With Alex Whitmore
The art of making chocolate goes back almost 2,000 years to the ancient Mayan civilization. After that the Aztecs of Mesoamerica adopted chocolate as the Mayan civilization declined. They both used chocolate as a beverage, sometimes having great religious significance. The beverage was spicier than we think of today, a combination of mixed ground cacao seeds with various seasonings to make a spicy, frothy drink.When the Spanish conquered the Central Americas they soon adopted the pods of the cacao tree as well, at first also using it as strictly a beverage. The Spanish brought it back to Europe where it remained primarily a beverage for many years. In fact for many years it was considered the sweet drink of Kings and was not available except to the royalty and the wealthy. Eventually it was made into and eaten as a solid as well as a beverage, the forerunner of today’s chocolate candy bars.
Alex Whitmore traveled in Mexico and came across the process of chocolate making that is unlike our modern methods. In the Mexican chocolate process the cacao beans are stone ground and minimally processed, and they do not use any of the modern techniques, which are referred to as “conching.” (The word comes from the Spanish word “concha,” which refers to the conch shell. It was named because the modern vessel used in chocolate manufacturing is shaped like a conch shell.)
Alex decided to start a company, called Taza, to make chocolate the traditional Mexican way. Instead of using modern methods such as steel refiners to grind the cacao, they use authentic Oaxacan stone mills. Due to the imperfect surface of these granite millstones, unrefined cacao particles and sugar granules remain in the finished chocolate. These generate what some consider an explosive flavor on the palate, creating a distinctive granular texture. It is not like eating regular commercial chocolate at all.
Taza calls their process “bean to bar,” because they do everything themselves after procuring the actual dried cacao bean. Most other chocolate makers obtain the chocolate after it has already been processed from the bean.
The basic process is actually very simple. Starting with raw, whole cacao beans, they roast and winnow the beans, grind and refine the nibs, temper and mold the chocolate, and cool, wrap and ship out the finished bars.
Prior to getting the beans, there is actually a lot of work done to get them to Taza’s small factory in Somerville. First, the pods grow on trees in a hot, humid climate such as the Dominican Republic. (There is actually a ‘Cocoa Belt’ – the name for the range of land twenty degrees north and south of the equator and stretching around the globe – where Cacao trees are cultivated.)
Down in the cocoa belt, the farmers have to get at the cacao beans inside the pod. To do this the melon-like skin of the fruit is cracked with a machete and the insides scooped out. In a typical cacao pod, there are roughly 40 almond-shaped beans surrounded by a white, mucilaginous pulp called ‘baba’. The baba de cacao is sweet, tangy and delicious to eat, while raw, unprocessed cacao beans are intensely bitter and nearly inedible. The beans are usually a beautiful deep purple.
As the pods are picked and shelled, the baba and beans are collected and added to a sack lined with banana leaves. When the sack is full, it is sewn shut and loaded onto a pack mule. Mules are a necessity on the farm because the rough terrain makes vehicle access impossible, and sacs of wet cacao are too heavy for people to carry very far. The mules carry the cacao out of the jungle so it can be transported to the fermentery.
Cacao fermentation is much like that of other fermented foods, like beer, wine, and bread. At the fermentary it is done in three stages over six to seven days. After fermentation has completed, the beans are emptied onto large, wooden drying decks. There, the beans will be slowly dried in the sun for seven to ten days. They are then graded, packed and shipped to the U.S.
Growers, which are typically individuals or small families, bring their crop to a central location for fermentation and drying. They receive compensation for their work according to how many beans they produce as well as for the quality of their beans.
