Chocolate passport

That8217;s where Miller comes in. He8217;s a part-time musician, but looks perfectly at home in the Flatiron district, where the French chocolate maker Michel Cluizel opened a shop in November at ABC Carpet and Home. It is Cluizel8217;s only shop in America and much of the chocolate reflects the specific piece of land where the cacao beans were grown.

Miller8217;s job is to help the baffled but curious make sense of it all. His tools are a tray of foil-wrapped chocolate wafers from several countries, a glass of water and a little bowl of tortilla chips to provide a palate scrub. We pondered the snappy break and acidic finish of chocolate from the African island of Sao Tome and discussed how growing cacao trees in the soil of a former mango grove might result in chocolate with a faint flash of the fruit. We contemplated the raisiny ways of a bar from Papua New Guinea, which Miller suggested would go well with port.

Each chocolate wafer had its story. 8216;8216;It8217;s like reading a novel and eating a novel all at the same time,8217;8217; he said. But when it comes down to it, can he discern Ghana from Grenada? Ecuador from Colombia? 8216;8216;Regions I can tell. Continents, at least,8217;8217; he said. 8216;8216;I8217;m working on the countries.8217;8217;

If our chocolate sommelier can8217;t understand it all, is there hope for the rest of us? Even those who turn cacao pods into artisanal chocolate haven8217;t quite settled on a lexicon for this new way of contemplating chocolate. Some chocolatiers use simpler phrases like single origin, single bean or varietal. Others have gotten more extreme, naming bars after one of the three main varieties of cacao, like the rare criollo, and labelling chocolate made from beans grown on one farm 8216;8216;plantation8217;8217; or 8216;8216;estate8217;8217; chocolate. Harvests believed to be particularly special might even be deemed 8216;8216;grand cru8217;8217;, a term borrowed from winemakers.

8216;8216;That doesn8217;t mean much more than that the chocolatier thought enough of his chocolate to give it a fancy name,8217;8217; said Bill Yosses, the pastry chef at Josephs Citarella restaurant. He is among several pastry chefs and chocolate makers who have been cultivating a quiet, intense relationship with varietal chocolates since the late 1980s, when Valrhona, Lindt and others began producing chocolates identified by both the percentage of cocoa and the beans8217; origins. By 2000, chocolate makers like Cluizel and Gary Guittard in San Francisco were selling chocolate from small plantations, and the first bars marketed to consumers began to show up regularly at specialty stores and upscale groceries.

For those more interested in politics than hedonism, eating chocolate according to country makes it a little easier to figure out the environmental and labour practices behind each bar. The use of child slave labour in cocoa production is of particular concern. In the late 1990s, reports of large numbers of child slaves being used in cocoa production in Ivory Coast began to surface. Since then, the world8217;s major chocolate producers and the Chocolate Manufacturers Association have vowed to work to end child slavery in the cocoa business.

Of course, not every chocolate maker is buying the hype. Deciding which chocolate to eat based on where it is from is essentially eating blind, says Robert Steinberg, a founder of Scharffen Berger chocolate in California. 8216;8216;To say, here we have single-origin Madagascar , and leave people with the impression that this is what beans from Madagascar taste like, is misleading,8217;8217; Steinberg said.

Many factors affect a piece of chocolate: not only where the beans were grown, but the skill of whoever dried, fermented and roasted them, the amount of cocoa butter that was mixed back into the crushed beans, the two- or three-day process of mixing, heating and cooling called conching and tempering, and the touch of the chocolatier.

New York Times