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The 2017-2018 Sourcing Report is Ready

September 11, 2019 by

I’m excited to say that we have finished our fourth annual(ish) Sourcing Report! These were huge years of growth for us and the industry at large, but also years when we learned some tough lessons. The first lesson was that it takes a lot longer to write a sourcing report than you might imagine, so we’ve decided to combine two years together. As always, our goal for this report is to help you learn and understand more about us and our chocolate, but more importantly, learn about the producers with whom we work. Each section of this report is dedicated to a single producer and we’ve tried our best to represent them in the way that they feel is most appropriate. This includes having each producer guide, contribute to, and review the content.

The first thing you might notice in this report is that we bought more cocoa in 2017 than we did in 2018. Does this mean that we’re shrinking? No, we are still growing, but this was our next big lesson: building in San Francisco takes a long time. We thought our new 16th Street Factory was going to be finished in 2018. Since we buy all of our cocoa one year in advance, this meant that we needed to buy a lot of beans in 2017 to prepare for our new facility, which is designed to use up to 200 tonnes of beans per year, and to supply our Valencia Street factory, which uses approximately 25 tonnes of cocoa annually, and our Kuramae factory, which uses around 30 tonnes. In 2017 we were excited to finally start buying larger quantities of beans and the producers with whom we work were thrilled. For cacao producers, having a customer buy more is almost always a great thing. The specialty cocoa industry is growing quickly and most producers have more supply than they have demand. Unfortunately, we were wrong about how long it would take to complete our new factory. The good news is that our new factory is open as of April 2019. The bad news is that we started buying larger quantities of beans too early, which means that we are still working through our backstock. This also means we incorrectly set expectations with the producers with whom we work. They have all been very understanding, but this is why we bought more beans in 2017 than in 2018. Our goal in working with producers is to buy the same quantity of beans from them or more year over year. We are not trying to find the cheapest cocoa that tastes good. We are trying to build longterm relationships with producers that grow over time so that we all benefit. Fortunately, our plan is to buy more beans in 2019 so we can get back on track with our producers.

In 2017 we also started our customer trip program in earnest. While we’ve done periodic customer trips over the years, we’ve now turned this into a consistent and core part of what we do. We’ve decided to visit three producers regularly: Maya Mountain Cacao in Belize, Zorzal Cacao in the Dominican Republic, and Kokoa Kamili in Tanzania. Each trip allows us to introduce our customers to a different view of cacao. Belize allows us to highlight cacao as an integral part of the local Maya culture. The Dominican Republic allows our customers to see what it is like to have cacao as a core part of a country’s economy. Tanzania allows us to bring people to an operation so far off the beaten path you have to drive two days to get there. I’m excited to lead each trip and to get to share a part of my life with people who are interested in learning more about cacao and the people who produce it.
 For more information, please check out our website.

While things have changed here, there have also been changes in the industry. As an industry we are getting closer to having quality metrics for specialty cocoa, inspired by the work done for specialty coffee. Specialty coffee has a system known as Q grading developed by the Specialty Coffee Association that provides a well understood, trainable, and consistent methodology for scoring coffee. This score allows coffee producers to negotiate a price based on an understanding of how their coffee compares to the rest of the beans on the global market. Cocoa does not have a similar grading system. Several chocolate makers and industry members have developed systems over the years, but none of them are universally accepted as of yet. We haven’t even agreed on what to call specialty cocoa, er, I mean fine flavor cocoa. While we have our work cut out for us, we are making progress. My sense is that the goals of a unified system for cocoa evaluation are:
– To analyze unroasted beans to allow producers to evaluate small lots of cocoa in a very short time frame.
– To rely on cheap equipment (so that even small, poorer producers can use the methodology if they would like to).
– The ability to be trainable everywhere in the world.
– To yield a consistent score for cocoa beans that everyone can agree upon.
If we could accomplish these goals we’d be well on our way. Carla Martin and the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute have developed a protocol that gets us much closer than we’ve ever been before. We are now working on the last mile to agree on a way to use the protocol in order to create a score that can be used by everyone. I hope that our next sourcing report will start with a discussion of how great this new methodology has become.

