Double Chocolate

I’m sorry if I have you thinking about muffins or ice cream flavors at this point. Not my intention. Instead, I wanted to share the results of two recent adventures we had into the fascinating society of chocolate.

The first of these was called the Chocolate Experience. We met a woman named Ruth who brought us to her house. It began in her garden and we picked some flowers and herbs that we would later use in the chocolate we were making from scratch! You could probably guess that after the garden it was on to the kitchen. The other adventure was visiting Chocolate World, a shop in la Cuidad de Mitad del Mundo.

Chocolate cocktails! (Though one is alcohol-free)

 

Between these, I learned a great deal about chocolate, its history, its present, and its variety. Where to begin? Logic dictates: the beginning.

When the Spanish arrived in the New World, chocolate was already being consumed in much of Mesoamerica. It was completely new to the Europeans. Chocolate comes from the cacao plant which had been domesticated and spread throughout the region. But where did it originate?

Cacao is a rather short tree that grows in the canopy of taller trees. It requires a lowland region with lots of heat and lots of rain. That still leaves a lot of possible locations for the origin of cacao. Yet, scientists have pretty good evidence of where it all began.

Anthropologists were able to find organic remnants of cacao on pottery artifacts that are 5,500 years old. This is the earliest known evidence of human interaction with cacao. These artifacts were found in the Amazon rainforest in what is today eastern Ecuador. Thus, the best evidence we have so far indicates this is where chocolate originated.

But you must understand how far it is from a cacao tree to chocolate to wonder how the earliest cocoa pioneers figured this out. The cacao plant, after pollination by bees or hummingbirds, produces cobs. They are bigger than an ear of corn, shaped somewhat like a football (an American football, a rugby ball for those unfamiliar with American football), but about half again as large. Within those cobs is a pulpy fruit and within that are what we call the cocoa beans. Each cob has between thirty and forty cocoa beans. (It takes about ten to fifteen cobs to make a pound of chocolate.) The process to get from tree to bean has many steps. The cobs are harvested. Then they are placed in a wooden box, covered by banana leaves, and allowed to ferment for several days. The banana leaves help keep the heat of fermentation in the pile to allow it to happen better.

After two days, the outer leaf of the cob has biodegraded. Now there is the pulpy fruit. The yeasts eat the sugars in the pulp, creating acetic acid as a byproduct. Everything smells like vinegar and the pulp turns into slime or liquid and drains out of holes in the bottom of the box. Acid is an important part of preparing the beans.

Four days after going in the box, the cocoa beans are taken out. Then they are dried in the sun for a couple weeks. Cacao farmers don’t want to take the beans too early or they won’t make good chocolate. They need to get down to 7% humidity or less. The beans themselves are in a thin shell, and the farmers press on this shell to see if it is still pliable (too wet) or starting to get brittle (dry enough).

Now the beans are ready to be roasted and this is where we came in during our Chocolate Experience. While cacao is grown and sold in many places in Ecuador, it is not grown in Quito. It isn’t grown anywhere in the Andes Mountains. That’s because cacao needs low elevation and lots of heat. The Andes are high are very temperate.

Ruth, who led our Chocolate Experience, travels about three hours by car toward the coast of Ecuador to find the cocoa beans fresh. One could also travel east out of Quito and head into the Amazon River region to find cocoa. In fact, the most elite, sought after, and expensive chocolate comes from that region, the birthplace (we believe) of chocolate. It is called Arriba Chocolate, but this is because of a problem in translation. When the Dutch and English traders came to the ports of South America to buy the cocoa beans, they would ask the Ecuadoreans what it was called. The Ecuadoreans (now Spanish speakers) didn’t really understand the question. They told the traders this chocolate was arriba (which means above), trying to indicate it came from upriver. The traders took that to be the name of the chocolate.

Where you get the cocoa beans does matter. Remember I mentioned the bees and hummingbirds that pollinate the plant? Those animals also collect nectar from the taller trees which surround the cacao plants. So some of the nectar and pollen of the taller trees gets mixed into the cacao flower and affects the flavor of the chocolate that will be produced by that cacao plant. The seeds that Ruth purchased came from cacao that grows in the shade of banana trees and so has just the subtlest banana flavor.

