5/18/09 - The “Swiss Farm” Part 2: A Great Example of Fermentation
The other great thing about Finca Elvesia is their fermentation. Fermentation is the key step in bringing out cacao's great flavor. Get it right, and you've got a fantastic chocolate. At Finca Elvesia, fermentation starts in the field. The cacao is harvested and then the babas (the seeds with the fruit on them) are removed from the pods and put into plastic gunnysacks. (Note that the empty pods are left in the field to mulch and serve as micro reservoirs for the small midges that pollinate the cacao.)
(John watches while beans are being harvested)
The sacks are loaded onto the burros and brought down the planted hills to the sheds near the farmhouse. They are then left overnight, which allows an enzymatic process to begin to loosen the pulp. The babas are then spread on a table and the remnants of the stringy stems of the pulp are removed by hand. These are put into the compost pile and the cleaned babas are moved into the fermentation shed.
(fermentation shed)
The fermentation shed is built with a good cover, and sides but allows for some ventilation. The fermentation begins by putting the babas into boxes that can hold between 300 and 1000lbs of wet beans. There are three boxes adjacent to each other - each one is positioned behind and above the other in a step-like formation. The fermentation begins in the highest box when the babas are put into it and covered with banana leaves. Wild yeasts begin to consume the sugars in the pulp and produce heat, alcohol and CO2. This process starts to break down the sticky pulp and this continues for about 2 days. At this point, the cacao is dumped into the bin that is down the steps.
(fermentation shed)
Beans are aerated when dumped and the fermentation begins. At the same time bacterial fermentations begin to feed on the sugars and alcohol and the process that turns bitter seeds into the ingredient of great chocolate is well on its way. One more dumping to the lowest bin is done about a day later and the fermented beans are free of the sticky pulp and put out to dry.
(drying facility)
At Finca Elvesia, we tasted beans with varying fermentation levels and were once again amazed at the positive impact of good fermentation on cacao. Too much fermentation produced funky off flavors, while under-fermentation produced a lingering harshness.
4/13/09 - The “Swiss Farm” Part 1: The Tasting Lab
I recently traveled to the Dominican Republic with Ray Major, one of our Chocolate Makers. While there, we visited one of my favorite places, Finca Elvesia, managed by Jo Locandro, a friend I met at the Chocolate Show in NYC several years ago, the farm was converted to cacao in the early part of the 20th century by a family that had emigrated from Switzerland. To this day, it is known as the Swiss Farm. Its name, Evesia, is actually a slightly garbled local knickname for Switzerland.
One of the most noteworthy things about Jo's farm is the incredible variety of cacao. It is like a mini-tasting laboratory. As you may know, there are three main types of Theobroma cacao — forastero, triniatrio and criollo. However, within each type there are hundreds of different varieties due to cross-breeding, mutation, etc. Jo's farm seems to have it all.
Walking through the farm, you can see grounded green Amelonado, warty red Trinitario, and purple long Criollo. On a recent trip, we took beans out of many of the pods and cut them in half. Some were a loud dark purple, some were a light rose color and some were a buff color. Tasting them was also across the board. Ranging from harsh and fruity, to bitter, to mild and pleasant, we could only wonder at the kind of flavors they would give our chocolate.
(John sampling beans)
We also came upon another species of cacao with huge pods that grow more like a normal tree with flowers and fruit in the upper branches. Called Theobroma bicolor, it is completely different from the cacao used for chocolate. Also called pataxte in Spanish, the beans are light in color, have almost no bitterness and are fairly bland in flavors. Mayan people add this to Theobroma cacao to soften its flavors in their drinks and raise the level of the bromine, the mild stimulant found in chocolate. It is a species more associated with the forest and wild lands, which why it's called the Jaguar Tree in several indigenous dialects of Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. The Jaguar is also associated as the guide for humans as they enter the afterworld, so this bean is added in many ritual ceremonies in Guatemala. My colleague at SCHARFFEN BERGER, Ray Major, has spoken many times of trying to use some of this type of cacao in a chocolate at some point. I think that it might be a great project.
Our long awaited Asante Bar is in production. When Brad, Peter and I tasted the final product it lived up to all of our expectations—even Peter's. I think Robert Steinberg would really be proud of this bar, in fact I believe he even participated in the original selection of the beans.
Ghana is famous for pure chocolate flavor. It has that baked brownie characteristic that for most of us define the word chocolate. Added to that is a super long finish that prolongs the pleasure. We use it in many of our blends because it is the perfect foil for the fruity and aromatic beans that are our usual signature. This particular bar begins by teasing the palate with black cherry and then it expands into pure chocolate with just a hint of raisins and tobacco. Even at 65% cacao there is not a trace of bitterness. It is a great eating chocolate and fantastic for baking and home candy making.
Ghana has a long tradition of cacao that began in 1879 when legend has it that a trader, Tetteh Quarshie, smuggled cacao beans out of the Portuguese controlled island of Fernando Pó and planted them in the Akwapim Mountains in what was then called the Gold Coast. These first plantings of cacao were of the Amelonado cultivar and originally came from the Bahia region of Brazil. Production in Ghana increased and spread across the country until by 1910 it was the world's leading producer of cacao. Since then cacao production in Ghana has seen its ups and downs, but today it produces over 700,000 metric tonnes per year and is second only to Côte d'Ivoire in the size of its crop.