Lastly, the biggest challenge that the specialty cocoa industry is facing now is that it has grown faster than the demand from chocolate makers. There are great beans everywhere! The overall quality of what we taste as samples has gone up dramatically just since 2014. But, there either needs to be larger makers or there needs to be a larger number of makers willing to buy these beans at a premium price. While I believe this will happen eventually, right now it is a struggle for many cocoa producers to sell everything they produce. In this report we’ll talk about some of these situations and how it has impacted the producers.

While we continued to grow in 2017 and 2018, 2019 is the year that we finished our new factory. This means that we’ll be able to increase our consumption of cocoa as we had planned to do two years ago. We are now connecting our customers to cocoa producers more closely than ever before through our trips, and we are on the verge of having a consistent system for evaluating cocoa from around the world. The specialty cocoa and craft chocolate industry are both growing, and I couldn’t be happier. With growth comes more learning, better livelihoods for producers, and, of course, more chocolate!

Read the 2017-2018 Sourcing Report

Greg D’Alesandre
Chief Sourcing Officer, Dandelion Chocolate

A Halloween Debut of a New Web Series Featuring Witches and Chocolate

October 29, 2018 by

Megan Giller is a longtime friend of ours and one of the most prolific journalists and authors in the field of chocolate. She’s also a feminist, a food historian, and our guest blogger for this post. Note that the video mentioned below is not suitable for children.

graphic of woman and birdsWhen I was working on my book, Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution, one of my favorite sections to write was “Chocolate Is for Everybody,” about craft chocolate being made by all sorts of minorities, including women. (After all, my business card says, “food writer, feminist, chocolate eater.”)

I’ve always wanted to write more about women and food, and when I asked Professor Kathryn Sampeck if she knew of some good stories, boy, did she deliver. She sent me two scholarly articles, “Chocolate, Sex, and Disorderly Women in Late-Seventeenth and Early-Eighteenth-Century Guatemala,” by Martha Few, and “Potions and Perils: Love-Magic in Seventeenth-Century Afro-Mexico and Afro-Yucatan,” by Joan Bristol and Matthew Restall.

These dense, academic papers contain a treasure trove of illicit activity. Long story short: In the 1600s and 1700s in Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, thousands of women were accused of bewitching their lovers, enemies, and frenemies with magic hot chocolate. At that time, chocolate was a pretty gritty drink, and you could hide all sorts of ingredients in it. Fears of women spiking hot chocolate stemmed from anxiety about their changing roles in society, and women who challenged the status quo were persecuted — just as they were in every age, and all around the world.

One of the stories is so powerful that it inspired me to start a new project, a digital TV show called What Women Ate. The first episode is about one of the so-called witches, named Cecilia, who was accused of bewitching her husband with hot chocolate and making him impotent (sure, sounds likely). Before I write any more spoilers, here is the full episode for you to watch, just in time for Halloween. If you like what you see, subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow @whatwomenate on Instagram!

Cooking with Fresh Cacao Pods (and a Recipe for Cacao Chips and Cacao Fruit Jam)

October 19, 2018 by

Cynthia is our Dean of Beans and the head of our educational programming. She’s been saving her allowance her entire life to buy every chocolate bar possible.

Four yellow fresh cacao pods

The flesh and peel of a fresh cacao pod is thinner than an acorn squash (and it smells similar to one, too), which might be why so many students in my classes ask if you can eat it. My answer used to be simple. “No. People don’t eat cacao pods. They typically compost them to put the nutrients back into their farms or use them as feed for livestock.”

And then my friend received a book, The Cocoa Pod Used in Recipes by Mercedes Mendoza, from his sister who had visited The Chocolate Museum in Belgium. Mendoza is from Peru and her passion is to help cacao farmers learn to prepare nutritious dishes from this byproduct (cacao flesh is about 80% of the weight of the fruit and it is typically discarded; chocolate is made from the seeds of the pod). The book shows readers how to prepare the pod and includes various savory and sweet Peruvian dishes that call for cacao pod flesh as an ingredient.

This was the first time I had ever heard of someone preparing the flesh of the pod as food. Some recipes were really interesting. Others I’m not sure I would ever repeat again. But as a curious cook and a huge fan of cacao in all forms, obviously I had to try it.

