While researching tours and recreation options for a trip to Kaua’i, I came across Lydgate Farms, operated by a fifth-generation Kaua’i family and producing craft chocolates, vanilla beans and honey. (Hawai’i is the only U.S. state where cacao grows.) It took me all of 30 seconds to decide to sign up for a three-hour tasting tour, especially when I realized the farm was only a 15-minute drive from our accommodations in Kapa’a, on the island’s east side.

After meeting our well-informed and extremely personable guide, Kate, we began our walk around the farm with the promise of tropical fruit tastings in addition to plenty of chocolate history, processing and comparative chocolate tastings. We started off squeezing the juice of a Tahitian lime over a stick of sugar cane and then enjoying the sweet/tangy juice as we mashed the cane with our molars. We observed vanilla vines draped throughout a variety of trees (no roots in the soil), their long green beans far from harvest.    The vanilla orchids must be hand-pollinated in the first of many painstaking steps to produce premium vanilla beans.

As a gardener, I appreciated the wide range of plants, trees and flowers we observed. From papyrus  to bamboo   to foxtail palms,

        we learned each contributes to the sustainable farming practices here. Of course, some, whether useful or not, were just beautiful to see and smell.     

Our stroll also took us past trees laden with tropical fruits, some more recognizable: star fruit   bananas  and oranges

  than others:   breadfruit.

In a clearing we sat on benches while Kate talked about several tropical fruits and offered us tastes of those currently in season. We sampled longan (Dragon’s Eye), dragon fruit and strawberry papaya. The most unusual fruit we sampled was Buddha’s hand, boasting a citrusy, mild lemon scent and taste with a texture like a firm apple.   We also sampled Lydgate’s wonderful honey, with a complex flavor and beautiful color. Their bees swarm over the flowers of the foxtail palm, the source of this unique and multiple award-winning honey.

The final part of the tour began in a cacao grove, where the pods grow all up and down the trunk and branches of the trees and could be found in all sizes and stages of development and ripeness.     

Kate sliced open a mature pod with a machete, exposing the white pulp which encases the individual beans.

  The pulp has a mild, slightly sweet flavor and silky texture, and I was surprised to find the beans also very mild (I had expected more bitterness), juicy and tender.

We then adjourned to the tasting tent for an extensive blind tasting of mostly dark chocolates from around the world as Kate provided a fascinating history lesson on chocolate and modern chocolate production and processing techniques. We also learned more about the health benefits of the various organic compounds in dark chocolate . . . as if we needed another excuse to eat this food of the gods.

Our final stop brought us to the gift shop, where we found some great options for stocking stuffers. I really do hope that the chocolate bars we bought (some combining Hawaiian sea salt or the palm honey with the Lydgate estate chocolate) will last ’til Christmas. If your travels take you to Kaua’i, I enthusiastically recommend the Lydgate Farms chocolate tour!

— Patty Vanikiotis, associate editor/copy editor