Chocolate from the Source

News Covers Madre Chocolate's Xoconusco Success

Wed, 3 Aug 2011 03:45:50 -1000

We're getting into the final hours of our campaign and we're so close we can almost taste it... the delicious, rich, fruity, creamy royal Aztec Xoconusco chocolate bars! But these bars can only become a reality if we make it all the way to 100% funding in the next 11 days. We're just past 72% funded so tell your friends, tell your family, tell your neighbors, tell strangers that if they want great tasting, original & traditional chocolate made with direct trade cacao grown organically by Mayan farmers in Chiapas, they need to back this project soon!
And remember, it's not just donating money to help Chiapas farmers whose ancestors helped invent chocolate get organic certification, get better fermenting equipment, preserve their traditional chocolate recipes & rare endangered spices, and bring this authentic traditional chocolate to the rest of the world, but for your backing you also get tons of great rewards like super rare bars we'll make from the first hand-roasted batch of Xoconusco cacao and hard-to-find spices, bars designed specifically to your wants and needs, and private chocolate classes. These delicious limited edition bars are worth the donation alone!
In fact, in a tasting we took part in at the Fine Chocolate Industry Association meeting in Washington DC on July 9th before the Fancy Food Show with our first limited run Xoconusco chocolate bars made with the aromatic maple-scented Oaxacan spice rosita de cacao

and carefully selected cocoa beans hand roasted on a traditional ceramic comal griddle in Chiapas,

we received unanimous praise from attendees.
Even stacked up against such renowned fine chocolate makers as Bonnat, Valrhona, Amano, Felchlin, and Pacari that the tasting organizer, the famous Cuban chef Maricel Presilla, had deftly arranged in a historical and geographic order from cacao & chocolate's origins in South and Central America, people including the founder of Dagoba Chocolate were waxing on, even with their small sample, about how much they loved the delicate aroma of the rosita with the fine, smooth, and fruity taste of the Aztec Royal Criollo cacao-based chocolate. They were wondering when they could get full bars of our chocolate into their stores and mouths. But you can have several bars of this rare chocolate before any of the chocerati that were at the meeting if we can get to 100% backing in 11 more days.
It's not just the best chocolate makers and tasters in the country, but the local news in Hawaii is also excited about our project as both a way to get local sustainable economies rejuvenated in both Chiapas and Hawaii, and as way to jumpstart the world of chocolate makers in Hawaii since we will use a small part of the kickstarter funds to be some of the first people to bring medium scale chocolate-making equipment to Hawaii. Right now it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem with chocolate here- no one wants to plant a ton of cacao since there's no equipment to process it on the islands, and no one wants to bring in the equipment since there's not enough cacao grown here currently to keep the equipment busy. This recent Honolulu Magazine article explains a bit of that issue and how we've been building up the equipment bit by bit, and supplementing the growing Hawaiian cacao production with modest shipments from Latin America. Imminent Hawaii food writer Martha Cheng's article in Honolulu Weekly describes how we and some other local small food businesses are using Kickstarter to get things started right.
And that's where you all come in- helping us get chocolate started right, with a sense of history, ethics, sustainability, locality, and most of all, deliciousness. So please spread the word to anyone you can to help us and the Mexican cacao farmers bring you great tasting chocolate by backing our campaign. We hope to send you some of those tasty results in only 11 days!

Tales from Chocolate Mecca: Oaxaca

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 01:46:02 -1000

After the success of finding exactly the right delicious cacao in Xoconusco, Chiapas to make you all hundreds of bars of Royal Aztec Chocolate, our trip to Oaxaca state was an even bigger success, where we located great sources for Vanilla from its geographic origins in Chinantla, Rosita de Cacao flowers and the foamed chocolate drink Tejate they are used to make, tons of nifty molinillo foaming sticks, plumeria flower infused bu’pu foamed drinks in Juchitan, and plenty of other chocolate drinks and preparations wherever we turned. As soon as you enter Oaxaca city you are struck by the wonderful rich smell of chocolate drinks like champurrado, mole vendors in each market, and cacao grinders on practically every corner, grinding up ingredients for chocolate recipes to your specifications. Though there is almost no cacao grown in Oaxaca state, this is truly the Mecca for traditional chocolate use and where the idea for starting Madre Chocolate was sparked.
The most common form in which you see chocolate in Oaxaca is in mole. There are many kinds of mole (at least 8 in Oaxaca alone) with different colors, spices, and bases, but the one most known outside of Mexico and the one with chocolate, mole poblano meaning it is a mole that comes from the state of Puebla. It usually has roasted chilis, roastedpumpkin seeds, tomatoes, raisins, almonds, garlic, oregano, cinnamon, cloves, and many other indigenous Mexican spices. To make a mole base, you can spend hours toasting, peeling, and grinding cacao and other spices or you can go to one of the plethora of these cacao grinding shops:

Where you can just tell them what amounts of cacao, cinnamon, cloves, and almonds you want ground together and they'll do it for you in a few minutes for a tiny charge. The Soledad shop I talked to said they grind about 400 lbs a week on their machines and they have to redress the grinding stones each week! The smell in these shops is absolutely heavenly for any chocophile, and you can get plenty of chocolate drink bases (with the rich cocoa butter still in there, not just cocoa powder) to satisfy your chocolate cravings by making something like an excellent champurrado with corn, water, and loads of rich chocolate.
Another part of our chocolate that was inspired by Oaxaca aside from the company idea was our Amaranth Crunch bar, based on the Alegria bars that are easily found in any market or street corner vendors. Alegrias are like rice crispy treats made most commonly from the popped healthy supergrain amaranth mixed with honey but also can be found made from pumpkin seeds, puffed corn, sesame seeds, peanuts, or a blend of all the above. Collect the whole set like we did pictured here in a small market in SE Oaxaca city in front of a tasty glass of horchata, a delicious and refreshing drink made from rice milk, almonds and cinnamon.

When Dave was living in Oaxaca last year he so loved snacking on the healthy & tasty amaranth alegrias that he was decided we just had to make a chocolate bar with the popped amaranth. Amaranth is the north American relative of quinoa, both supergrains in the spinach and beet family that have a complete set of amino acids, unlike regular grains like rice, corn, and wheat in the grass family which need to be mixed with legumes to have a complete set of Amina acids. Because of its nutritiousness, amaranth was a staple crop of the Aztecs that the Spanish conquistadors unfortunately outlawed since they thought its use in making temple sculptures was sacrilegious. This outlawing of their staple food possibly contributed to the downfall of the Aztecs and its use and growth now are supposedly at about 1/10th the levels at the height of the Aztec empire! We met the great group Puente de la Salud Comunitaria who are working in Oaxaca to encourage the replanting and use of this great food. It's a beautiful ornamental to boot that grows easily in temperate North America, Hawaii, and Mexico (as pictured here at the gorgeous lush Oaxaca ethnobotanical garden).

The Oaxaca ethnobotanical garden is the only solely ethnobotanical garden we've ever seen or heard of in the world and it's a stunning celebration of all food, medicinal, dye, and psychoactive plants of the West Coast of Mexico. Another plan that was great to see there was the rosita de cacao, flor de cacao, cacahuaxochitl, or poyomatli, an incredibly heady smelling flower said to be redolent of maple syrup, fenugreek, and curry. Here a vendor in the vast Abastos market sells rosita de cacao along with several of the other spices used to make the delicious foamed drink tejate, like pixtle or the seed of the mamey sapote fruit, cloves, jaguar cacao, and regular cacao:

Just around the corner from the spice and flower vendors, you can find women selling the white foamy tejate, which they’ve been mixing and foaming all day with sticks or tools called molinillo (“little grinder”) that are like low-tech hand blenders and were introduced by the Spaniards centuries ago where they quickly supplanted the Mayan foaming technique of pouring back and forth between to vessels from a height of several feet. The molinillos you can find in Abastos market as well, in nearly a million sizes and configurations:

The foam stirred up by the molinillo comes from the combination of the fat from the cacao beans, calcified jaguar cacao, and some of the spices. This foam is what most people in Mexico enjoy most about chocolate drinks. When you are served this “drink” in the beautiful jicara (painted calabash fruit shells) you can see at this vendor’s stand, you actually mainly get a bowl of foam that you eat with a spoon, not a liquid. I like to say that the indigenous Mesoamericans were making high-tech foams with keen plant chemistry thousands of years before the new rash of molecular gastronomists like Ferran Adria and Grant Achatz, who are obsessed with foams, were even born. This white foamy “drink” is a bit chalky at first from the calcified jaguar cacao, but the flavor and aroma are so addictive that you find yourself craving this foam that is like breathing in chocolate laced with the beautiful scent of the Oaxacan air.