A fresh cacao pod cut open to expose the seeds inside

If you do decide to try cooking with fresh cacao pods yourself, here are some general tips for sourcing and preparing them:

  1. Source quality fresh cacao pods. I am fortunate enough to have access to fresh cacao that we buy for our Chocolate 101 class. Finding them can be easier said than done, but I buy pods from a florist called Magic Flowers near Guayaquil, Ecuador. It’s expensive – about $80 for nine pods. When they arrive I put them in the fridge to keep them fresh for a week or two.
  2. Cut the pods open carefully. Prepare cacao pods as you would an acorn squash. Stab your knife into the center of the pod deep enough to break through the skin and flesh. Then run the knife along the length of the fruit from the top to the bottom to cut it all the way through. Don’t cut through to the other side because you may accidentally cut open some of the beans.
  3. Scoop out (and save!) the inner fruit and seeds. Scrape out the beans and save them for another use. You can suck on them to eat and enjoy the delicious, citrus-y pulp, or try to ferment them if you plan to make your own chocolate. You can also plant them to grow a cacao tree, or save them for another use (I’ve used them to make miso, an idea I picked up from a few doctors at Casa Mascia Apothecary in Belize).

Cut slices of fresh cacao pod

Preparing Fresh Cacao Pods

All of Mendoza’s recipes begin the same way — peel, de-seed, and core the fresh fruit. It’s easier said than done!

  1. Peel the pods with a vegetable peeler. Be careful, as they get REALLY slippery!
  2. Cut the cacao into small, one-inch pieces. Again, be careful! I can’t emphasize enough how slippery these get.
  3. Cut out and remove the dense center layer. The book said to do this because the center layer hardens when it cooks and becomes inedible. I believed the book, but after cutting away the center from my fourth piece I realized that it would not only take forever to prepare the cacao but the likelihood of cutting myself was a certainty (did I mention they were slippery?). I tested cooking them with this layer intact and then removing the inner core after cooking. It was easier to remove, but the cacao was even more slippery and dangerous. My helper used a butter knife so that he wouldn’t accidentally cut himself.

The first recipe I tried from the book was for fried cacao pod chips. I was immediately drawn to thinly slicing and frying the cacao in hot oil, but it was a lot of work, very expensive, and pretty tasteless with an odd slippery texture. It’s much easier to make chips with potatoes or nearly anything else. But if you’re curious:

Fresh cacao pods being fried into chips

Recipe for Cacao Pod Chips (adapted from Using the Cacao Pod in Recipes)

  • 1 fresh cocoa pod cut, peeled, cored, and seeded
  • At least 2 cups of neutral, high-heat vegetable oil
  • Salt to taste
  1. With a very sharp knife, slice the prepared cacao fruit as thinly as you can.
  2. In a small, heavy-bottomed pot, heat the oil until it’s very hot; 350-375 degrees Fahrenheit. Drop the cacao slices, a few at a time, into the hot oil and fry them until they turn golden brown, about 1-3 minutes per batch.
  3. With a slotted spoon, removed the finished chips and let them cool on a rack over paper towels. While they’re cooling, sprinkle with salt to taste.
  4. Fry the remainder of the cacao slices, adjusting the temperature of the oil as needed to keep it steady.
  5. Eat immediately and enjoy.

Many of the other recipes in the book–including a spicy chili dish I was eying–were quite similar in that the first step is to puree the pod. That didn’t sound hard at all! I make purees all the time due to my obsessive desire to make everything from scratch. But I soon found out otherwise…

The puree on its own is a nutritious and thick start to soups and stews that can be fun to play with in the kitchen. Though simply making the puree was so laborious and time-intensive that I decided to just use my own kitchen skills to make a jam from the pectin-rich cacao pod boiling liquid. My co-workers thought the jam tasted more complex than regular blueberry jam, with a subtle creamy flavor. While the cacao pods make for good jam, it wasn’t chocolatey at all, and it didn’t taste like the lychee/citrusy cacao fruit smoothie we serve in the SF cafes, either. I don’t think I would do it again.  

