It's been quite some time since we wrote about anything particularly Honduran. Since about a year ago, everything around here started seeming, well, normal. We used to write about, let's say, a Guatemalan market we shopped at, or all of the exotic tropical plants surrounding our house here in Honduras. But all those things have become normal, regular, average [well, maybe not quite average]. My point is, if we still wrote about such things, it would be similar to a Wisconsin resident writing about going shopping at Walmart and passing some maple trees on the way [oh, and having a bratwurst for lunch].
What I'm trying to say is this: something Honduran happened! I mean, something we hadn't experienced before. We had the chance to spend a morning with one of my English students and her family up on a beautiful mountain, watching about thirty men [all related] process the caña that they'd just harvested. In case you're unfamiliar with caña, it also has an English name: sugar cane. Here's a nice photo of some chopped caña, ready to be turned into one of many different caña products.
Now, I could probably spend 3 hours talking about all the stuff that was happening with the caña while we were there [that's how long it took us to figure out what was going on...], but I'll make it as short and sweet as possible.
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This is a view of the operation from afar. Notice the oxen, the guy following the oxen to get them to keep moving [must be dizzy!], the man feeding the caña into the machine from the pile to his left. Meanwhile, younger boys are using burros to go collect more caña. |
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Here's a close-up. The barrel is used to collect the juice that the machine squeezes out from the caña. The kid takes the leftover caña and puts in on the "used" pile a few feet away.
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| The juice from the barrel gets put into these two boiling bins- one is for the stuff that has boiled as long, so it's thinner. The other one has been boiled a bit longer and is on its way to becoming caña honey. |
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| A fun byproduct of the boiling caña juice is the foam that collects on the top. It's like drinking a sweet foam [well, it's not really LIKE drinking a sweet foam, it actually IS drinking a sweet foam]. The men called the foam Cachaza, but I've asked other Hondurans and they don't seem to recognize the word. Also, if you google "cachaza", you get results for some type of Brazilian liquor. The actual translation of "cachaza" is something along the lines of "a laid-back attitude". So, the name remains a mystery. |
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Here, the men are using a big paddle to thicken the already boiled juice. Then, they bottle it as "caña honey".
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| After being stirred around for a while, the stuff gets really thick. Then, it gets placed into molds to make little [or big!] candies. The interesting part about this is that there are a ton of bees everywhere during this process, and many of them get stuck in the candy. Nobody seemed to concerned, though... |
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After drying the molds in the sun, the candy is ready to be extracted. If you look closely, you can see the little squares in the bin.
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Here's Andrew and our little guy, Edgar, enjoying the sweetness of some of the extra candy that the guys took out for us to eat instead of putting it in the molds.
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And, finally, this guy is doing some sort of awesome artsy thing with the candy to make it into taffy. For some reason, they call this "the rooster", which was pretty much the most confusing part of the day.
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