Recall the beans themselves are in a thin shell. You take these beans, with their shells, and you roast them. We used a clay pot to roast them. The shells get very black, and sometimes you hear a loud pop similar to popcorn popping. Legend has it that if you are more calm and at peace when you are stirring the cocoa beans as they roast, you will hear more pops. If you are stressed, you will hear fewer. I don’t think I am particularly stressed, but no beans popped while I was stirring. Syarra got one pop. Alrica didn’t get any pops either. The blessings of childhood, I guess.

After they are well roasted and the shells are black on all sides, you take the beans, one by one, in your hand. Yes, they are very hot! Now you crack the outer shell and pull the bean out of it. The bean is brown and shiny and has an outer layer of oil. This not only protects the bean during the roasting and makes it shiny, it also makes your fingers soft. The broken shells are collected in one dish and the released beans in another.

Shells left on the left, shiny on the right!

 

The shells are ground with a mortar and pestle. This powder can then be used to make tea or it can be used to make a lotion for your hands. The beans are also ground, but not by mortar and pestle. They are ground in a large crank grinder, like a sausage grinder. It is a lot of work to turn the crank and grind the beans. What comes out are thin shavings of brown cocoa. Tasting them at this point, they are very bitter.

That’s one big irony of chocolate, it’s actually quite bitter. Of course, sugars are going to be added in the cooking process.

Here is another interesting historical happy accident. Before the Europeans came to the New World, there were no cows in the Americas. In fact, the Americas had very few animals which could be domesticated. Wolves had been domesticated and became dogs. In South America, llamas and alpacas were domesticated to be used as pack animals and for wool. They were not generally eaten. And they were certainly not milked. So the natives didn’t have milk.

When the indigenous people of Mesoamerica cooked their chocolate, they mixed it with water. The Spanish were the first to bring the beans back to Europe where it was to be prepared for the king. The explorers had asked the natives how to prepare it, but in a multilingual game of telephone (metaphoric telephone, as telephones were not yet invented) mistakes were made. A group of nuns in Spain were preparing the cocoa for the king, and they thought they were supposed to use milk when they cooked it. So milk chocolate was born from an accident.

Before

 

Back in present day, we took our ground cocoa beans and mixed them in orange juice (for some natural sugars), milk powder, some lavender, and some white sugar. This is not really how the pre-Columbian natives would have made it. They didn’t have white sugar, and they didn’t have oranges. Oranges are native to East Asia. We cooked it for about thirty minutes to get a beautiful bubbling pot of brown goo.

After

 

Also, chocolate making is about joy, so you have to dance while you stir. Naturally, right? We listened to “Bate que bate el chocolate” and showed off our swaying hips as our spoons and feet when round.

We tried our chocolate with seven different flavors (one at a time): Rose (actual rose petals we had picked in the garden), peanuts, salted caramel, ginger, chili pepper, cinnamon, and coconut. They were all very different, even using the same chocolate. Alrica and Syarra liked the cinnamon best. I was all about the chili pepper. (You don’t really notice it at first and then there is a delightful transition of flavors in your mouth.)

At Chocolate World we got to experience chocolates made in Ecuador and the region. We learned how each company is a community or a village. Some are in the Amazon region, others nearer the coast. They are working to sustainably produce their chocolate and have various social justice initiatives. One community on the Ecuador-Colombia border is giving young men jobs and skills as chocolate makers so they won’t become drug mules making border runs. In another place, a group of indigenous women wanted to make chocolate, but their tribe restricted what women are allowed to do. So they moved to a nearby village and started their own chocolate harvesting and making company. They help other women to greater autonomy.

We purchased some chocolates from some of these communities. We also got cups of hot chocolate. They were so thick and so rich that the stirring straw stands straight up when you leave it in the liquid!

 

Straight up (and not because we are on the equator)

The next time you enjoy chocolate (even in muffins or ice cream), look at what percent cocoa it is. It’s likely not that high a percent. And when you consider how time-consuming and labor intensive it is to get and prepare the beans, you’ll understand. True 100% cocoa is expensive. But so worth it!