Recipe for Fresh Cacao Fruit Puree (adapted from Using the Cacao Pod in Recipes)

  • Fresh cacao pods
  • Water to cover by at least one inch
  1. Simmer the peeled, cored, and chopped cacao pod flesh until soft, about 25-35 minutes. Note that the water will turn yellow, then purple, and then thicken so much it looks like jam. (It turns out that cacao pods have a lot of pectin.)
  2. Remove the cacao pieces from the liquid. Be sure to reserve this liquid if you want to make Fresh Cacao Pod Jam (see recipe below). Puree the fruit in a food processor until smooth. Pretend you’re not grossed out by the resulting slimy puree. :)

Cacao Blueberry Jam and a fresh cacao pod

Recipe for Fresh Cacao Fruit Jam

  • 3 cups cooking liquid from Fresh Cacao Pod Puree
  • 12 ounces frozen blueberries (or another high-pectin fruit, like apples, cranberries, or pears)
  • 1 cup sugar (or more to taste)
  1. Remove the solids from the cooked cacao pod, and measure out 3 cups of the liquid into a heavy-bottomed pot. Bring the liquid to a boil.
  2. Add the blueberries and the sugar. Uncovered over medium-high heat, let the jam boil, stirring often, until a lot of the moisture has boiled away and a spoon streaks across the bottom of the pot, about 30-35 minutes.
  3. Serve the jam warm or ladle into jars. Keep refrigerated. This makes about a pint.

This was a fun project, and one that I’m glad I tried, but it was more intellectual than inspiring. I’m glad I finally tried preparing and eating the flesh of the cacao fruit, but I think I’d rather leave it behind for the farmers to add nutrients to the soil.

How to Store Chocolate: Tips and Tricks (and the Science) for Keeping Chocolate Bars at Their Best

June 13, 2018 by

Becca works on chocolate quality, team safety, and risk at our SF Valencia location. She enjoys the science that explains how chocolate works. Her favorite bar at the moment is Gola Rainforest, Sierra Leone. And yes, she once left chocolate to accidentally melt on the backseat of her car.

Chocolate with streaking and sugar bloom

When bad things happen to good chocolate from improper storage. Left to right: fresh chocolate, streaked chocolate (when the cocoa butter separates), and sugar bloom (when sugar crystallizes on the surface).
📸@ericwolfinger

Leaving a bar of chocolate in your hot car will surely ruin your day. So much work goes into making a Dandelion chocolate bar: we bring beans into the factory from all over the world that undergo a meticulous production process to transform them into glossy chocolate. We wrap each bar in gold foil and make sure the label lines up. And then just like that, the whole thing is a puddle. The chocolate tastes great in the short term (yum! molten chocolate!), but after that it’s messy and, without retempering the chocolate, the bar won’t ever be the same again. So, in the interest of having the best chocolate-tasting experience days, months, or years from now, I share a few pointers on how to properly store tempered, finished chocolate bars.

Short-term storage for enjoying chocolate within a few months:

● Squirrel it away somewhere cool and dark; the back of your pantry is ideal.

● Keep it away from strong odors. Cocoa butter can absorb strong flavors like garlic and coffee, which can alter the delicate flavors of the chocolate.

● Keep the bar away from heat and out of direct sunlight. The stable form of cocoa butter (Form V or 𝜷V) starts melting at 84°F. Tempered chocolate is a sol: a suspension of solid particles (cocoa solids, sugar) in a liquid (cocoa butter). It can separate just like the emulsion of oil and vinegar in a vinaigrette, except with chocolate you get dark cocoa solids and white streaks of cocoa butter. If a chocolate bar melts in your beach bag and you pop it in the fridge to resolidify, the bar will likely have a streaky appearance, a soft break, and it will crumble when you bite it. The appearance may be unpleasant, but it’s still safe to eat. I recommend melting it into brownies or some other delicious chocolate-based dessert.

Mid-term storage for up to a year:

● For storing chocolate longer than a few months, keep it in a temperate climate: we’ve had good results storing our chocolate between 40-68°F. The kitchen pantry is ok, but a cool closet or basement area are ideal.

● Stable temperatures are best. Chocolate’s appearance and texture can be affected by transitional bouts of hot and cold.

