From “Las Acacias” (Criollo) and “Los Ujuxtes” (Trinitario), we were guided along his various percentages from 60, 70 and 75%. The different formulations were very well done, better it seemed than the bars I had some months ago, and it was a treat to discover the potential of Guatemela grown cacao. The cacao flavors from this country are unique, the only bar that came to my mind as reference was Duffy’s “Indio Rojo”. Not unknown to Carlos, who kept going in detail on many aspects of cacao and sharing his passion and knowledge with us.

On top of the range, Danta now also offers their Chuao bar, one that certainly deserves your attention. The roast is in between Amano (too light?) and Pralus (too much?). Carlos’ mild version puts this bar one a good spot amidst the growing Chuao releases. A creamy melt with various very gentle tones makes it a very pleasant experience.
We then also compared the Chuao’s from Pralus and Domori, which unfortunately weren’t in best shape, and didn’t match Danta’s freshness. Carlos also brought Chuao beans to taste, which were delicious! Finally I treated all on a single estate bar from hacienda San José, Venezuela, made with the Canoabo Criollo variety. Great way to end this evening.

Thanks to Carlos for being a wonderful guest and taking all who attended down the cacao trail. Next tasting event is soon, some themes in consideration, so keep an eye on our events and I hope to seduce you to join Choqoa.

Related Stories:

1. Report: The First Choqoa Tasting Event
2. Report: The 2nd Choqoa Tasting Event
3. Report: Choqoa Tasting Event 10.1

I still remember the first night at the hotel bar in San José, Costa Rica. Charley just came in late from the airport when he shared some of his samples. His intriguing Rio Caribe was one of the strongest I ever had, well hello nice to meet you too.

Charley Wheelock only recently decided to become a craft chocolate maker. His designer background will surely help him to develop a personal take on the chocolate experience. We shared a lot of time together as two cacao comrades. On the tour he absorbed all knowledge and experience to strengthen his skills, so I’m very happy to see Woodblock came alive. And from what I tasted then, I hope the world gets more of it.

He was a great guy to share this amazing Costa Rica experience with, and I hope our chocolate trails may cross again one day soon. Enjoy the video!

Related Stories:

1. Costa Rica finally changed my relation with chocolate.
2. The Fruit of Costa Rica
3. Crushing My Passion, all the way to Costa Rica!

My Aunt (and Stéphane Bonnat)

Once upon a bean, my aunt came back from France. Since long I was the chocolate guy of the family. She gifted me 6 different bars of Bonnat, a first glimpse on the goods, total disappointment.
What is this French brand I had never heard of? They’re all the same 75% bars?! (yeah the percentages, he). Thanks though. Let’s just unwrap and tuck into it.
And I still remember that couch where I ate a chunk of all 6 different origin bars. For those in the know, that’s where my lust became a passion. My aunt changed me from candy to chocolate with the discovery of origins .

Bertil Akesson

Meeting Bertil was a fine coinicidence. He reacted to a blogpost on one of my tasting events, where we had tasted his bar. I replied with enthusiasm, and at all odds, he happened to stay in Antwerp for a while.
We scheduled and soon I ended up spending a whole morning with Bertil. I had no agenda, just driven by curiosity to learn. Our encounter was pleasantly informal, and we enjoyed talking things on chocolate and life.
Bertil Akesson changed my knowledge about how plantations – and its owners, work with chocolate makers. I had never been in talk with a person on the trader/plantation side. But Bertil shed light in that dark knowledge spot of me, with simple facts and personal stories.

Steve Devries

I feel very fortunate to have spent a 10-day cacao tour in Costa Rica with Steve DeVries, and a fine gang of other cacao aficionado’s. Needles to say, this trip changed a whole perspective.
Steve was a geiser of knowledge, guiding us through the fields of chocolate uncensored. The whole gang talked beans and bars 24/7. I have some videos coming up soon.
Hightlights can be read on my posts on Costa Rica.

