Chocolate
See 12/07/11 blog entry for the backstory behind my research into chocolate.
A Trendy Word Lately the word “gourmet” has become a popular adjective to be used in describing foods and beverages. One of the most common places to find this is in the extensive world of chocolate. So how do you know if what you are getting is actually gourmet chocolate? There are unfortunately no regulations on the use of the word gourmet, which means that the burden lies on you. If you really want to know if the chocolate you are eating lives up to the true standards of this enigmatic French word then you are going to have to do a little research.
Start With a Definition To start you must understand the meaning of the word. There is no actual book definition of gourmet chocolate but most experts agree that it incorporates three different themes, high quality ingredients, skillful and accurate preparation, and artistic presentation. This makes sense when you look back to the root of the word gourmet, the original Old French noun referred to the valet in charge of wines or a wine merchant. It described someone who was an expert in quality wine, they knew the best grapes of each particular region, they knew the proper way for each grape to be prepared and bottled, and finally they knew how to artistically pair the perfect wine with a particular food. Today the underlying idea of the word gourmet is still the same, even though it is now used for a much larger array of products. Beware of Imposters One has to be quite careful in seeking out gourmet chocolate these days because in most parts of the world the word gourmet has become a catch phrase or a marketing tool. It is being used to describe everything from potato chips to tequila to cat food. The fact that gourmet chocolate is being labeled as one of the fastest growing industries tells us that there are bound to be quite a few imposters that are simply using the phrase to make a little more money. The French Approach The French may be our best measuring tool when it comes to finding truly gourmet chocolate. The reason being that, even though they originated the word, in the French language the phrase “gourmet chocolate” does not exist. To them ALL chocolate is gourmet. In most of the world the word gourmet has to be used to make it clear that a particular chocolate is not common, that it is of a higher quality than the average chocolate. In France however there is care and quality put into every kind of chocolate so this distinction is not needed. What to Look For So how does this all boil down to information that one can use when choosing which chocolate to buy? The answer lies in our definition. To start one must look at the ingredients. Make sure that what you are buying does not replace any cocoa butter with vegetable fats. In Europe companies are allowed to replace up to 5% of cocoa butter with a variety of vegetable fats, in the US the standards are even more lenient, but a gourmet chocolatier knows that this would be a desecration of the superb flavor of pure cocoa butter. You should also look at sugar content; cocoa solids or paste and cocoa butter should precede sugar on the list of ingredients. If purchasing truffles or filled chocolates you want to look for ingredients that are fresh and unique. Your chocolates should be free of preservatives and the manufacturer should recommend a guideline to let you know how long they will stay fresh. Next, one should look at the preparation. Many products claiming to be gourmet chocolate will not disclose to you where, how or by whom their sweets were created. This should be a red flag. A veritable gourmet chocolate manufacturer will gleefully divulge that their delicacies are hand made by a reputable chocolatier. Lastly, one should desire that the presentation match the product. This may sound pretentious to some but this is the precise completion of anything gourmet and chocolates should not be an exception. Once you have scrutinized the chocolate itself and learned that it is legitimately gourmet then you should examine whether or not the same artistic care and quality has gone into the packaging. To fail to give attention to this detail would be equivalent to serving a pristine wine in a coffee mug. Does Price Really Matter? Undoubtedly, price can create a clear distinction between your garden-variety chocolates and those that are faithfully gourmet. If the chocolate you are researching adheres to the previously mentioned, rigorous standards, then it really should be more expensive than commonplace chocolates. Of course you could skimp in one category or another to save a few dollars but then you could not in good conscience say that what you are getting is authentically gourmet chocolate. The Effort Will Be Worth It This may seem like a lot of effort to go through just to eat chocolate but we guarantee that once you have tasted the difference it will all be worth it. So take the time, do the research, and enjoy thoroughly the spoils that come from your hard work. http://www.zchocolat.com/chocolate/chocolate/gourmet-chocolate.asp |
Tasting Guide
