Discover Chocolate | Clay Gordon | Talks at Google

Good afternoon and welcome. Welcome to today's authors at Google and chefs at Google Talk. We are pleased to welcome Clay Gordon. He's the editor and publisher of Choco File.com and the founder of the New World Chocolate Society. He's a leading independent authority on chocolate. He conducts chocolate tastings and classes across the country. What a great Christmas gift. And his insights about chocolate are frequently published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and businessweek. So please join me in welcoming Clay Gordon.

Thank you all for coming today. I'm a big, very excited to be here. And what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to spend the next 40 minutes or so talking about subjects that are not in the book. So we're going to cover completely and entirely different ground today. And there are three topics I'm going to talk about. Number one, how I became a chocolate critic, my journey to becoming a chocolate critic. Number two, I'm going to talk about how chocolate gets its taste. So it'd be a little bit of chemistry and a little bit of biology and genetics and things like that. And the third section, the third section of the talk this afternoon is going to be chocolate and politics. All right, so my journey to become a chocolate critic. Since I was a freshman in high school, I wanted to become a photographer. And when I got out of high school I immediately dove into non commercial FM radio. It was a very, very straight path. And after three years in Portland, Oregon working for a community supported broadcasting station, I moved to Providence, Rhode island where I earned a BFA in Photography. In 1983, while I was at RISD, I took the first ever computing class offered at school. It was given by students of Professor Andy Van Dam from Brown University. And if anybody knows about computer graphics, Andy authored the first textbooks fundamental of interactive computer graphics back in 1982 or 1983. So after I got done with school, I came down to New York City. I started first assisting as a photographer and a couple of weeks later an alumni connection called me up and said, hey, there's this friend of mine who works out at this computer graphics company in Metuchen, New Jersey. I'm living in Manhattan and they're looking for somebody. So I take the train out to Metuchen and within a couple of weeks I had talked myself into a job. They were looking for somebody who had an art background who could talk to technologists about art and computing and I was the closest thing they had seen. So I worked at that company for about four and a half years and Worked on such wonderful projects as the first 24 bit paint system on a personal computer. We introduced it in July of 1984 at Siggraph in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was three 8 bit graphics cards which had a bridge across the top of them. It was running on a leading edge personal computer. Ms. DOS 2.1, 512K of RAM with a 5 megabyte hard drive and it cost $30,000. In 1987 Apple introduced that summer the color Macintosh. And I realized what had happened is that the work that we had done in PC graphics in terms of disintermediating and replacing the VAX PDP 11 based systems that were very, very common up until that point, Apple was just going to do to us. So I decided to jump ship and spent a number of years doing interesting things and eventually wound up for the first high definition television production company company in North America. Company called Rebo Studio just around the corner. And that was back in 1991. In 1995 I wrote the first book on HGTV production that looked at production instead of the politics of high definition television. And before I got there I actually co founded an information technology company called Enfish. I don't know if anybody's heard of it. E N F I S H My father who was at Stanford University in the late 1950s with Doug Engelbart, right, who was working on the Augment program at that time and also Dick Hamming who created the Hamming codes, people may know about those in information theory, had developed a pencil and paper based system which actually implemented Vannevar Bush's Memex. And in the 1970s he worked with a colleague to produce a version on Apple IIC which was written in UCSD Pascal. And we founded a company in 1993 to actually implement this program which he called Nemadex from Mnemonic Index and nfish. And of course because of the vagaries of marketing people, what we actually delivered to market had nothing, no bearing whatsoever in what we originally started out to do. Now I say all these things not because I want to impress you with my background or anything like that, but there's a lot about my journey in chocolate and actually connecting with a passion. And that's what's really important to me is being able to connect with this passion. So I was in Cannes in 1994 where I first got introduced to origin chocolate. And an origin chocolate is a bar where the beans come from is somewhere on the label. So the notion of a non blended chocolate, sort of a chocolate where the terroir of the beans was important, was very new to me. So I brought the chocolate back to New York City. We had a dinner party a couple of weeks later, and I served these things for dessert. I had no idea that I was doing my first chocolate tasting where I was just having fun. And my memory of that evening was every single one of us had a different favorite chocolate for a different reason. And those of us who actually like the same chocolates had different reasons for liking the same chocolates. And this was really quite interesting to me. I'd never really come across the phenomenon with anything other than wine before. And so I was just thinking about this over the course of a couple of weeks, I realized that nobody was talking about chocolate the way people were talking about wine. And in 1994, it's also microbrew beer and cigars and things like that. And so I literally said one day, oh, market opportunity. The entrepreneurial Bing market opportunity. I'm going to become the Robert Parker of chocolate. It was very, very clear to me in February of 1994 that that's what I wanted to do. The problem with that, of course, is that while there were dozens of places that I could go to learn about wine, I could go to London and take a class and become a master of wine. I could go visit Kevin Zrahle, who was at Windows in the World on the time, and take classes to become a sommelier. There was no place in the world that I could go and learn what I needed to know to become a chocolate critic. So I spent seven years teaching myself what it was that I needed to know. And in 2001, I started writing about it professionally. Website called chocofile.com, it's still there, although I'm in the process of converting it over to discoverchocolate.com just because from a marketing perspective, it makes sense to have the website the same name as the book and not try to maintain two completely independent web presences in 2001. So I put my shingle out, and all of a sudden, there's this genre of criticism about chocolate, and people go, who the heck needs a chocolate critic? Well, we have restaurant critics, and we have wine critics, and we have movie critics. There are people who critique comics and video games and websites and all these other things. And I say, chocolate is important enough. 90% of Americans eat chocolate in some form every day.

