint of cucumber, as I wrote in a story published in Grist yesterday about the cacao upcycling company Blue Stripes.
Like many of you baking buds, I’m always wondering what culinary delights the world is missing out on because of all the perfectly edible food that gets wasted or underutilized.
Cacao fruits, which look like yellow, orange, red, or burgundy Nerf footballs, are a case in point. The global chocolate industry is built around these tropical fruits, but harvests just a third or so of each pod by weight, despite the fact that the rest is edible too (as chefs in cacao-growing regions well know).
Blue Stripes, as I wrote in Grist, is one of a number of startups trying to bring cacao beyond the bean to chocoholic markets like the U.S. Of all those companies, it has brought the broadest range of snacks and drinks to grocery stores — think cacao water, cacao fruit snacks, and whole-cacao chocolate bars incorporating a bit of the ‘flour’ made from the fruit’s husk — demonstrating the many culinary directions these underutilitized fruits can go.
I wrote a brief review of their wares as part of my story, which looked closely at the company’s model in the context of sustainability and farmer livelihoods.
Since we’re obsessed with dessert hereabouts, I thought you’d get a kick out of seeing some of the coolest cacao-fruit sweets and bakes I came across in my reporting. Feast thine eyes, then helpful yourselves to a treat — maybe an upcycled one! Happy hump day, baking buds.
Cacao fruit sorbet
Cacao fruit Gâteau Basque
Mega-fancy cacao desserts
An extra helping
Tilt your ears toward NPR’s Here and Now program today to hear me talking about this story! (This is a certified wild moment for me since I love public radio so much that I named my car NPR.)
Read this 2023 Saveur story to learn more about what other cacao-upcycling companies are whipping up in the kitchen, and this 2024 story on how chefs are finding new life for cacao byproducts.
Just for fun, watch me open a cacao pod to find slightly overripe fruit inside. See those bubbles? Methinks that’s fermentation. 10/10 looked like alien eggs, tasted utterly delish.
Thanks for the mention and for alerting me to Blue Stripes!
So fun to hear you on NPR! Is it just me, or does the fruit inside the cacao pod look just like the creatures from Mickey 17?