Long-term storage for up to five years:

● For cellaring chocolate and holding on to vintage bars, I recommend using a wine fridge set to 50°F. Note that a regular kitchen refrigerator may have strong food odors and it is often too cold for the task (below 40°F). Greg, our Chocolate Sourcerer, and Todd, our CEO and co-founder, set their chocolate refrigerators to 50°F. If chocolate gets too cold or undergoes a temperature shock, condensation can form and potentially cause sugar bloom. Sugar bloom changes the texture and appearance of the bar. It occurs when the sugar in the bar absorbs water and, when the water evaporates, it recrystallizes on the surface of the bar. It’s still safe to eat, but the chocolate’s appearance and texture make it better for baking.  

● Never freeze chocolate for all of the same reasons as above.

● All of our chocolate bars have a “best if used by” date of one year from production. This is the time period during which we’re confident that the flavor notes you’ll taste in our bars will be as close as possible to when the bar was first tempered. That said, the flavors in our bars evolve over time, and some chocolate even  improves with age.

● After a year or two in storage, it’s possible for chocolate to start looking dull and a bit grey on the surface and acquire a brittle, chalky texture. Over time, cocoa butter transforms into an even more stable polymorph known as Form VI or 𝜷VI. As long as you’re storing the chocolate in controlled conditions, it should be safe to eat for several years.

● Chocolate like ours with just cacao beans and sugar tends to be shelf stable. You don’t need to worry about two-ingredient chocolate going bad. In milk chocolate or bars that have nuts, those other ingredients can become rancid over an extended period of time.

Chocolate storage refrigerator

The chocolate/wine refrigerator of Greg, our Chocolate Sourcerer. What a collection!

Education Station: What’s Up with Whole Roasted Beans?

July 28, 2017 by

You’re curious, so we find answers. Our education team fields lots of questions from our guests during classes, so we’ve decided to launch a  series of monthly installments in which we tackle some of those questions and share the answers with the world. We call it The Education Station. This week, Robert addresses some questions about a product we sell in our cafes, and what to do with them.

At Dandelion Chocolate, most people know us for our chocolate bars, drinks, and pastries,  but the one item our customers seem to be most curious about lately are whole roasted beans. We sell bags of them in our cafés, and after spending most of my time working at the Ferry Building as a cafe associate, I’ve heard a lot of questions about them: “Are those coffee beans?” or “Is that where chocolate comes from?” and of course, “What do I do with them?” Well, now is the time to grab a bag and come along to dehusk that question.

To start, Whole Roasted Beans (or as we often abbreviate, WRB) are cocoa beans. Yes, these are what we use to make chocolate. So nope, they are not coffee beans. After we finish hand sorting all of our beans—picking out the cracked, flat, and broken ones that might not taste good—we roast them, and then we crack, winnow and grind them down with sugar into chocolate. Roasting is a very important step in our flavor development process for two reasons: One, it helps bring out the flavors that we love in our chocolate and two, it’s the ‘kill step’ that ultimately kills any possible pathogens and assures that our chocolate is safe to eat. For our WRB, we use Madagascan beans from Bertil Akesson’s Bejofo Estate, and roast them a bit longer than we do if we were making them into chocolate. Why? The answer is simple. When roasted lightly, our Madagascar beans have the bright flavors we think taste amazing as a chocolate bar (after they’ve been conched and sugar has been added) but we don’t necessarily love those flavors as much as a stand-alone experience. So, by increasing our roast time, we’ve been able to skim off some of the sharper acidic flavors, leaving us with a nutty, citrusy flavor profile that we think is more snackable. If you want to learn more about the roasting process for our beans, we have factory tours and classes available to answer any questions you may have.

So, how do I eat them?

Snacking 
One way people eat them is as a snack! You can squeeze one lightly and roll it between your fingers, just like cracking a peanut, to snap the skin and make it easier to peel off. You’ll end up with two parts; a peel, which we call husk, and the solids inside or the “meat of the bean,” which we call the nib. The nibs are what we refine down to make chocolate. This is the closest thing to eating 100% chocolate without the commitment. I often taste nutty notes in pure nibs, similar to a peanut or almond.

Topping
Using the nibs as a topping is always my favorite way to enjoy them. I like to have the crunchy texture and nibby flavor that it adds to things I already love. You can sprinkle the full nibs on top of yogurt, oatmeal, a salad or even ice cream! If you feel like getting creative, many people candy their nibs and use them as a delicious topping for desserts. Not only can you eat them as broken chunks of nib, but you can grind them up in a blender or food processor to make a nutty powder to boost your recipes. I suggest trying matcha soft serve, covered in ground nibs – yum!

