Today we are going to be harvesting and processing carob pods from our female Carob Tree and turning them into carob powder. If you’ve ever heard of carob or seen it in the grocery store, a lot of people use it as a chocolate substitute. We are going to show you how we collect and process our carob here at the urban farm.
We have a male carob tree on the other side of the property, but the great thing about our female carob tree is she produces these carob pods. If you’ve ever heard of carob or seen it in the grocery store, a lot of people use it as a chocolate substitute. So today we’re gonna be showing you how we collect and process our carob here on the property.
If you have a smaller tree, it’s a lot easier to be able to grab the dried pods from the tree. But because this tree is so old and so tall at this point, we are going to have to harvest from the ground from clean and dry areas.
What we look for is just full sized pods. We usually only go for the bigger ones just to make it worth our while. And we’re gonna wash everything and clean them up. So we are just looking for these pods. And when they’re on the tree, they’re gonna start off as green pods and they’re in a bunch. Once they get this nice dark brown color, you know, they’re ready to be harvested.
That was step one, harvesting your dry carob from the carob tree.
Then step two is we’re gonna go inside and wash things and get them ready for processing. After you gather your carob beans is going to be to wash them. So we just wanna make sure we get any dust and grime that’s been on your beans off before we boil them. Then we’re just gonna wash them nice and thoroughly.
Then we’ll put them into our pot and then we’ll just fill our pot a little bit more and add water. So then the third step is going to be to boil our beans.
Place that on there. And then we’re just going to let them boil for 10 to 15 minutes, and then we will let them sit in the pot for another five to six hours. We did ours overnight. However works best for you. I’m just gonna pour out the water and drain these carob beans.
The next step after the pods have been soaking overnight for a minimum of five hours is removing the seeds. We’re gonna show you two methods. I’m gonna do it by hand. And Lindsey is going to be using the knife in the cutting board. So what we’re doing is pulling out the seeds and the stems. This stuff is trash and we’re processing for the pod itself. The pod is the part that we eat. So you rip them open, you pull out the seeds, and then once you’ve done that, you put all the pods into there.
So the next step after pulling and removing the seeds and putting the pods in there is you let the pods dry out thoroughly. So the pods are gonna get all crunchy again. The next step after that will be to blend them up, or you crush them by hand. If you don’t have a whole lot.
This is the final part for drying our carob powder. These are the pods. We removed the seeds. As you saw in our last clip, you wanna make sure they’re fully dry. They can be a little moist. That’s a dried out pod. So these are dry. These sat for a week,
If you don’t wanna wait a week, you can also oven dry them or put them in the dehydrator.
So this next step, we load up our blender with pods. You don’t wanna do too many just enough. So now we’re gonna put ’em on our blender stand and we’re going to blend these up and we’re gonna blend them until they’re a fine powder. It’s going to get loud.
Next, we empty into the bowl. You’re going to just continue and do all the rest of your seed.
After you’ve blended all your powder, you can sift it. You’ll have two different types of levels of fine powder. You’ll have really fine powder. And then they’ll also have some chunks. So sifting, it will help remove these bigger chunks. And then this is a final sample here of our fine powder of the carob. So this is how it looks when it’s the final product of the fine carob powder.
The fine carob powder is really good for dusting on top of desserts, adding to smoothies or yogurt. And the more coarse powder is great for baking and carob is often used as a chocolate substitute. So this is how you can sift your carob powder to get the two different kinds of coarseness. This is what we would use as our fine powder. And this is what we would use as our thicker powder for baking. So we store our carob powder in jars. You can store it in anything airtight and it’ll last up to a year. So you can have carob powder all year long. We hope you enjoyed this video about the process of how we convert carob pods from our tree into edible carob powder.
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