You & All Choqoa Fans

Yes, all of you too 100%.  Those who read, and eat, those who share, those who come to taste. I should do more on helping you spreading the passion for fine chocolate still. Inspire me!
All your encouraging responses to Choqoa Selections and the Choqoa Tasting Events so far, change a bit how I look at cacao and appreciate chocolate. Because you share with me how you rediscover chocolate, and I’ll be happy to give more in return.

Looking forward to your comments, and keep on sharing Chocolate!

Related Stories:

1. Costa Rica finally changed my relation with chocolate.
2. Report: The First Choqoa Tasting Event
3. Choqoa opens its new chocolate season with taste!

Meet Carlos Eichenberger from Danta Chocolate, Guatemala.

The new Choqoa Tastings will carry adventurous themes, and our first session features a special guest, all the way from Guatemala!
Carlos Eichenberger from Danta Chocolate is producing his own chocolate in the country of origin, Guatemala. He buys already fermented cacao and then starts with roasting and goes all the way to wrapping each bar.
Sourcing beans from specific “fincas” (or cacao estates) he currently offers crafted bars from ‘Los Ujuxtes’ and ‘Las Acacias’. On top of that he’s also trying to work some legendary Venezuelan beans, let’s hope we will be able to taste all of them…

While Carlos is in Europe, he will join Choqoa to share his stories with you at our tasting event soon, on September 7th, in Antwerp.

Register now

You can register directly here below for this unique occasion, or on this event’s page for this tasting session. RSVP required! And don’t hesitate to share this with your friends.

For our other future tasting events, more info and details will be updated and shared with you through our tasting events overview.
Let’s rediscover chocolate!

Related Stories:

1. Report: Choqoa Tasting with Carlos Eichenberger, Danta Chocolate, Guatemala.
2. Choqoa opens its new chocolate season with taste!
3. Report: Choqoa Tasting Event 10.2

On Saturday, Steve voluntarily took some of the early arrivers to the vibrant fruit market and showed us around through the various colorful stalls, exposing a wealth of fruit known and unknown to me. The usual mango I had turned out to be unlike any mango I had before, and the cainito was unlike any fruit I ever saw. There were varieties of pineapples, guavas, papayas and limes, fruits with flesh or pulp, with seeds or juice. A contest of deliciousness in flavors unknown!

This extremely tasteful start of the Costa Rica tour triggered a first reflection on appreciating cacao, and more specific chocolate bars. What is the relevance of reviews that focus on listing a series of references to what we know. What use in describing a food to taste like apple, peach and mango if everybody may have a different experience and reference to that flavor? Or even doesn’t know the fruit. I’d love to point out a bar has hints of cas or limon dulce, who will tell me wrong where I live.

In extension of these philosophical meanderings, it reminded me that the places where cacao grows and where chocolate is eaten are far away from each other. Another disruptive thought on appreciating chocolate as we know. Well, just some ‘food for thought’ here, but it intrigues me.

Steve warned us, at the end of the week you will merely know what you don’t know. So what are your thoughts on appreciating and reviewing food?

Related Stories:

1. Costa Rica finally changed my relation with chocolate.
2. Crushing My Passion, all the way to Costa Rica!
3. Choqoa Video: Charley “Woodblock” Wheelock, on tour in Costa Rica.

You may be enjoying the thing you like as much as you want, read books on it, do activities around it, and some more. But at a given moment you’ll get that itch that makes you go to the true source. To understand a tiny bit more what it really is that you like so much. To get a different angle. To reinterpret why you love it, and why it’s fun. Finally embracing cacao physically and mentally shaped my ambitions.
After 10 days in Costa Rica, I come back from a succesful ‘de-platonizing’ experience, and I now know what I don’t know yet. And even if I did not have any particular expectations, this trip exceeded all of them, and I will share it as much as I can with as many people.

Through some following blog posts, photo and video, let’s take you to the fruit of the gods. Thank you Ecole Chocolat for the great tour, thank you Steve Devries for being the geyser of knowledge and inspiration, and all the enthusiast people for the never ever ending talks.

And thank you cacao for being here, the food of the future. Pura Vida!