Enjoying high-quality chocolate is an experience like no other. The flavors are rich and complex, and there is a large variation in flavors among various chocolates. In fact, the flavor compounds found in dark chocolate exceed those in red wine. For this reason, we have put together this tasting guide to assist people new to the world of chocolate tasting. Chocolate is best enjoyed when it is savored slowly and not quickly eaten. Chocolate tasting is not unlike wine tasting. Each type of chocolate bar contains its own set of unique flavor profiles. Since the cacao bean is the source of all chocolate (as grapes are the primary source of wine), its flavors can be imparted by a multitude of variables, such as topography, weather (e.g. rainfall, amount of sun, etc.), soil conditions (e.g. type, nutrient content, drainage properties, etc.), post-harvesting processing (e.g. fermenting, roasting, etc.), and of course genotypic properties. With so many variables affecting the flavor of just one chocolate bar, it's important to taste carefully so that you can extract the fullest flavor potential. First, it is imperative to taste chocolate in an environment free of distractions and background noise, such as television, music, or conversations. Being able to concentrate as intently as possible will enhance flavor detection because your mind needs to focus on one task and one task only. It is often a good idea to have a piece of paper or notebook handy for you to take tasting notes in. Such things as smells, flavors, and textures should be noted. Your palate should be clean. This means that your mouth should not contain residual flavors from a previous meal. If necessary, eat a wedge of apple or piece of bread, since these foods will wipe out all preexisting flavors without imparting their own. After all, chocolate should not taste like lasagna or beef burgundy. Water, especially sparkling water, also works as a palate cleanser. Make sure that the piece of chocolate is large enough to accommodate the full evolution of the flavor profile. A piece too small may not allow you to detect every subtle nuance as the chocolate slowly melts. The important thing to remember is that flavor notes gradually evolve rather than open in one large presentation. Ideally, the beginning of the length (the time it takes for the chocolate to melt) will be different from the middle and the finish, so it is important to discern how the flavor evolves from beginning to end. 10g should be a minimum starting point. Never taste cold chocolate. If it is stored in a wine cooler, allow the chocolate to rest at room temperature before tasting. Why? Cold temperatures will hinder your ability to detect the flavor. Some advise even rubbing the chocolate briefly between your fingers to coax out the flavor. Crackers, apples, and luke-warm sparkling water works well as palate cleaners between chocolate tastings. Look at the chocolate. The surface should be free of blemishes, such as white marks (called bloom). Observe the manufacturer's job at molding and tempering. Is the chocolate afflicted with air bubbles, swirling, or an uneven surface (results of settling after molding), or is it clear of such defects? Also, the bar should have a radiant sheen. A matte surface is usually an indication of poor molding but will not affect the flavor. Next, note the color. Chocolate comes in a brown rainbow of multifarious tints, such as pinks, purples, reds, and oranges. Some chocolates may even look black or so dark that at first glance a tint may be indiscernible. But probe further and hold the chocolate at different angles. What do you see? Smell the chocolate. The aroma is an important component of flavor. Inhaling the fragrance and noting its profile will prime the tongue for the incoming chocolate. It further engages the senses and gives you a chance to compare how similar or different aroma and flavor are. Break the piece in half. It should resonate with a resounding "SNAP!" and exhibit a fine gradient along the broken edge. If you hear a “THUD” chances are good that either the chocolate was too warm or it was improperly tempered. Place the chocolate on the tongue and allow it to arrive at body temperature. Let it melt slowly. This step is crucial, for it allows the cocoa butter to distribute evenly in the mouth, thereby muting any astringencies or bitterness of the chocolate. Chewing immediately will release these properties and might offend the palate. Study the taste and texture. As the chocolate melts, concentrate on the flavors that unfold on the tongue. It is important to notice how the flavor evolves from beginning, middle, to end, and how the flavor exists in the finish (after the chocolate has melted). Chewing is optional, but do not chew more than three times. Since the cocoa butter has had time to coat the mouth, chewing just may release even more flavor components. Remember, we’re tasting and not eating. Now the chocolate is nearing its finish. How has the flavor evolved? Is the chocolate bitter? Heavy? Light? Was the texture smooth, creamy, dry, or grainy? Do any changes in texture and flavor occur? Take note of how the chocolate leaves the palate and slips into its finish. Does a strong reminder lingering in your mouth, or does it quickly vanish? https://www.amanochocolate.com/articles/tasting-guide.html |
The World's Best Chocolate By Pete Wells
http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/the-worlds-best-chocolate
After trying a chocolate so good it leaves him speechless, Pete Wells goes on an urgent tasting mission to cult Tuscan chocolatier Amedei.
