Grinding Chocolate by Hand

Following up on an earlier post about turning cacao beans into chocolate, Lesley Téllez provides a timely lesson on what grinding chocolate on the metate (grindstone) is actually like.

Pain shot through my knees as I attempted to get up from the floor. My legs wobbled. The backs of my knees felt slick with sweat, and my T-shirt was damp. I shuffled the four paces to the jar of agua like an arthritic old woman. A blister was starting to form on my left palm. Why was I doing this to myself?

Of course, as you will see when you read her full account, she was using the physical motion of grinding to heat the metate.  Remember your physics lessons.  Mechanical work as force exerted over a distance.  That´s what Lesley was up to.  Maybe physics classes would be more immediate if students had to force the stone over the grindstone time and again to create heat.   It would have been easier, though not a whole lot easier, if the metate were heated. And of course it would have been hotter.

Anyway compare Lesley’s reality with this oh-so-cool gentleman, not a suspicion of sweat on his brow, not a hint of the weight of the body forcing that stone along.

Finally in a tweet, Lesley said she would never look at dark chocolate the same way again.  Well, even Lesley’s final puddle of chocolate was a long, long way from the dark chocolate so popular now.  That kind of smoothness can never be created with a grindstone.  It took the Industrial Revolution to produce that.   Another post coming soon on that.

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