the
artisans craft beans to bars
T’S A LABOR OF LOVE. It’s paying close
attention to every step of the process. It’s
equal parts science and art. It is a connec-tion
to the cacao bean from its origins all
the way through to its transformation into a
bar of chocolate.
Talking to bean-to-bar chocolate makers
is like listening to a compendium of adven-ture
stories, travelogues and entrepreneurial
endeavors. It starts at the very beginning,
with sourcing cacao beans directly from the people who grow
them, and that often involves traveling to places like Costa Rica,
Venezuela or Nicaragua, or even as far afield as Madagascar.
It’s an all-encompassing adventure, starting with establishing
relationships with farmers and seeing firsthand how and where
the beans come from, and how the pods are harvested and fer-mented.
Every step is an important aspect within the growing
artisan chocolate-making community.
This growing movement of chocolate artisans now comprises
60 producers in the United States, the Fine Chocolate Industry
Association states, and North Carolina is front and center.
One of the first to forge a path was Hallot Parson and his
business partner Danielle Centeno, both former chefs. Their
travels through Venezuela and Costa Rica spurred an interest
in chocolate-making and a pursuit in search of pure choco-late.
Ultimately, they established Escazú Artisan Chocolates in
Raleigh in 2008.
“I recognized that most people in the U.S. had no idea how
chocolate was actually made, and there were very few of us
doing it at that time,” Parson says. “It also happened to coincide
with the beginning of a very small group of people in the U.S.
exploring the possibility of making chocolate from the bean in
small batches. There was a lot of repurposing and fabricating
equipment as well as modifying techniques. Those things pushed
all of my buttons and made it both a challenge and extremely
rewarding.”
What makes bean-to-bar chocolate-making particularly
rewarding is the efforts and skills of a small group of people,
from farmer to maker, combined with the unique influence of
the equipment and the specialized, labor-intensive process.
“It counters a long trend of increasingly homogenized, unin-teresting
and low-quality chocolate,” Parson says. “It is largely
responsible for a dramatic increase in the prices paid to small
farmers and has also created a tremendous diversity of chocolate
that was not available in the U.S. 10 years ago. It makes each
chocolate unique, which in my mind is a good thing. I’m not
saying it automatically makes it better chocolate. There is some
problematic bean-to-bar chocolate out there. In our very early
days, we had some hit-and-miss batches as well. We grew too
fast for our learning curve and paid the price, so experience
makes a difference.”
Jael Rattigan, who founded French Broad Chocolate in
Asheville with her husband, Dan, is another pioneer of the bean-to-
bar movement.
“I was in my tiny kitchen in my house in Minneapolis. I was
hand-rolling caramel and nut clusters in what is now called 100
percent cacao chocolate (back then it was less poetically called
‘unsweetened’),” Rattigan says. “I became distinctly aware of
a tingling sensation in my chocolate-covered hands. I looked
down at my palms and it became clear in my mind. ‘Chocolate
is the thing that will make me happy.’”
She and Dan dropped out of grad school in Minnesota,
bought a 40-foot school bus, transformed it into an RV that ran
on used vegetable oil, and drove it all the way to Costa Rica.
“Our plan, if you could call it that, was to buy a piece of land,
live on the bus, build a brick oven, and make bread and choco-late
to sell in the nearby village of Puerto Viejo,” she says.
The couple ended up renting a small open-air café they
named Bread & Chocolate on the main road in Puerto Viejo.
After two years spent in paradise, they headed back to the U.S.
— now with a toddler in tow. They moved to Asheville, where
they set up French Broad Chocolate.
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WBM april 2018 IRENE SCOTT FOR AUSAID/FLIKR