Late last year, I grew curious about an Italian chocolate brand called Amedei. I mean curious in the same sense that sharks are curious about surfers. Amedei, founded in 1990, is the joint project of a 42-year-old Italian named Alessio Tessieri and his younger sister, Cecilia; he buys the cacao and she turns it into dark, glossy bars. In November, a competition in London awarded a gold prize to one of Cecilia's handiworks, a single-plantation chocolate called Chuao. Two other Amedei products tied for silver.
Both the visionary French pâtissier Pierre Hermé and the visionary Spanish chef Ferran Adrià have said that Chuao might, in fact, be the world's greatest chocolate. And yet Amedei is sold in only a handful of stores in the U.S., and—while a new importer has big plans for the brand—few Americans have heard of it.
How had the Tessieris vaulted from obscurity to produce chocolate in the same rarefied league as Cluizel, Scharffenberger and even the mighty Valrhona? And, more urgently, where could I get some?
The second question had an easy answer: Chocosphere, World Wide Chocolate and other very handy Web sites for people who care about cacao content. A carton from Chocosphere containing just over a half pound of Amedei bars and squares ran me $50, with shipping. The next day, the whole box was gone. In my defense, I've seen engagement rings that came in bigger boxes. I knew that I wanted more, but at $100 a pound it would be cheaper to fly to Italy and go to the factory myself, which is what I did. This might make me the first traveler in history who went to Tuscany to save money on a candy bar.
The Tessieris work about 40 miles west of Florence, close to the Arno, and not far from Pisa; the Italian wine and food magazine Gambero Rosso has called this region the Chocolate Valley because of the concentration of chocolatiers who work there—among them Paul de Bondt, Roberto Catinari and Luca Mannori. The Chocolate Valley is not nearly as famous as other parts of Tuscany. For me, this only increased its allure. While other tourists inched through the vineyards of Chianti staring at the exhaust pipe of the rental car just ahead, I would be lazily bobbing along in a rowboat, dipping pieces of bread over the side into the world's biggest fondue.
Amedei sits just outside Pontedera, where they build those stylish Vespa scooters that make even old Italians look young. Amedei's factory, a low brick structure, used to be an iron foundry. Alessio and Cecilia met me inside a tasting room, where a table was set with linen tablecloths and silver chargers. Two large jars were prominently displayed; filled with what looked like water, each held a large, red, heart-shaped object. Cecilia wore a severe suit of charcoal gray, a no-nonsense expression, and a red scarf; the factory was cold that day. Alessio's face was round and rosy, and his rimless eyeglasses made him look more like a graduate student than a chocolate baron.
Trying to make small talk, I mentioned hearing that there were many other chocolate makers nearby.
Alessio shook his head. "But those other companies do not make chocolate," he replied. "They buy it."
In the lofty strata where Tessieri operates, "making chocolate" means that you make the chocolate. You import cacao beans from plantations. You roast them and husk them and grind the cacao nibs into a fine paste. You add sugar and grind some more. Finally you swirl the mixture in open tanks called conches, which smooths the texture while helping to blow off acids and other nasty flavors. It's complicated, demanding work, and few small companies even attempt it.
Cecilia asked me to put on a hairnet, a plastic jacket and disposable blue booties, then led me downstairs to the factory. The machines, Swiss, Italian and German models painted ivory, clacked and hammered away, sounding like an orchestra of conga drums. A young guy with tattooed forearms strained to push sweetened cacao paste through a screen with a paddle. For some reason, the floor was painted blood red. The chocolate smell was so strong and pure I could barely think. Somehow I managed to remark to Alessio that these antique machines must limit the quantity of chocolate Amedei can make.
"The problem is not the machines," he said. "The problem is cacao. We can't find enough good cacao." Only by starting with prime cacao, he explained, can you achieve the quality and character that set Amedei apart from the candy makers, who buy bulk chocolate.
"Everyone said, why do you want to work so hard and invest in machinery?" Alessio explained. "Everyone said to make chocolate, you need to produce tons, not kilos. But this was a desire to do something unique."
But that wasn't the Tessieris' only desire. When we simply love something we eat, it's natural to imagine that it was made from the same simple love. And often we're right, but the motives that drive people to work as hard as Alessio and Cecilia can sometimes be a little more complicated.