Baking
Baking with chocolate is always fun, but with nibs, it’s even better! My favorite is making chocolate cherry bread using nibs instead of chocolate chips. Roasted cacao beans also make a great substitute for nuts. You can easily make banana nut bread by replacing nuts for nibs. We use nibs in many of our recipes here at Dandelion, stop by either of our cafes to try how our kitchen team incorporates them into our pastries and drinks.

Chocolate making
Although it’s possible, I wouldn’t recommend using these bean for home chocolate making. As I mentioned before, we developed a very specific roast profile that is intentionally different from the one we use for our bars, so we would hate for you to not get the result you wanted. If you’re interested in making chocolate at home we have a book coming out in November where we go more in depth, but if you can’t wait, sign up for our Chocolate 201 classes and let’s make a batch of chocolate!

Are there any other experiments I can do with them? 

Absolutely! The great thing about working at Dandelion Chocolate is all of the tasting and experiments we do here—from our chocolate makers developing new bar profiles to our pastry team regularly adding new things to the menu. Everyone works hard in learning and creating something they’re excited about, so I wanted to share a couple of things that I made at home using my roasted beans.

Cracking and winnowing (removing husks)
If you want a quick, but slightly messy way to remove the husk off the beans, this has worked since the beginning of our chocolate journey. This is the same technique our founder, Todd, used when he was starting in his kitchen at home.

  1. Put your desired amount of beans into a ziplock bag and make sure it’s closed all the way.
  2. Using a rolling pin to go over the bag and break all of the beans. What you will have in the bag is a bunch of broken husk and nibs, all mixed together.
  3. Place all of the broken nibs and husk into a bowl. I found that using a strainer helped me filter out some of the bigger pieces of husk before putting in the bowl.
  4. Then use a blow dryer to “winnow” the husk off the nibs. Since husk pieces are light, they should blow away and the nibs should remain in the bowl. This takes a little practice of angling the blow dryer just right to allow only the husk to fly over the edge of the bowl, while the heavier nibs remain inside. As a warning, make sure you do not do this in a place where pets could eat them. Theobromine is very, very dangerous for dogs!
  5. If you’re like me, and like things done at 110%, you can remove any remaining husk by hand. In our factory, we use the ten-minute rule: once you start picking nibs clean, cap yourself at ten minutes. Otherwise, you’ll be doing it for eternity.

I also tried seeing how long it would take me to remove the husk by hand, bean by bean, and got through half of the bag before my hands were covered in cocoa butter and smelled like chocolate. It’s not impossible, but requires more patience, a lot of podcasts, and may take longer than cracking and winnowing.

Cold Brew infused with nibs
After spending some time working at the Ferry Building one of my favorite things to do was to make our Ecuador Cold Brew. So I went home and made some for myself in a French press.

  1. Start off by grinding your coffee at a coarse grind.
  2. Optional: Use a spice grinder. I tried to match the same coarseness as the coffee.
  3. Pour the coffee into the French press first and then fill it about halfway full with boiling water.
  4. Next, add the nibs and stir everything together before topping it off with more water.
  5. Remember to put the lid on, but don’t plunge it.
  6. Leave it to brew at room temperature for 24 hours.
  7. Plunge the coffee, and do it slowly so none of the grounds make it to your coffee.
  8. Transfer to a jar and put it in the fridge to enjoy later.

Waffles with nibs

This was probably the most exciting thing I got to do. I bought a cast iron waffle maker and was finally able to put it to use. If you were wondering, this is where I used those nibs I winnowed by hand!

Here is a recipe I adapted from Flour Arrangements:


INGREDIENTS

  • 1¾ cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • ⅓ cup cocoa nibs
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1¾ cups buttermilk
  • 1 stick butter, melted
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla
  • maple syrup, for serving


INSTRUCTIONS

  1. Combine all of the dry ingredients into a bowl.
  2. In another bowl, mix the eggs, buttermilk, melted butter and vanilla.
  3. Combine wet and dry ingredients.
  4. Brush each side of the waffle maker with sunflower oil, or another neutral oil.
  5. Pour 1/2 cup of batter into the pan for each waffle.
  6. Cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until golden and crispy at the edges.
  7. You can use maple syrup if you like, but I used strawberries as toppings since I wanted to really taste the nibs.