These great flavor combinations and spices unknown outside of this area of Mexico are what we are trying to bring to the rest of the world with chocolate bars like our rosita de cacao bar made with Xoconusco cacao. With all of your incredible help backing us and spreading the word, we’ve gotten over halfway to our $15,000 kickstarter project funding goal in just 1/2 the time allotted. We’d love it if you could continue to tell your friends, family, and coworkers who love delicious artisanal chocolate or like supporting organic farmers about our project so we can make the final push to fund our project before the deadline in 20 days and get all those chocolate bar rewards out to you!
In our next update we’ll cover the last part of Oaxaca- Juchitan where they make the mythical bu'pu chocolate drink with the super fragrant plumeria or flor de mayo flower, commonly found in Hawaii leis, and how our Xoconusco chocolate with rosita de cacao was a smash hit at the Fine Chocolate Industry Association meeting in Washington DC last weekend. Stay tuned for more great updates!

From the Road in Xoconusco, Chiapas

Wed, 6 Jul 2011 01:39:26 -1000

Hola and Aloha everyone, from Juchitan, Oaxaca, Mexico!
Thanks a million to everyone who's backed us, we're forever indebted to you, and we're slowly reaching our goal. We wanted to give you this update and encourage to tell all your friends & family about our project so we can be sure to get it funded, and we can truly benefit all the amazing cacao farmers and traditional chocolate makers we've been meeting over the last 2 weeks in Chiapas & Oaxaca! So if you have a moment, please pass this on to everyone you know.
We wanted to give you a taste of what we've found down here so far. On getting to Tapachula at the center of the Xoconusco Cacao growing region of Chiapas, we met with the CASFA cacao coop and were quickly introduced to cacao growers and fermentation centers in 4 towns, Santa Cecilia, Tusantan, Plan de Ayala, and Huehuetan, where the mainly Criolo cacao grew in biodiverse, multicrop orchards, under the shade of towering palm trees and frilly-leafed soil-enriching legume trees like the ear pod and guaje:

They had all made incredible improvements to their fermentation techniques since we'd visited them last year, using wooden boxes covered with banana leaves where the cacao is turned every day:

or these excellent new barrel fermenters made with a Cuban design

that really got the heat up inside so nice & high we could hardly keep our hand in there for very long:

But of all the cacao growing areas we saw, Santa Cecilia in the mountains had the most beautiful setting for growing their cacao:

with cacao drying areas on the roof, out of the reach of chickens:

Don Isidro who runs this cacao growing & fermentation group with his family were incredibly nice, and probably due to the great mountain climate and his excellent fermentation techniques, they had the best cacao we tasted in Chiapas. A beautifully fruity taste without much astringency. And he and his family were really excited to taste the chocolate we'd made from some Mexican beans and brought with us, as these cacao growers rarely get to taste what happens to their cacao when it leaves the state and the country.
Let me tell you, we tasted a lot of cacao from the CASFA warehouse in order to select the best beans, probably a pound each between Dave and I of raw cacao a day (that's 100% chocolate, so the equivalent of about 1.5 lbs or 13 bars of dark chocolate), so we were pretty wired by the end of the day
But it was all worth it when we got to kick back with a nice cup of locally made chocolate drink like this Champurrado made with cacao, sugar, cinnamon, and white corn atole or porridge and is filling, refreshing, and delicious all at once!