The Tessieris did not set out to make chocolate. In the beginning, like the rest of the Chocolate Valley, they made candy. Their parents owned a business in Pontedera that sold pastry ingredients to bakers. Alessio and Cecilia went off on their own, but they didn't stray far. They rented a small room in town and began to experiment with what they call pralines and we call filled chocolates. Soon enough, they wanted to move to a higher grade—the highest grade they knew. So the brother and sister, who were still in their 20s, went to visit a chocolate maker they greatly admired.
In 1991, Alessio and Cecilia made a pilgrimage to Tain l'Hermitage, in the Rhône Valley, for an appointment at Valrhona. The Tessieris were humored for a while, but when they were ready to make a deal, they were sent away with nothing. The French wouldn't even negotiate. According to Cecilia, they were told that Italy wasn't evolved enough to appreciate such extraordinary chocolate.
It was a personal slight, a national insult, a call to arms. "Right then and there," Cecilia would later say, "it was war."
Chloé Doutre-Roussel, the author of The Chocolate Connoisseur and one of the world's leading authorities on fine chocolate, uses another word to describe what came next: vendetta. "Everything Alessio does, he does with intensity," Doutre-Roussel says. "So this revenge became his focus. He put everything—the family money, even his sister—on this project."
Within three weeks, the Tessieris decided that they weren't going to buy chocolate anymore—they would make it. Cecilia apprenticed with bean-to-bar artisans around Europe. At first they bought cacao from brokers, but by 1997, Alessio had begun hunting it himself, from Ecuador to Madagascar to the Caribbean coast of Venezuela. This last region was especially rich with cacao of the first rank; a lot of money was at stake, and life could get rough. Four years ago, someone tried to murder a cacao buyer who worked with Valrhona, strafing his car with an automatic weapon and leaving him with a half-dozen gunshot wounds.
The most famous Venezuelan cacao of all comes from Chuao. The trees of Chuao are shielded by mountains from all but the warm Caribbean breezes; the soil is naturally irrigated by three cascading rivers. Doutre-Roussel calls the region "one of the jewels of the earth." Besides the microclimate, Chuao has centuries-old traditions of harvesting and preparing cacao. First it's fermented to develop the compounds that will later blossom into rich aromatics, then it's laid out on the parvis in front of the village church to dry slowly in the sun. Because the farmers worked together as a cooperative, Chuao is one of the only places where a chocolate maker could buy, at one stroke, 9 to 10 tons of uniformly excellent cacao. Until recently, that chocolate maker was Valrhona. Today every last kilo of cacao from Chuao goes to Amedei.
Alessio went around to the brokers and negotiated directly with the farmers' cooperative, offering to pay off their debts and triple the previous price for their beans. "By the time Valrhona realized, it was gone," Doutre-Roussel says.
Cecilia transforms the beans of Chuao into chocolate that packs a sensory wallop I tend to remember for weeks. It's very aromatic, with a clarity and elegance more often found in wine and some single malts. One bar retails for just under nine dollars. Chuao represents just a fraction of Amedei's total output, yet it has made the Tessieris famous.
The story of how Amedei eloped with Chuao and sent the wedding pictures to Tain l'Hermitage isn't exactly a vision of sugar plums, but the chocolate industry has a long history of wars, most of them far more brutal. Steve DeVries, a bean-to-bar chocolate maker from Denver, used to say that the Spanish arrived in Mexico and threatened, "Give us your cacao or we'll shoot you." Hunting beans in Mexico, DeVries repeated the remark to an anthropologist. "No, no, no," the anthropologist said. "Before that, the Aztecs came down and said 'Give us your cacao or we'll cut your hearts out.'"
Even today, the chocolate trade looks a lot like it did in colonial days: Raw materials bought at generally low prices in the tropics are shipped to the developed world and turned into a luxury product. Today, three of the largest importers of cacao to America are fighting a lawsuit filed by a human rights group claiming that they buy beans harvested by child slaves, mostly in the nation of Ivory Coast. Several journalists have contended that the extent of slavery in the cacao industry has been overblown, but it's hardly comforting to hear that the number of slaves who helped make your afternoon snack has been exaggerated. Without doubt, adults and children on some cacao farms, particularly in West Africa, perform demanding, exhausting work for awful pay.
Most chocolate makers know nothing about where their cacao comes from. A former consultant for a well-regarded European chocolate maker told me that until last year, the firm's cacao buyer had never been to a plantation. Farmers sell to brokers who sell to bigger brokers; by the time the cacao reaches the factory, nobody knows its story. Sometimes this arrangement allows growers to mistreat workers without accountability. It also can allow them to get the same price for unripe, rotting or generally trashy beans—at their worst, these are known as "dogs and cats"—that they get for the good stuff.