I love incorporating roasted beans into my overall diet, especially if I want to cut out sugar for a bit. The possibilities are endless, and if you ever see me at an event or class I would love to hear how you used your beans. Or comment your favorite ways below! Remember there’s no right or wrong way to taste chocolate, so I hoped this helped answer some of your questions. There are lots more experiments that I wanted to try, like smoothies and candied nibs, so keep an eye out for another post soon.

Education Station: Ca-what?

June 29, 2017 by

You’re curious, so we find answers. Our education team fields lots of questions from our guests during classes, so we’ve decided to launch a brand new series of monthly installments in which we tackle some of those questions and share the answers with the world. We call it The Education Station. This week, Kelsey dives into clarifying some commonly mis-used words – namely what plant chocolate does and does not come from. 

Sometimes, when we’re deep in conversation with a class attendee or a guest in our cafe, some very similar sounding — but very different meaning — words come up. And those words, if misused, can create a bit of confusion. So let’s discuss coca, coco, cocoa, and cacao, and how, if any of them are related to chocolate.

First, let’s talk about what they have in common: These are all plants. They grow in the tropics. Aaand that’s about it. Below, we’ll dig into each of them, but a quick disclaimer before we get started: the definitions here are our own, unless noted otherwise, and refer primarily to terminology used in the United States. You may find slightly different definitions elsewhere, and we’ll do our best to explain how we arrived at the words we use.

So what is coca?

Coca [koh-kuh]:  any of several South American shrubs (genus Erythroxylon, family Erythroxylaceae); especially :  one (E. coca) that is the primary source of cocaine. (Merriam Webster)

Leaves of the South American shrub, of the Erythroxylon genus

The plant itself is native to the Andean region of South America and grows relatively easily in mid to high altitudes. When consumed, the primary alkaloid in the plant, cocaine, acts as a stimulant by constricting blood vessels. Coca only becomes dangerous when the cocaine alkaloid is extracted, concentrated, processed and synthesized. Although coca may receive a bad rap due to its modern day uses and cultivation (think Narcos, the TV show), the traditional and practical uses are much more innocent than many think. Often consumed by chewing the leaves, or as a tea, coca has been, and is still, used to relieve pain, altitude sickness and even suppress hunger.

Dried coca leaves, steeped in hot water used as tea

The coca leaf has actually been used for thousands of years, with some of the oldest evidence pointing to nomadic tribes scattered throughout the Andes in Northern Peru, around 1800 B.C. These tribes migrated with the changing of seasons, avoiding the harsh conditions of the mountains in search of food and shelter. This required walking up and down the high altitudes of the Andes for long, extended periods of time, where food was often scarce along the way. Naturally, the healing properties of the coca plant allowed many tribes to move frequently and was used as a sacred medicine. 

Coca is also known as one of the first domesticated plants in recorded history. Once early explorers of the region began growing the crop for medicinal purposes, the cultivation expanded and evolved as more was understood about the plant. By concentrating of the cocaine alkaloid in order to produce a high demand drug, coca turned into the high-risk cash crop it is now commonly known for.

It is not related to chocolate, in anyway whatsoever. Bummer, I know.

What is coco?

Coco [koh-koh]: the coconut palm; the drupaceous fruit of the coconut palm whose outer fibrous husk yields coir and whose nut contains thick edible meat and, in the fresh fruit, a clear liquid (see coconut water) (Merriam Webster)

Dandelion Bean Sourcerer, Greg, drinking a coconut

Coconuts! From the now popular coconut water, touted as a magic cure for one too many adult beverages, to clothing made from the fibrous husk — the coconut has become an important global commodity with rising popularity and variety of uses. As Science Daily put it, “The coconut […] is the Swiss Army knife of the plant kingdom; in one neat package it provides a high-calorie food, potable water, fiber that can be spun into rope, and a hard shell that can be turned into charcoal. What’s more, until it is needed for some other purpose it serves as a handy flotation device.”