The word Asante is the name of one of Ghana's largest cacao producing regions and also of the people who live there. The Asante belong to the Akan ethnic group and speak a language called Twi. They are great cacao farmers and pay special attention to fermentation and drying. They are a matrilineal society which means that descent is traced through the mother and many Asante women are cacao farmers. The king of the Asante is called the Asantehene and that was my recommendation for the name of our bar because it sure has a royal flavor—too bad it didn't fit on the label.
3/16/09 - Our Guatemalan Beans Have Finally Arrived
We're excited to say that some very intriguing beans from Guatemala have finally arrived. We'd never thought about Guatemala as a source for cacao until a bag of fat, pale cacao beans landed on Brad Kintzer's desk a few years ago. (Brad is one of our chocolate makers.) I saw them sitting on his desk and noticed that they were much bigger and rounder than the beans we've been seeing. I bit into a bean and was surprised by how mild it was. Usually the beans that we get from new cacao growers are extremely bitter because they are under fermented.
When I found out where the beans came from, they became even more interesting. An NGO that helps struggling regions build sustainable ventures had sent us the beans from Cahabón in Guatemala. We decided we had to make the trek there and see who was growing these beans.
Cahabón lies in the Alto Verapase mountain chain, which meant a long and bumpy ride on a dirt road. We followed the Cahabón River past the town of Lanquin and headed up into a cloud forest to find a whole village turned out to greet us. The people in the Cooperative that grew the beans were from an indigenous tribe of Kekchi Maya. It was pretty astonishing to climb out of the dusty pickup while a large crowd of people stared at us curiously. Most of them followed as we were ushered into a one-room lodge made of logs and mud, and those who couldn't fit inside the lodge crowded around the doors and windows to peer in. A big cauldron of a fantastically spicy turkey soup was carried in and ladled into bowls for us. I drank my soup and started to recover from the long pick-up truck ride.
Most of the farmers spoke only Kekchi Mayan, so everything we said was translated to Spanish and then translated into their language. We handed out small bars of our chocolate; I watched as the wrapped bars were tucked into pockets, despite the heat. It made me wonder if they had ever eaten refined chocolate. I opened a small square and ate it and then asked them to try it. Although they consume chocolate in drinks, as their culture has for thousands of years, these cacao farmers had never eaten a piece of smooth, refined chocolate. From the smiles on their faces I could tell that they loved it. One by one they dug the chocolate squares out of their pockets and ate them.
Eventually, we got around to talking about their fantastic cacao. When I asked how much they sold it for, they replied with an astonishingly low figure: less than half the world price at the time for low-quality cacao. We decided to work with the Cooperative, drew up a contract, and made a pact to buy their beans at the rate we pay for highly flavored cacao – more than 4x the price they were expecting – giving the money directly to the Cooperative so none of the profits went to a cacao broker.
It has been extremely gratifying to work with these people directly, to give them a fair price for a great product and to see where the money goes. Much of the money pays for school for the children of the Cooperative's members. We now get emails from some of their teenagers who have access to computers and even an occasional call from a mobile phone. The extra income from their cacao will allow these people to plant more cacao trees in some of the deforested lands on their ridge. We are also beginning a project with them to plant indigenous mahogany trees as an overstory for their cacao, which we hope will provide additional income for future generations.
While we haven't made chocolate from these beans just yet, we are planning to do so very shortly. Below are some images from our trip.
I'd like to tell you about a new bar we are making for the store. It is a 68% bittersweet, but what I am really excited about is that it is a single origin from the Brazilian Amazon and the beans are just superb. I found this cacao about a year ago while I was visiting a cooperative of farmers in the Brazilian State of Pará, about 150 miles south of Belém in the municipality of Tome Acu. These farmers are just incredible. They are all descendents of Japanese immigrants who came to the area in the 1920's.
They started out growing black pepper in a huge monoculture and were successful until disease hit and destroyed everything. Fortunately they were smart enough to learn from the experience and when they replanted they chose cacao and cupuaçu and other rainforest friendly crops. Today, along with cacao and black pepper, they have a thriving fruit pulp business. I was so awed by what they have accomplished that I had to buy some of their cacao and what a surprise it was. We have just now started to make chocolate with it and I have never tasted anything like it in more than thirty years of chocolate making. It has a good basic chocolate flavor, but on top of that are these wild notes of apple and pear—almost like a white wine. Brad described it like a sauterne mixed into chocolate. It is splendid. We had a magazine publisher in the office the other day and he could not believe what he tasted.
The other thing that has me excited about it is where it comes from—Pará. No one has a bar from there. Think of it—the Brazilian Amazon! The ancestors of this cacao grew wild on the banks of the Amazon and its tributaries. The Jesuits in the 1600's were the first to realize the high quality of this cacao and they hired the Tupi Indians to go out and collect it wild from the forest. Imagine a small fleet of canoes paddling along the banks of these tropical rivers and plucking cacao pods from the overhanging branches. It was the first Brazilian cacao to be exported to Europe and remained the principal producing region until the 1880's when cacao began to take off in Bahia. Now it seems to be an almost forgotten origin, but after people taste this bar I think there will be chocolate makers standing in line to buy it.
From making wine, I learned l lot about flavor and its origins in nature. This same idea carries over to chocolate making. We simply try to bring out all the terrific cacao flavors – the deep tones, the red-fruit sweetness, and a final, long crescendo of taste. While we're looking for good cacao beans, we stumble across some really great stories and wonderful people. We will be sharing some of our experiences through this journal.
