Yesterday, we piled into a 16-person van and drove out to Los Rios, Ecuador to visit a local cooperative of cacao producers. Part of my doing job is to be able to understand the local context well enough to determine whether people should qualify for visas or not. Field trips like this help us understand how some industries function, their likely profits, and what kinds of questions/vocabulary we can use to figure out whether the operation is a strong and ongoing business interest.
Cacao has a long history in Ecuador, stretching all the way back to pre-colonial times (most famously, the Aztec empire used to dried cacao seeds as hard currency). In the late 19th century, there was a cacao boom that made many local people very rich and also brought in a flux of European seeking to secure the supply chains for their raw material. The local saying “el gran cacao” is roughly interchangeable with our “big shot,” i.e., “Tu no eres el gran cacao!” Today, Ecuador is one of the world’s most important producers of fine and mostly organic cacao. Chances are, if you’ve bought an expensive chocolate bar at Whole Foods lately, the chocolate in it came from Ecuador.
We visited a cooperative of small cacao producers in the town of Vinces, located in Los Rios, Ecuador. The cooperative is called “La Pepa de Oro” in honor of the former Aztec cacao-seed currency.
At the center of the sign is a cacao pod. I didn’t get a picture of an actual pod, but I can tell you when you break them open they’re filled with this white, slightly gooey fleshy stuff and some really hard seeds. You can actually suck the white fleshy stuff off the seeds and it’s a little fruity, tart, and bitter but not unpleasant. The pods are a little smaller than your average papaya. The pods may be yellow to red or purple– but I’ve been told the yellow pods are the good ones.
Once the pods are harvested, the farmers split them open and pull out the seeds which are covered in the white sticky flesh. Something I learned on the trip is that cacao beans are actually fermented for four days. The system is pretty ingenious– the wooden fermentation boxes are set up in steps, so one the first day of fermentation you put them in the top box. Then, on each subsequent day you open the side panels of the box and push it down to the next box. By the fourth day, it’s good and rotty, and looks like this:
The smell is pretty nasty– basically like someone who has really sweaty feet and hasn’t changed their socks in about six months. Also, all the black specks are bugs. It is pretty gross but chocolate is so delicious, I just can’t deny the results!
If you has access to a facility the way the cooperative does, you will have a big wooden platform to spread you cacao beans out onto to dry. However, it’s not uncommon in the coastal Ecuadorian countryside to see small patches of cacao beans drying on the shoulder of the road.
The color of the beans depends on all sorts of things– from the genetic strain, the way the farmer has cultivated the crops, the weather that year, etc. They are left out to dry in the sun for several days– as long as it takes to make them as dry as possible.
The cooperative had this smart little contraption that was like a roof for the drying platform that sat on rails and could cover the drying beans within seconds of drizzle starting to fall.
Once the beans are very dry, you can break them open and really smell the developing chocolate scent. At this stage, the seeds once broken open look kind of like coffee beans inside. The cooperative had a small workshop with artisan-grade machinery for refining cacao, donated by the Spanish government. From here, the beans get toasted to dry them out the rest of the way, then shucked into nibs. Once they’re at the nib stage, they get ground down and then sent through a machine to separated them into 100% cacao and “manteca de cacao” (cacao butter).
So, how does this affect you, standing in the Whole Foods aisle and wondering what kind of chocolate you should buy? First of all, when you see a label like “75% dark” that means that your chocolate bar is 75% cacao. That other 25% should include nothing but cacao butter and sugar. Bars that have any other ingredients (be they chemicals or something as benign as vanilla) are simply masquerading as chocolate. And many of the mass-produced American bars (like chocolate) may derive fat content from other oils that are not cacao butter, which is very expensive, or other nasty chemical add-ins.
After learning how to properly eat chocolate (admire the color, smell it, then let it sit on your tongue and melt) we tried a little chocolate liquor and chocolate marmalade. Amazingly, the chocolate made by this small cooperative was remarkably delicious– some of the best I’ve tried in Ecuador (that said, it’s hard to find good chocolate here because most is exported directly to the US and Europe). I purchased lots of liquor and bars as gifts, plus I got some delicious rolls of pressed cacao, which look a little like this:
If you’re interested in trying some fabulous Ecuadorian chocolate, pop on down to your local chocolate supplier and search for any of these brands: Hoja Verde, Republica del Cacao, Kallari, Pacari, Chchukululu or Caoni…or any of the other many brands that are starting to pop up…you won’t regret it!
