It Literally Takes An Entire Village To Make Chocolate Moron!!!

What is Chocolate Moron?

A primer on Chocolate Moron - for those who are not familiar with it - it is a Filipino delicacy from the Samar-Leyte area. Chocolate moron is made up of ground glutinous rice also known as “malagkit” cooked in coconut milk, mixed with other ingredients such as milk, margarine, sugar and cocoa. It is wrapped in banana leaves and is mostly served during fiestas.

I have plenty of childhood memories watching the womenfolk make this delicacy but as a kid, I was never really involved in the whole process so I never really understood the magnitude of efforts you have to exert to make this. Well, surprise! It really is very tiring to make and like my title says, it literally takes an entire village to make chocolate moron. And it takes a whole day too! But is it worth it? Find out after the jump!

How To Make Chocolate Moron?

The Pre-Cooking Process

It all starts with soaking a mixture of ordinary rice and glutinous (sticky/malagkit) rice  in water, preferably overnight. Afterwards, it will go through a grinding process until the grainy stuff is gone and you get this creamy smooth consistency (see photo). Set it aside, 'coz you'll get busy with other stuff to do like...

...grating the coconuts. We have six pieces here. Then you have to add a small amount of water to the grated coconut meat so you can squeeze out the coconut milk. Set it aside because you also have to...

...prepare the banana leaves to be used for wrapping, along with the strings to tie it up. The banana leaves have to be passed over some flame to soften it up and to sort of clean it up too.

The Cooking Process

Once you have your ground malagkit/rice and coconut milk ready, you can move on with the cooking process. These are some of  the ingredients. 

First off, we cooked the white part.  You take about half of the rice/malagkit mixture and half of the coconut milk and set it over low fire until you get a thick consistency. Add about 1/4 cup of margarine and a dash of salt for flavor. Set aside and allow to cool.

Next off, you take the remaining malagkit/rice mixture and cook over low fire it with the remaining coconut milk. Add the sugar, margarine, condensed milk and cocoa powder and continue mixing until you get this think, lump-free consistency. Set aside and cool.

The Wrapping Process

While waiting for the chocolate mixture to cool down, you can start wrapping. You flatten out the white part, as shown in these photos. Afterwards, you can add the rolled chocolate part as the filling.  Adding cheese makes it even better. This is the trickiest part and definitely the most tiring. I myself had a hard time learning it and it took me more than ten tries to finally wrap a good one. Until the end I couldn't make uniform-sized morons. 🌝 While wrapping morons, you get all sorts of sad and depressing thoughts like, "how did I get myself into this kind of trouble?". But....when you start seeing all the morons piling up you get elated and excited. And nothing beats the feeling of scrapping the container for the chocolate morsel to wrap!

The Steaming Process

If you think that you're done just because you spent three hours wrapping them up, you're wrong. You need to put them in the steamer and wait for another 45 minutes to 1 hour cook them.

Bayanihan

Bayanihan is a Filipino tradition which is derived from the Filipino word "bayan" which means nation, town or community. Bayanihan is about a community coming together to help one another in difficult situation or just to achieve a certain task. Me and my friends were able to finish off this task because we helped each other out. We had at least six to 7 pairs of hands working out different assignments. And when the wrapping time came, we were gathered in one table talking about joke after joke (sometime green ones) just to entertain us while we were growing tired.

I wasn't able to take a photo of the finished product. What kind of blogger am I? Ha ha I was too excited to eat it probably. When you labor over a food for the whole day, you just kind of forget about picture taking and you go straight to gobbling up the food.

But it was yummy. Like I said, the best Chocoloate Moron I have ever tasted in years!

XO,

Carissa