Related Stories:

1. Crushing My Passion, all the way to Costa Rica!
2. Choqoa Video: Charley “Woodblock” Wheelock, on tour in Costa Rica.
3. The Fruit of Costa Rica

[photo by Corey'sWorld]

I’m seizing the unique opportunity to join an international program to explore cacao in Costa Rica with Ecole Chocolat. Led by one of the grand icons of fine origin cacao, Steve Devries, we will tour with a small group through different locations:

A week long adventure will take you to the historical roots of cacao growing during harvest. Not only will your chocolate making benefit from a much better understanding of cacao cultivation and processing but you will engage in spirited dialogue on the future of fine chocolate flavor.

On many occasions people ask me where I want to go with Choqoa. The answer is always that I can’t tell. Eventually it’s not me who decides. It’s where my passion leads me, or more correct: the way all of you keep responding to my passion. That’s why I keep on crushing it as hard as I can. Costa Rica will certainly give new directions and inspiration to share.
And I’m looking forward to shake hands with Gary Vaynerchuck tomorrow too on the Phare conference.

Follow Choqoa and help everybody to rediscover chocolate!

Related Stories:

1. Costa Rica finally changed my relation with chocolate.
2. The Fruit of Costa Rica
3. Choqoa Video: Charley “Woodblock” Wheelock, on tour in Costa Rica.

All I had was Madagascar beans, cocoa butter, sugar, a Magimix and a hairdryer. So what follows is just for the fun, don’t take it too serious, yet!

Taking of the shell of roasted beans

From François Pralus, I had some Madagascar beans to show for my tasting events. They were already roasted by the master himself, so all I had left to do was take away the shell off the beans. But gosh, what a job! It’s even worse than pistachio nuts. The big thing here was how best to separate the thin fragile shell from the bean itself.

Breaking them gave me too much waste though for this home experiment. I quickly understood why we invented machines for this, ha! I experimented with a hairdryer to blow out the shell pieces, but with a force to weak. The dust cleaner to suck instead of blow (something I learned from the Mast Brothers’ home equipment), but that was to strong though and sucked almost half of my materials! Then I tried outdoors to blow from underneath myself through a sieve. Luckily neighbors were out to miss this foolish looking scene. Hehe…

So I ended up breaking the shells of bean by bean by hand. Big learnings so far. Excellent! Playing around with Mast Brother’s technique works inspiring and now am even more curious how Patric and Rogue or Pralus and Bonnat handle this… Same or different machines? We’ll find out, some day.

Making the liquor / cacao mass

At this stage I’m having 200 grams of pealed, roasted beans. Time to bring in technology called Magimix. Let’s see here what happens if we get those beans turning and spinning for while. For a second I considered hacking the Magimix into something more a grinder, but I stuck with the standard chopping blades. Easy here, just dropping in the beans and push the button.

Very interesting however to see the evolution of things happening. At first the beans are only ‘chopped’ or ground into ever smaller pieces, and then at some stage with the fat coming out more and more, cause of the blades spinning and creating temperature, I slowly saw a paste forming out of the beans. And boy that smell spreading in my kitchen, heavenly! Here I just let it go for while trying to get it to a paste as smooth as possible, but a Magimix has its limits. Ending up now I’m having this gritty paste that tastes just like the beans do. Madagascar style, pretty sour but interesting yummy!

Adding cocoa butter and sugar

When the Magimix seemed to be at the end of its capabilities to make the paste more refined, I thought the time had come to add the extra ingredients. I had bought some cocoa butter in Paris in the fabulous G.Detou foodie store. I simply added the butter to the paste, but I switched from blades to whisk on the Magimix. I thought this would make a more friendly treatment to the chocolate from now on. The gritty paste gave a warm welcome to the butter, and soon they were playing together in something that became like a soup.

For sugar I decided to use icing sugar, since it’s already a bit finer than the regular one. No rocket science involved for now, just let it blend all together. When I thought nothing new was happening, it seemed I was arriving a the end point of this fun home experiment. Technically it’s something like an 80% bar if I do the math. Now up to the final move, pouring this paste into something like a bar.