"We became convinced it was impossible to become number one in the world buying beans from brokers," Alessio says. "The broker cannot tell you who grew the beans, or how it was done." I don't take Alessio for a weepy humanitarian, and yet he practices enlightened self-interest when it comes to the people who grow his cacao. He has invested in Chuao, agreeing to pay off the farmers' mounting debts and buying baseball uniforms for the local team. He needs their best work so that he and Cecilia can do their best work.
Back upstairs in the room marked Degustazione, I stripped off my shower cap and booties and sat down across the table from Cecilia. For a long time, neither of us spoke.
"So," Cecilia finally said. "You want to try the chocolate?"
She walked to the sideboard and pulled down three trays, each arrayed with a different cru. Valrhona was the first to borrow that wine term and apply it to chocolate; Amadei uses it to describe bars made with beans from the same region. Amedei's Grenada I Cru was quiet and had something about it that reminded me of raspberries. The Jamaica was stronger and made me think of pipe tobacco; so did the Venezuela, but it also had a durable aftertaste of good black coffee. Then Cecilia offered me a tray of the first chocolate she made, called Toscano Black 70 percent. This time, I had trouble picking individual voices out of the choir. I mostly remember the overall sensation of getting all the deliciousness any sane person could want.
All the while, I'd been looking at the red heart-shaped objects that were floating in the two big jars. I kept thinking about the Aztecs. At last I asked Alessio what they were. "Cacao pods," he said. "In formaldehyde so they do not dry up." The one off in a corner behind the door was a unique Venezuelan variety called Porcelana. The other, placed on a low table next to all the trays of chocolate, gleamed and glistened like a trophy. That one was Venezuelan too, Alessio said with a smile. It came from Chuao.
Find more information about Amedei at amedei-us.com.
Pete Wells is a contributing editor to Food & Wine. E-mail comments to him at [email protected].
http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/the-worlds-best-chocolate
After trying a chocolate so good it leaves him speechless, Pete Wells goes on an urgent tasting mission to cult Tuscan chocolatier Amedei.
Late last year, I grew curious about an Italian chocolate brand called Amedei. I mean curious in the same sense that sharks are curious about surfers. Amedei, founded in 1990, is the joint project of a 42-year-old Italian named Alessio Tessieri and his younger sister, Cecilia; he buys the cacao and she turns it into dark, glossy bars. In November, a competition in London awarded a gold prize to one of Cecilia's handiworks, a single-plantation chocolate called Chuao. Two other Amedei products tied for silver.
Both the visionary French pâtissier Pierre Hermé and the visionary Spanish chef Ferran Adrià have said that Chuao might, in fact, be the world's greatest chocolate. And yet Amedei is sold in only a handful of stores in the U.S., and—while a new importer has big plans for the brand—few Americans have heard of it.
How had the Tessieris vaulted from obscurity to produce chocolate in the same rarefied league as Cluizel, Scharffenberger and even the mighty Valrhona? And, more urgently, where could I get some?
The second question had an easy answer: Chocosphere, World Wide Chocolate and other very handy Web sites for people who care about cacao content. A carton from Chocosphere containing just over a half pound of Amedei bars and squares ran me $50, with shipping. The next day, the whole box was gone. In my defense, I've seen engagement rings that came in bigger boxes. I knew that I wanted more, but at $100 a pound it would be cheaper to fly to Italy and go to the factory myself, which is what I did. This might make me the first traveler in history who went to Tuscany to save money on a candy bar.
The Tessieris work about 40 miles west of Florence, close to the Arno, and not far from Pisa; the Italian wine and food magazine Gambero Rosso has called this region the Chocolate Valley because of the concentration of chocolatiers who work there—among them Paul de Bondt, Roberto Catinari and Luca Mannori. The Chocolate Valley is not nearly as famous as other parts of Tuscany. For me, this only increased its allure. While other tourists inched through the vineyards of Chianti staring at the exhaust pipe of the rental car just ahead, I would be lazily bobbing along in a rowboat, dipping pieces of bread over the side into the world's biggest fondue.