So when we get the funding with all of your help to buy 1000 lbs of this cacao, we know exactly which one we will get, and that we can help all these communities with your support by buying them barrel fermenters which do the best job of getting the heat up on the cacao and producing excellent tasting beans! We've taken small samples of these beans back to Hawaii, some after roasting on the traditional clay comal pan, which we will turn into a small batch of limited edition bars to thank you, our backers.
We also got some great news while we were in Chiapas that Nat will be teaching a bean-to-bar chocolate making class in New York City and the beautiful new Saveur Magazine test kitchen, that we've been asked to travel all the way to Sweden to teach a similar class, that chocolate bon bon makers in Belgium want to order our chocolate over even the internationally renowned Belgian chocolate, and that our new limited edition Xoconusco Rosita de Cacao chocolate bars, fresh out of the molds, will be kindly featured by Maricel Presilla at her exclusive tasting at the Fine Chocolate Industry Association meeting in Washington DC, on July 9! Things are really starting to take off!
Our next update will be from Oaxaca where will give you a taste of all the amazing and aromatic spices and flowers that are used in their traditional chocolate drinks like tejate, bu'pu, atole, pozol, and more. Stay tuned, and please ask everyone you know to make this project a success!

On our way to the Motherland of Chocolate

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 03:21:43 -1000

David and Nat, Madre Chocolate cofounders, are on their way to Xoconusco, Chiapas, Mexico to look for prized Aztec cacao stands in support of our project to go beyond fair trade, and buy directly from the farmers in this ancient cacao growing region of the Aztecs and put chocolate making back in its place, in Central America where it originated. We’ve started a kickstarter campaign with the video above explaining the whole project, so you can help out too if you would like.

David and I will post pictures and info as we are making our way from Oaxaca to Chiapas and back, keeping you up to date on traditional regional chocolate drinks and preparations, cacao varieties, and the CASFA Maya coop that grows this excellent cacao.

Dave is already in Oaxaca sending back great pictures of pepita alegrias (pumpkin seed brittle) which may make it into some of our future bars)

tejate (an excellent foamed Oaxacan chocolate drink usually made with cacao, patashte or jaguar cacao, rosita de cacao, pixtle, and coyol palm)

and some of the cacao pods we'll be checking out.

Nat will join Dave in a few days, and together they will try to help reintroduce the rest of the world to the incredibly delicious chocolate recipes and ingredients from Mexico & Central America that have remained hidden for so long. Stay tuned for more updates soon, and please consider backing our kickstarter campaign to help support direct trade of cacao and the long edible history of chocolate!

Eating the Streets of Chocolate

Tue, 7 Jun 2011 01:31:44 -1000

We miss you. It’s been way too long. How come you never write anymore?

No, but seriously, we’ve been overwhelmingly busy making chocolate bars non stop for the last few months to meet all your demand for Hawaiian bean-to-bar chocolate. Since we last left you, we hired our first wonderful employee (Kristen, who strangely has won Employee of the Month each of last 3 months), had some wonderful videos made by our friends Shirley and Stan from Chop Chop Media, got a new 65 lb chocolate grinder named Bertha Ganesh to seriously step up our chocolate production, starting selling our chocolate in our online store & gourmet food shops all around Hawaii and the Mainland, and sent our chocolate as near as Waikiki and as far as New Caledonia, Australia, Ireland, England, and Belgium! We feel very honored that our chocolate is in demand in such far flung places and in Belgium, a country synonymous with the production of the world’s finest chocolate.

Our new melangeur Bertha Ganesh grinding away at 40 lbs of beautifully rich, smooth Waialua dark chocolate

In addition to the Hawai’i Kai and Hale’iwa Farmers Market we do each weekend, we are excited to be taking part in several new markets in O’ahu including the super-local Kaka’ako Makai Farmers Market on Friday evenings 4:30-8 PM at Ward Ave and Ala Moana Blvd and the fun, all-night eating blitz, Eat the Street where we had a great time chowing down on tasty tacos from great food trucks like Tacos Vincente, hanging out with the food bloggers from Nonstop Honolulu, snacking on delicious curried fish from Irie Jerk truck, serving up hundreds of our chocolate bars from our table and the newly christened Choco-Cycle food “truck” in support of the greening of Honolulu, and breathing fire into the sky after eating a few too many of our own spicy Chipotle Allspice organic fair-trade Dominican chocolate bars. It was great fun, we love meeting all of you face to face, and we hope to see you when we return at the July 29th Eat the Street with some of our newly introduced flavors.