From paste to… something like a bar

I just poured the soft, warm paste into a simple mould, which went pretty smooth I’d say. Even after it cooled down, there were no ugly bubbles and only subtle textures revealing the pouring flow. Next time I should use a real mould instead of plastic lid though. Make it look a bit more pro : ) The taste development was pretty stuck into sourness though.

Conclusions

The texture off course still is very TAZA like, rough and gritty, however not totally unpleasant to me. The taste though was rather to sour still, almost identical to the aromas of the beans. And it was hard to discover a nice flavour development. Again a though learning that beans need a master to release their talent.
I had it tasted at a Choqoa Tasting event, though I warned everybody this was really for the brave… All fun aside, Kasper from the UGent Cacaolab suggested me to work on a conching thingy, so let’s be creative and see if we can hack some utensil for the next experiment! Your tips are welcome

Related Stories:

1. My first Wine & Chocolate pairing experience
2. Battle of Bonnat: ‘Manufaktum’ Madagascar 100% vs. Cacao Real del Xoconuzco
3. Marcolini Unleashes His Bean-to-bar Passion

What didn’t happen were the many video interviews I planned. Many chocolate people were subject to loaded schedules and the talks I did have left little window for an extra video. So I ended up with only three. And I didn’t shot a single photo. Gosh. Didn’t talk with Stéphane Bonnat, talked but didn’t interview Diego Badaro, and well some other things.
The good news though, I was really glad to run into Clay Gordon again, my inspiring chocophile from the US. Also Bertil Akesson was running a booth for the first time and I finally met a charming Santiago from Pacari. Also nice shaking hands with London’s most talked chocolatier Paul A. Young and Kate Johns, the director of The UK Chocolate Week, and an inevitable warm talk with Valérie from Pralus. It was a great surprise as well to see the Rizek family, the Dominican Republic cacao producer.

My two most inspiring moments were meeting Duane Dove and Chloé Doutre-Rousell. Duane devoted 7 years of his life to revive a true cacao plantation in Tobago, beautiful story. And now he releases his chocolate with the help of François Pralus. And yes I do have a short video with him.
The second encounter with Chloé was the longest talk of the day, but we needed 100 times more time. Her experience, attitude and now the El Ceibo project fired up talks and thoughts on our shared passion. Must be continued. Video, check.

On the chocolate side, it was crowded and the discoveries came from rather unexpected moments. It was not by queuing booths but through sharing passion that those discoveries happened. Tasting the Rizek family chocolate was exciting, trying the ‘El Ceibo Heritage’ was unique, and getting a non commercial sample from a rare Brazil Forastero variety was truly … rediscovering chocolate!

After all an unexpectedly very interesting Salon du Chocolate 2010. And for next year, I do need business cards. Taking a time now to reflect on many things, and do the video edits. More in detail of all of the above soon, for there is of course much more to tell!

Related Stories:

1. Getting ready for the 2010 “Salon du Chocolat” in Paris!
2. Visiting the Salon du Chocolat 2009
3. Video: Interview with François Pralus at Salon du Chocolat

Pre-order the new Salon du Chocolat Selection!

Above all, this is what is getting me excited the most. Just like every year Choqoa will put together a new, special selection with bars discovered at the Salon du Chocolat. It’s what thrives Choqoa: sharing great cacao, and have you rediscover chocolate. And every year so far it was a unique surprise. This year I’m already establishing contacts for a fantastic edition… It’ looks to be an exclusive and limited again.

For a smooth followup I have setup a special order page to make pre-ordering as easy as possible for you. So reserve your Salon 2010 Selection by Choqoa now!
Thank you for spreading the news, and stay in close touch!

Related Stories:

1. The Salon du Chocolat 2010, a first report from Paris.
2. Last call for your orders: 2009 Salon du Chocolat, Paris
3. Video: Childhood Memories with Stéphane Bonnat at Salon du Chocolat