Amedei sits just outside Pontedera, where they build those stylish Vespa scooters that make even old Italians look young. Amedei's factory, a low brick structure, used to be an iron foundry. Alessio and Cecilia met me inside a tasting room, where a table was set with linen tablecloths and silver chargers. Two large jars were prominently displayed; filled with what looked like water, each held a large, red, heart-shaped object. Cecilia wore a severe suit of charcoal gray, a no-nonsense expression, and a red scarf; the factory was cold that day. Alessio's face was round and rosy, and his rimless eyeglasses made him look more like a graduate student than a chocolate baron.
Trying to make small talk, I mentioned hearing that there were many other chocolate makers nearby.
Alessio shook his head. "But those other companies do not make chocolate," he replied. "They buy it."
In the lofty strata where Tessieri operates, "making chocolate" means that you make the chocolate. You import cacao beans from plantations. You roast them and husk them and grind the cacao nibs into a fine paste. You add sugar and grind some more. Finally you swirl the mixture in open tanks called conches, which smooths the texture while helping to blow off acids and other nasty flavors. It's complicated, demanding work, and few small companies even attempt it.
Cecilia asked me to put on a hairnet, a plastic jacket and disposable blue booties, then led me downstairs to the factory. The machines, Swiss, Italian and German models painted ivory, clacked and hammered away, sounding like an orchestra of conga drums. A young guy with tattooed forearms strained to push sweetened cacao paste through a screen with a paddle. For some reason, the floor was painted blood red. The chocolate smell was so strong and pure I could barely think. Somehow I managed to remark to Alessio that these antique machines must limit the quantity of chocolate Amedei can make.
"The problem is not the machines," he said. "The problem is cacao. We can't find enough good cacao." Only by starting with prime cacao, he explained, can you achieve the quality and character that set Amedei apart from the candy makers, who buy bulk chocolate.
"Everyone said, why do you want to work so hard and invest in machinery?" Alessio explained. "Everyone said to make chocolate, you need to produce tons, not kilos. But this was a desire to do something unique."
But that wasn't the Tessieris' only desire. When we simply love something we eat, it's natural to imagine that it was made from the same simple love. And often we're right, but the motives that drive people to work as hard as Alessio and Cecilia can sometimes be a little more complicated.
The Tessieris did not set out to make chocolate. In the beginning, like the rest of the Chocolate Valley, they made candy. Their parents owned a business in Pontedera that sold pastry ingredients to bakers. Alessio and Cecilia went off on their own, but they didn't stray far. They rented a small room in town and began to experiment with what they call pralines and we call filled chocolates. Soon enough, they wanted to move to a higher grade—the highest grade they knew. So the brother and sister, who were still in their 20s, went to visit a chocolate maker they greatly admired.
In 1991, Alessio and Cecilia made a pilgrimage to Tain l'Hermitage, in the Rhône Valley, for an appointment at Valrhona. The Tessieris were humored for a while, but when they were ready to make a deal, they were sent away with nothing. The French wouldn't even negotiate. According to Cecilia, they were told that Italy wasn't evolved enough to appreciate such extraordinary chocolate.
It was a personal slight, a national insult, a call to arms. "Right then and there," Cecilia would later say, "it was war."
Chloé Doutre-Roussel, the author of The Chocolate Connoisseur and one of the world's leading authorities on fine chocolate, uses another word to describe what came next: vendetta. "Everything Alessio does, he does with intensity," Doutre-Roussel says. "So this revenge became his focus. He put everything—the family money, even his sister—on this project."
Within three weeks, the Tessieris decided that they weren't going to buy chocolate anymore—they would make it. Cecilia apprenticed with bean-to-bar artisans around Europe. At first they bought cacao from brokers, but by 1997, Alessio had begun hunting it himself, from Ecuador to Madagascar to the Caribbean coast of Venezuela. This last region was especially rich with cacao of the first rank; a lot of money was at stake, and life could get rough. Four years ago, someone tried to murder a cacao buyer who worked with Valrhona, strafing his car with an automatic weapon and leaving him with a half-dozen gunshot wounds.
The most famous Venezuelan cacao of all comes from Chuao. The trees of Chuao are shielded by mountains from all but the warm Caribbean breezes; the soil is naturally irrigated by three cascading rivers. Doutre-Roussel calls the region "one of the jewels of the earth." Besides the microclimate, Chuao has centuries-old traditions of harvesting and preparing cacao. First it's fermented to develop the compounds that will later blossom into rich aromatics, then it's laid out on the parvis in front of the village church to dry slowly in the sun. Because the farmers worked together as a cooperative, Chuao is one of the only places where a chocolate maker could buy, at one stroke, 9 to 10 tons of uniformly excellent cacao. Until recently, that chocolate maker was Valrhona. Today every last kilo of cacao from Chuao goes to Amedei.
