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Making bean-to-bar chocolate isn't for the faint of heart. In 2006, when a 21-year-old Colin Gasko began making chocolate in Minneapolis, he was lucky to have the hubris of youth on his side. “I just thought it was so obscenely crazy to be doing what I was doing,” says Gasko, who in person projects the detached, thoughtful demeanor of a computer engineer. In the years since Gasko founded his Rogue Chocolatier company, the bean-to-bar field has broadened, though with fewer than two dozen makers currently in the U.S., it’s still small. “It's crystallizing into a movement," Gasko says.
Gasko's latest project is equally ambitious: an $11 bar of chocolate called Silvestre, made from wild cacao harvested in the Amazon basin, along Bolivia’s Rio Beni. There’s only been one other attempt—by some Jesuits in the 16th century—to make wild cacao commercially viable, and that failed.
Gasko relies on cacao foragers to obtain the raw ingredient. "They go around in boats,” he says. “There are these huge unkempt trees on the side of the river, and they forage a bunch of pods. They have this incredibly crude post-harvest process, where they dump the seeds and the pulp.” Instead of a typical fermentation facility, foragers fill cloth bags with the wet cacao and hang them from trees before drying.
A centralized buyer collects chocolate from the independent collectors and negotiates sales to chocolatiers. Gasko says that, to the best of his knowledge, he's the only chocolatier in the country producing chocolate exclusively from wild cacao.
When we talked to Gasko he was at work on his third iteration of wild-cacao chocolate (it wasn’t ready for us to taste). "It has this deep, heavy earthiness," Gasko says of the flavor. "It has plum and a little bit of orange and some sort of ... it’s something I can't get my head around, kind of like spices." He pauses for a moment. "It's pretty unique."
But flavor is only half the story. Gasko notes that creating a market for a wild product from the Amazon can help sustain the forest itself. “The idea is that it's more valuable to keep the forest than cut it down."
Craving more chocolate? Read these:
Olive and Sinclair’s Scott Witherow Talks Southern Chocolate
The Meadow’s Mark Bitterman: Don’t Call It Candy!
Image source: Colin Gasko / Rogue Chocolatier
Colin did a great job and it is not so easy and quite risky to take on something that strange. The story behind is to find at:
http://www.frontier-ventures.com/field.html
Regards
Volker
It's not correct that Colin's is the first attempt since Jesuits in the 1500s that someone has tried to commercialize products made from the wild cacao of the Beni. Since long before Colin started up Rogue, Volker Lehmann has been working in another area of the Beni (near the town of Baures) to produce wild cacao beans for export.
Unlike the system Colin describes, Mr Lehmann collects the wet...+READ
It's not correct that Colin's is the first attempt since Jesuits in the 1500s that someone has tried to commercialize products made from the wild cacao of the Beni. Since long before Colin started up Rogue, Volker Lehmann has been working in another area of the Beni (near the town of Baures) to produce wild cacao beans for export.
Unlike the system Colin describes, Mr Lehmann collects the wet seeds from harvesters (paying in cash) and oversees the post-harvest fermentation and drying steps to ensure a more consistent quality product. Many of the beans are destined for Switzerland where the chocolate maker Felchlin has been producing tons of "Cru Sauvage" since before Colin sold his first bar.
The hanging bag fermentation technique Colin mentions is a typical one that has been used for centuries, one that was promoted by the Jesuits. It lends itself to fermentation of small batches. From personal experience I can also tell you that the fresh liquid that drips off the bags (called baba, it's the pulp that surrounds the seeds) is one of the tastiest foods I have ever put in my mouth.
To reply to oldunc. I spent time in the Beni in 2010 and went out with a group of foragers to harvest the wild cacao. What they are doing has very little impact on the forest. Are they "pristine?" Take a read of Charles C Mann's 1491. The first chapter is set in this very region of Bolivia - the Beni. As for the profitable part - it already is. However, the beans grow wild and by definition any kind of cultivation renders them no longer wild. The agricultural method is very low impact (zero agricultural inputs and little labor) and increasing yields (by using fertilizers, pesticides, and other techniques) is not done because it makes no economic sense - the trees are just too scattered to make the investment worth the time involved. The majority of pruning and tree maintenance that does go on goes on during harvest.-COLLAPSE
I gather this isn't part of the "sustainable" movement. Sounds very PC and everything, but I have to wonder what sort of damage these foragers are doing in these still mostly pristine forests- and how much they'll do if this actually becomes profitable.