Now we’re off to Oaxaca and Chiapas Mexico to hunt for rare spices and bring back 1000 lbs of Mexican cacao processed in Xoconusco, Chiapas to support the cacao growing cooperative and communities there. Look for our Kickstarter campaign to be launched this week to help support this effort and if all goes well, we’ll be able to bring you fine, gourmet chocolate made with traditional Mexican cacao and spices like rosita de cacao, orijuelas, sapayul, sacuanjoche, and jaguar cacao. The Central American cornucopia of delicious spiced chocolate is endless!

Hope to see you at the next Eat the Street in July to get some tasty chocolate samples from the Choco-Cycle!

Thanks for coming out to the Hale'iwa Cacao Festival

Wed, 2 Feb 2011 01:45:14 -1000

We had a great time this past Sunday, January 30th, at the Hale'iwa Cacao Festival, talking to all the enthusiastic festival goers about how cacao is grown and turned into chocolate, handing out samples of our 6 flavors in our Mexican and Hawaiian lines, ducking from the rain, and watching our bars fly off the table, especially the Big Island Passion Fruit flavor which completely sold out in a few hours! In addition to that, we had other popular flavors like Big Island Earl Grey Tea, Organic Fair Trade Dominican Hibiscus, Organic Fair Trade Dominican Chipotle Allspice “Xocoxochitl”, and Raw Venezuelan Criollo from Mantuano.

People seemed to have a great time tasting chocolate and playing with all the chocolate-related plants we had on display like achiote or lipstick plant, patashte (white cacao or jaguar cacao), plumeria flowers, and the almondy-smelling mamey sapote seeds, all used in traditional chocolate drinks in Oaxaca, Puebla, Chiapas, Tabascao, and Vera Cruz states of Mexico. It was great to see our friends from Kokoleka O’Ka Aina, Malie Kai Chocolate, Manoa Chocolate, the Hawai’i Chocolate Festival, and Waialua Estate.

This was a great way to kick off Hawai’i Grown Cacao Month which will culminate with the Hawai’i Chocolate Festival at Dole Cannery, Honolulu on February 26 where we’ll be teaching a chocolate tasting class and sampling and selling our bars, many vendors will be sampling chocolate in all its forms, and you'll get to meet some of the cacao growers from Hawaii that we work with like Tom Sharkey, mentioned in this Honolulu Magazine article along with us. If you can’t make this festival, or just want to learn more about chocolate and other aspects of ethnobotany, please take a look at our class page for the bean-to-bar chocolate making, spices & herbs, medicinal plants, and psychoactive plants classes we’ll be teaching over the next few months in Honolulu.

We hope to catch up with you at one of these fun events!

Chocolate gets even healthier recently

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 01:37:19 -1000

After watching Woody Allen’s classic slapstick comedy movie ‘Sleeper’ where they mention that in the future, they have proven that hot fudge and cream pies are some of the healthiest things for you, I was thinking about how we have gone in only about 15 years from thinking chocolate is terrible for the human body, causing pimples, racing hearts, obesity, and certain death, to the current understanding that chocolate is actually really good for you. This is a great turn around and one that many of chocophiles were expecting!

There has been plenty of research on how the Kuna in Panama due to their high daily chocolate intake have much lower death rates from diabetes and heart disease than one might expect, probably from the high antioxidant flavonol content of dark chocolate drinks they consumed. There have also been many studies of the LDL cholesterol and blood pressure lowering properties of chocolate, and even that some of the traditional drinks of Central America like tascalate that contain achiote seeds and cacao seeds may prevent malaria, research done by our friend Steven Maranz at Cornell Weill Medical Center in New York.

Now in the last few weeks there have been two new exciting studies on the healthful benefits of chocolate, including the mechanism by which chocolate lowers blood pressure by inhibiting the blood-pressure-raising enzyme ACE (just as many ACE inhibitor prescription drugs do), as mentioned in this overview article and in the original research done at Linköping University in Sweden. The other interesting recent chocolate research showed that elderly women who consumed chocolate at least once a week had lower rates of fatty plaques in their large blood vessels and fewer heart disease-related hospitalizations and deaths.

Further good news is that the cacao that Madre mainly uses from Chiapas, Mexico is one of the highest in the antioxidants that gives most of these benefits, of all the cacao we looked at from Central America, the Caribbean, and Africa, so you can eat less, have less sugar, and still get the same amounts of beneficial antioxidants as eating large amounts of other chocolate.

