When life gives you cacao, make tablea: Workshop shows how

The air is cocoa-kissed from the moment you enter Dahlia Chocolates.

Tucked along a busy road in Mandaue City, the peaceful shop shares its chocolate secrets through a series of workshops. Last April 11, Rappler attended a tablea-making session, where participants were invited into the tactile process of transforming cacao beans into tablea, the staple base for many Filipino treats.

“A lot of our workshops are designed for farmers, especially this one,” said Grace Aquino, chef and owner of Dahlia Chocolates.

After more than a decade running a pastry shop in California, she returned to the Philippines with the hopes of slowing down and retiring. What she found instead was a new passion project.

“I obviously loved chocolate as a pastry chef,” Aquino stated. “But the idea of cacao here in the Philippines — I just fell in love with it.” 

DAHLIA. A display of chocolate offerings lines the counter at Dahlia Chocolates. All photos by Anika Martina Leonora

While romantic in theory, Aquino says she struggled to find trained cacao farmers in the area, a challenge that nearly stalled the shop before it could even take root. 

“There was a point where I told my husband: ‘Are we still opening?’” she said. “Filipino cacao is not bad. Our problem is we need scientific knowledge on the post-harvest process.” 

Which is why, alongside selling her chocolates, she decided to instruct workshops on how to best use our country’s cacao. 

WORK STATION. Tables are set with cacao beans, tablea tablets, and tools like a mortar and pestle and batirol for workshop participants to use as they make their own tablea on Saturday, April 11.

There will be someone who has farm experience in this workshop “if we’re lucky,” said Aquino. And we were. Two farm owners raised their hands when asked who in the room has tried making tablea before. As the session went on, they kept their hands raised to ask questions. 

Up until the workshop, their tablea-making process relied on trial and error, which has led to some confusion. They didn’t roast at specific temperatures; their tablea melted too easily; their paste turned white after molding. Aquino smiled casually at each concern, diagnosing them and affirming that she will share “the best tips and tricks that we use in house.”

The cost of chocolate

“The process of making tablea is as simple or as complicated as you want it,” Aquino said. After fermenting and drying the seeds, there are five steps: roasting, winnowing, grinding, molding, and storing. 

What shapes the final taste, she explained, is which steps you take more time on and which ones you bypass. You can roast the beans at a temperature of your choice; opt not to remove the shell; adapt the grinder settings for coarseness or fineness — “it depends on you,” Aquino shared. 

STIR. A workshop participant stirs a batirol to melt tablea tablets into sikwate.

It also depends on the consumer. Aquino gave insight on how crucial it is to understand the market before pricing tablea. Based on her experience, it is a low-margin kind of work.

“That’s the problem our farmers are facing; the money isn’t translating,” she said. “They’re barely making money.”

In 2024, the Department of Agriculture noted that some cacao farmers have been cutting their trees down because they were not earning enough from them, largely due to limited knowledge on how to properly process the beans after harvest. 

This is the very gap Aquino is trying to address through her workshops, to turn cacao from a raw, undervalued crop into something farmers and small producers can better understand and potentially earn from. She hopes growers can depend less on buyers and move further up the production chain by themselves.

MERIENDA. While waiting for the tablea paste to cool, workshop attendees enjoy puto, lemon cake, and sikwate they made themselves.

The bulk of the two-hour workshop was spent hands-on: peeling shells off beans, pouring pastes into molds, and furiously stirring batirol to make sikwate. As we waited for our paste to cool, we indulged in lemon cake and puto, as well as conversation with the attendees.

A seat at the tablea

For Gally Oropel, a farm owner from Iloilo, the workshop was an educational trip. His cacao trees – planted five or six years ago – have only recently started bearing fruit, and he is now trying to understand how to turn that harvest into something more valuable.

“Ang culture sa Negros dili drinker sa tablea (Negros doesn’t have a tablea-drinking culture),” Oropel said. He hopes to be the one to introduce it to the Ilonggo market. 

He is one of the farm owners who relied on trial and error to make chocolate out of his cacao. It wasn’t enough for him, so he searched for an available chocolate-making workshop. The closest was in Dahlia Chocolates, so he flew all the way from Iloilo to attend it. 

INQUIRY. Farm owner Gally Oropel asks Dahlia Chocolates owner Grace Aquino additional questions to refine his tablea-making process.

Others are less business-minded about the workshop. One of the attendees, Cherie Lei Calledo, is learning how to make tablea to honor her grandmother’s memory. She recalled fondly how her grandmother owned an ancestral house with cacao trees, and she’d spend hours laying cacao seeds on the roof to dry them under the sun. 

For business owner Janine Mesina, it’s her dad’s passion for tablea that led her here. She had no experience working with chocolate, but her father regularly made sikwate and champorado with it.

Making tablea may seem deceptively simple, but its presence in Filipino households runs deep. It is the rich aroma that flavors champorado on early mornings. It is the warm cup of sikwate families share on rainy days. It is the familiar taste that stays in many Filipinos’ memories long after the ones who introduced it to them are gone. 

FINISHED PRODUCT. Workshop participants pack their freshly made tablea.

When the paste cooled, everyone was given back the tablea they had successfully made. 

Holding the tablets in their hands, both Mesina and Calledo lamented about how this was a “dying tradition,” and expressed gratitude that workshops like these were being held, allowing them to relive happy moments with loved ones and pass it on. — Rappler.com