Alessio went around to the brokers and negotiated directly with the farmers' cooperative, offering to pay off their debts and triple the previous price for their beans. "By the time Valrhona realized, it was gone," Doutre-Roussel says.
Cecilia transforms the beans of Chuao into chocolate that packs a sensory wallop I tend to remember for weeks. It's very aromatic, with a clarity and elegance more often found in wine and some single malts. One bar retails for just under nine dollars. Chuao represents just a fraction of Amedei's total output, yet it has made the Tessieris famous.
The story of how Amedei eloped with Chuao and sent the wedding pictures to Tain l'Hermitage isn't exactly a vision of sugar plums, but the chocolate industry has a long history of wars, most of them far more brutal. Steve DeVries, a bean-to-bar chocolate maker from Denver, used to say that the Spanish arrived in Mexico and threatened, "Give us your cacao or we'll shoot you." Hunting beans in Mexico, DeVries repeated the remark to an anthropologist. "No, no, no," the anthropologist said. "Before that, the Aztecs came down and said 'Give us your cacao or we'll cut your hearts out.'"
Even today, the chocolate trade looks a lot like it did in colonial days: Raw materials bought at generally low prices in the tropics are shipped to the developed world and turned into a luxury product. Today, three of the largest importers of cacao to America are fighting a lawsuit filed by a human rights group claiming that they buy beans harvested by child slaves, mostly in the nation of Ivory Coast. Several journalists have contended that the extent of slavery in the cacao industry has been overblown, but it's hardly comforting to hear that the number of slaves who helped make your afternoon snack has been exaggerated. Without doubt, adults and children on some cacao farms, particularly in West Africa, perform demanding, exhausting work for awful pay.
Most chocolate makers know nothing about where their cacao comes from. A former consultant for a well-regarded European chocolate maker told me that until last year, the firm's cacao buyer had never been to a plantation. Farmers sell to brokers who sell to bigger brokers; by the time the cacao reaches the factory, nobody knows its story. Sometimes this arrangement allows growers to mistreat workers without accountability. It also can allow them to get the same price for unripe, rotting or generally trashy beans—at their worst, these are known as "dogs and cats"—that they get for the good stuff.
"We became convinced it was impossible to become number one in the world buying beans from brokers," Alessio says. "The broker cannot tell you who grew the beans, or how it was done." I don't take Alessio for a weepy humanitarian, and yet he practices enlightened self-interest when it comes to the people who grow his cacao. He has invested in Chuao, agreeing to pay off the farmers' mounting debts and buying baseball uniforms for the local team. He needs their best work so that he and Cecilia can do their best work.
Back upstairs in the room marked Degustazione, I stripped off my shower cap and booties and sat down across the table from Cecilia. For a long time, neither of us spoke.
"So," Cecilia finally said. "You want to try the chocolate?"
She walked to the sideboard and pulled down three trays, each arrayed with a different cru. Valrhona was the first to borrow that wine term and apply it to chocolate; Amadei uses it to describe bars made with beans from the same region. Amedei's Grenada I Cru was quiet and had something about it that reminded me of raspberries. The Jamaica was stronger and made me think of pipe tobacco; so did the Venezuela, but it also had a durable aftertaste of good black coffee. Then Cecilia offered me a tray of the first chocolate she made, called Toscano Black 70 percent. This time, I had trouble picking individual voices out of the choir. I mostly remember the overall sensation of getting all the deliciousness any sane person could want.
All the while, I'd been looking at the red heart-shaped objects that were floating in the two big jars. I kept thinking about the Aztecs. At last I asked Alessio what they were. "Cacao pods," he said. "In formaldehyde so they do not dry up." The one off in a corner behind the door was a unique Venezuelan variety called Porcelana. The other, placed on a low table next to all the trays of chocolate, gleamed and glistened like a trophy. That one was Venezuelan too, Alessio said with a smile. It came from Chuao.
Find more information about Amedei at amedei-us.com.
Pete Wells is a contributing editor to Food & Wine. E-mail comments to him at [email protected].