Of the 30 or so people in the world who process cacao from bean to bar, six of them are located in Salt Lake City. Salt Lake City has the highest bean-to-bar cacao processors per capita in the world. I never would have guessed if I hadn’t learned it at the “Chocolate” exhibit during the University of Utah’s staff night at the Natural History Museum of Utah. We got free admission to the museum, the chocolate exhibit, and a free chocolate tasting session.
The Natural History Museum is located up the hill on the U’s campus.
The entrance. The wall contains pottery, butterflies, and other miscellaneous goodies.
Wandering to the special exhibit section.
The special exhibit section!
Chocolate, of course, grows on trees. Pods grow directly out of the tree trunk and have to be picked by hand because the branches are so thick.
The exhibit starts with the Maya, then goes to the Aztecs, then explains how the Europeans showed up and added sugar to everything. Once America got involved, chocolate went commercial (as shown by the plethora of products in the display case).
Chocolate tasting! I think this was my chief reason for attending the event.
This 75% cacao bar from Solstice Chocolate is made of beans from Madagascar and tastes like current berries and citrus. But the three-ingredient bar has no flavors added–the beans just taste that way on their own. As soon as the tasting was over I headed for the gift shop only to have the woman ahead of me buy the last bar. But that’s okay, Solstice has a website. We also tasted roasted cacao nibs, another 75% cacao bar from a different company (that one was milder and sort of hazlenutty), and some Valrhona white chocolate.
I had ten minutes to kill before the chocolate tasting started, so I wandered the museum, doubting that there was anything all that fascinating left to see. But then I looked over a railing and saw this mammoth on the floor below.
The plank walkway winds down two floors of phenomenal, gigantic dinosaur skeletons.
Mini t-rex-looking things!
Of course I should have realized that Utah is a dinosaur-skeleton gold-mine, especially since my loving father just showed me the Utah dino-dig article in May’s National Geographic. I saw some of the skeletons they talk about in the article, such as …
… this one! The photo doesn’t do the size of this animal justice. I could have easily curled up in its lower jaw or had a roomy nap in its belly.
The pretty rocks are always my favorite part of natural history museums, so I wandered by on the way out.
Put a bird on it.
The fifth floor terrace has a view of the valley.
You can see down through campus, past downtown, to the glimmering Great Salt Lake at the foot of the hills to the west.