Food of the gods

Yesterday I got to step out of my life for a moment and into the world of my sister… this adventure resulted in a tour of THE chocolate factory. Now, this is not your ordinary chocolate factory, but one run by about 30 employees, that make organic, fair trade and fabulous chocolate, most of it DARK. I meet the owner, the owner's mom, sister, and all the other wonderful employees. the owner zips back and forth, singing and whistling and smiling.

I have always loved chocolate. I love the texture, the flavor, and the idea of chocolate. My first and only encounter with a chocolate tree (how wonderful is it that chocolate grows on trees!?!) was in Ecuador in 1998. we canoed and trekked through the jungle, my friend Sarah and I each with a stash of chocolate bars in our pockets. occasionally we would pull one of them out and say to ourselves with glee: "we are eating chocolate in the jungle!" we would dance around in a chocolate high and admire the giant leaves and enormous, glowing insects. and I dreamt of working in the jungle one day, ethnobotany? ethnobotany of chocolate? salsa dancing? Spanish? yeah.

Theobroma cacao is a tree species that will only grow within 20 degrees of the equator, and many varieties are going extinct. The cocoa pods grow directly off of the trunk, and do not fall to the ground, but are carried by the most adorable mammal in the world: the sloth. The sloth breaks open the pods, and eats only the white flesh surrounding the seeds. Within the seeds, the cocoa nibs, the base for all that is good, live.

Cocoa nibs are sent though Dr. Seuss –like machines, warmed and cooled and mixed and warmed again. The tempered chocolate is then poured into buckets (Poured!! Can you imagine!?! Vats of warm, gooey chocolate?) and the special ingredients are mixed in by hand: a syringe full of lavender oil, tiny blueberries from another bucket, etc. The family of employees in production work like part of the machine, anticipating every move. Mojo, the main production machine spits the hand - mixed chocolate into moulds, shakes them vigorously and sends them though its belly to cool them. The bars are then wrapped by Bessie, an ancient machine with endless rolls of gold foil and wrappers, levers and knobs and pinching parts.

As I live for a moment in my fantasy, my sister is tracking down a lost shipment of blueberries. I hang out in the tasting room, trying single-origin dark chocolate: chocolate from Ecuador, a drop from Costa Rica, a bite from Madagascar. I let it melt over my tongue. I learn all that I can about cocoa trees, dream about warm vats of chocolate, and read up on all the articles that have been published about dark chocolate and the creativity and ingenuity of the man that started it all.