Fibrous coconuts, showing dark spots resembling faces

 

Often called the Tree of Life, the coconut palm (coco nucifera) has been supporting the local economies of many tropical countries for centuries. The first recorded discoveries of the coconuts were arguably by 15th century Portuguese explorers in Southeast Asia. They described the coconut shell as “coco” meaning “head or face,” for the characteristic the dark holes that resembled two eyes and a mouth.

Coconuts are also unrelated to chocolate, but you probably already guessed that.

What is cacao?

Cacao [kuh-kah-oh]: the fatty seeds of a South American evergreen tree (Theobroma cacao of the family Sterculiaceae) that are used in making chocolate.

Theobroma Cacao tree, bearing pods

It’s more than just a funny word from a Portlandia skit. Cacao is the seed of a tree, and it grows inside of a pod filled with pulpy fruit. To make chocolate, these seeds are traditionally harvested, fermented, dried, roasted, cracked and winnowed, then ground down with sugar. But at some point in this process, the cacao becomes cocoa. Chocolate has been made from cacao for a very long time, and it has a long and deep global history, much of which is widely still unknown. Most of what we do know about chocolate only happened in the last one to two hundred years, but we know it’s existed for thousands! (If you’d like to learn more about the history of chocolate, we’d love to host you in our Edible History of Chocolate classes). 

 

So, if cacao is a seed that becomes chocolate, then what is cocoa, and what is a cocoa bean? 

A harvested cacao pod, displaying the pulpy fruit surrounding cacao seeds

 

Good question. Even in dictionaries, cacao and cocoa are often used interchangeably. Because of that lack of clarity, the craft chocolate community has been trying to come to an agreement about how we all define things, including the difference between cacao and cocoa. One simple distinction that we like to make is that cacao refers to the unprocessed state, while cocoa is the processed state. But here is where it gets a little more complicated.

 

 

When does ‘processing’ begin? The minute human hands are involved, say at harvest? Or, is it when the chemical state of the seed has shifted, say during fermentation?

We like this summarized definition that was shared with us by the folks at the Cocoa Research Center at the University of the West Indies.

“The cacao becomes cocoa when the cotyledon dies. The cotyledon is the part of the seed that would become the first leaves of the plant. The death of the cotyledon changes the future of the seed; it ceases to be a plant and will become something tasty to eat instead. This simple distinction helps us identify when the destiny of the cacao changes from becoming a living thing to becoming a product.”

So, put simply?

Cocoa [koh-koh]:  the seeds of the Theobroma cacao tree, once the fermentation process has killed the cotyledon.

But, wait, what about cocoa powder? Isn’t that “cocoa”?

Cocoa powder; what remains of cocoa nibs after the cocoa butter is pressed out

Well yes. Kind of. Out in the world, sometimes the word cocoa, or ‘hot cocoa’, is used in reference to cocoa powder. Cocoa powder is made by pressing most of the fat (or cocoa butter, rather) out of winnowed cocoa beans, and then grinding up the solid mass that’s left after the pressing.

So technically, if you’re using our definition of things, cocoa powder is cocoa because the cotyledon is definitely dead, but the word cocoa could refer to a lot of things, not necessarily only cocoa powder. It’s one of those ‘a-square-is-a-rectangle-but-a-rectangle-isn’t-a square’ kind of definition.   

Clear as mud, right? If anything, I hope you’ve taken away a few lessons from this little rundown. Namely, chocolate is not a narcotic or a coconut.

 

In summary:

COCA:  Coca leaves were once a spiritual and medicinal plant that, over time and with heavy processing, turned into a controlled substance. Coca has nothing to do with chocolate.

COCO: Although many chocolate makers may use various parts of the coconut palm in their chocolate for additional flavor, chocolate itself does not come from coco(nut).

CACAO: The seed which grows off the Theobroma Cacao tree and is the main ingredient for chocolate.

COCOA: A debated term. Often alone, cocoa refers to a comforting hot chocolatey drink (at least in the United States). Within the chocolate industry, many use cocoa or cocoa bean to differentiate a cacao seed once it has been processed.

 

References:

Coca:

http://www.cocamuseum.com/history-of-the-coca-plant/

https://www.tni.org/en/primer/coca-leaf-myths-and-reality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca#Traditional_uses

Coco:

http://www.coconutrepublic.org/coconut_story.php

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110624142037.htm

Cocoa:

https://sta.uwi.edu/cru/