Now we just have to work on proving that those cream pies are good for you too! ;-)

Teaching chocolate history at Xokolatl café in Los Angeles

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 03:43:17 -1000

I was listening to KCRW’s Good Food radio show the other day, which is my favorite food show not only because I’ve been on it a few times, but because it’s always been an excellent source of information about delicious food, strange food like eating insects, and food politics, with the super knowledgable and vivacious host Evan Kleinman.

On last weeks show on Chinese Wine, The Foreclosure Gardener, Mexican Hot Chocolate, and Compost they mentioned the Xocolatl Café in Los Angeles, which sounds like it’s doing a great job of both teaching everyone in the area about the roots of cacao and chocolate in Southern Mexico, and teaching kids in two local charter schools their cultural history connected with chocolate while helping ensure they can learn the Aztec Nahuatl language.

It may be a while before I can make it to LA to try this place out, but from the video that Good Food posted and one on Dispierta America (in Spanish) it looks like many of the drinks they make like pozol (corn and chocolate drink), xocolicious, and popo (a foamed chocolate drink from Veracruz) are both tasty and authentic, made with cacao beans from Xoconusco, Chiapas, where we have been getting many of our organic beans. The hibiscus lemongrass drink, though not native to Central America, is also a super refreshing, delicious drink found in some form throughout Mexico, and the hibiscus is something we’ve been incorporating into our popular Candied Hibiscus chocolate bars. The food at Xocolatl looks great too, with squash blossom quesadillas, red corn pozole (hominy corn, not to be confused with pozol, the drink), and blue corn pancakes.

I can’t wait to try this place, but in the meantime, everyone out there in So Cal should go there, have some scrumptious food & drink, learn about chocolate history, and support the local schools!

Our Chocolate at the Smithsonian

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 23:54:23 -1000

We just found out here at Madre Chocolate that we have the great honor of being invited to take part in a chocolate tasting at a Chocolate Symposium on the history, present, and future of chocolate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC on October 23rd! This is a very esteemed event to be part of with only 7 other craft chocolate makers taking part. There will be talks by such luminaries (chocorati?) as Cameron McNeil, editor of the award-winning book Chocolate in Mesoamerica; Marcy Norton, author of the intriguing book Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures; and Mark Christian, creator of the amazingly in depth and insanely informative chocolate guide to the world website, C-spot.com, which will be launched on the day of the event (so keep checking that link!). Mark has sent us some previews of his region guides and single origin bar tasting reviews, and it goes beyond any chocolate tasting website we’ve ever seen!

We of course have to give huge shout outs to everyone who has helped us pull together at the last minute to be part of this great event and get our super secret stellar new chocolate flavor that represents the history of cacao prepared in time: Abby, Daniela, Linda, Kurt, Joelle Azoulay, Seneca Klassen, Doug, Alejandra, Loren, Skip, Maurizio and the countless other people who offered their help and services. Wish us luck for the next week as this will be our big national launch and we’ll start taking holiday chocolate orders soon after that for all of you that have been asking where to get our chocolate! Watch this space.

We decided on a name: Madre Chocolate!

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 21:58:46 -1000

After much deliberation, soul searching, and tons of help from all of you, who were kind enough to offer your invaluable ideas via our survey, we have decided on a name for our company; Madre Chocolate. Pronounced “ma-dray choe-koe-laht-eh”, this is Spanish for “Mother Chocolate" and represents what we are trying to accomplish: share chocolate from its birthplace in Mexico with people in the US to inspire, educate, and delight. Our opening line-up of chocolate will take you direct to the source, incorporating traditional Mexican, Aztec, Maya, and Mesoamerican ingredients in an organic, fair trade chocolate that celebrates the rich history of cacao, from the tree’s origin in South America to the discovery of chocolate in modern day Southern Mexico and Guatemala.

With a name in place, we are getting ever closer to producing enough bars that we can send to all of you that have been requesting them, many of whom have had little, enticing samples of what we’ve been working on. Stay tuned here for news on when and where to buy our one-of-a-kind bars and other fascinating stories from the world of chocolate!