And.

And so, darn it, it's about time that somebody treated it seriously. And so that's what it is that I do. I Treat chocolate seriously. Now, of course, there's nothing about chocolate which is supposed to be virtuous. So it's all about fun. And one of the reasons why I like being in the chocolate industry is that you really have to be a miserable person to be miserable around chocolate. You're there all day long, you got your hands in it, you're smelling it, it's a great thing. And there are remarkably few really miserable people in the world of chocolate. And it's a lot of fun. I get to travel all over the world. Every place I go, I buy a bar of chocolate. It's a tax deductible expense. I mean, how great is that? And I travel importantly, not only to places where chocolate is made, but to places where cocoa or cacao, which is the raw ingredient for chocolate, is grown. And for me, I felt like an imposter until I actually made my second trip into the rainforest looking for chocolate. Until that time, a really important part of my understanding about how chocolate was made and where chocolate came from was from reading other people's experiences about going into the rainforest and going and harvesting cocoa pods and opening them up and what viscerally this is all like and what the experience of the people is who grow cacao. So it wasn't until 2005 when, when I was on a trip to southern Ecuador and actually this is a picture of me walking through the rainforest. I have my camera pointed down at my feet, trying very hard not to trip over vines and things like that on the forest floor. We're actually at the border between Ecuador and Peru along the confluence of the Rio Pastaza and the Capoari rivers, which is there the woods is taken. And that actually was very, very close to my mental state at the time. Just before I got out to. Just before we got out to the rainforest, I had taken part in a ritual with a shaman in Quito, which involved the consumption of illegal substances and things like that. A rainforest vine called ayahuasca, if anybody wants to go to the research on that, which is considered very important on these people. And so my mind was very, very much heightened and attuned to the walk through the rainforest, as one might imagine. All right, so how chocolate gets its taste. This is me. No, I'm actually in the camera. That's not me. We're here actually in Chiapas state in southern Mexico. We're on the Pacific coast near the Guatemala border. This region is called Soconusco. And Soconusco was the most important cacao growing region in the Americas when The Spanish landed, actually conquistadors landed in the early 1500s. Here I am with my interpreter. What we've done is we've just opened a fresh cacao pod and he's going in and smelling. And the smell of fresh, ripe cacao is indescribable. It is one of the most amazingly wonderful smells you can get. And it turns out that that white pulp inside there is very, very flavorful, wonderful. This is typical of where cacao beans grow. It's an open, variegated forest. There are some shade trees and the cacao is underneath it. If you look very, very closely, you can find the pods, but they're there. And this is a nursery. You can see this is actually more typical of the way a cacao wants to be grown. The taller trees provide shades, and then the cocoa trees grow under the overstory on the shade plants in the canopy. This particular nursery, it belongs to one of the longest and oldest established cooperatives in that part of Chiapas. And they're in the process of actually a five or ten year effort to go and isolate high quality heirloom cacao varieties and replace modern hybrids with heirloom cacao varieties. It turns out that when the hurricane came through there several years ago, the modern hybrids fell over. Right, because they weren't as acclimatized to the local conditions or acculturated the local conditions. And they found that by using heirloom cacao varieties, they had something which was much more robust. This is what a cacao tree looks like in the wild. One of the things that's interesting about this is you'll notice that the pods are not only different colors, but they're different sizes and different shapes. So there are various degrees of ripeness of these pods on the tree at the same time. But also what you see is that the effects, the genetics of the pollinating plant on the different cacao pods. So we have actually six or seven or eight different hybrids of cacao on this tree at the same time. And if you actually look at the morphology of these things, you'll notice that some are shorter, some are longer. Actually, I have a pointer. Some have pronounced shoulders at the top and little nipples at the bottom which turn. And these actually indicate various different kinds of, of parentage genetically in the plant. This is another picture of the pod which you open up. It turns out there's a central placenta and the placenta is pulled out. The seeds are then again stripped from the placenta. And the first step in making chocolate is that the seeds are fermented in that white pulp. So if we start looking about how chocolate gets its taste and we stop at this point, what happens is there's an inherent flavor in the cocoa bean, and we have two different inherent flavors, flavors that are stable and will not be affected by the process of fermentation. And then we have chemicals that are unstable and will either be affected by the biochemical reaction or the thermal reaction, the heat which is generated through the process of fermentation. So it turns out the pulp is very high in sugar. There are yeasts on the inside of the pod and yeasts in the atmosphere. And the fermentation is going to set off an incredibly wide range of chemical reactions which are going to break down complex proteins into simpler amino acids, complex sugars into simpler sugars and antioxidant phenolic compounds. Flavanols, the precursors of flavanols, so that when the cocoa beans get ready for roasting, there are some chemicals there which will react to high temperature and caramelize and generate flavor. So we have inherent flavors in the cocoa bean. Now, this gentleman is unhappy. He's sitting in front of a very, very large pile of cocoa beans. If you can see, some of these look like they're dark and icky. In fact, they are dark and icky. He's probably nursing a hangover. This was the day after an important soccer match between Ecuador and, I think, its arch rival, Peru. The enmity between Peru and Ecuador goes back hundreds of years. And only recently did Peru cede some territory to Ecuador, and Ecuador gave some territory to Peru, and Ecuador actually at that point became the owner of the Galapagos Islands. But they gave away a lot of territory for Peru to get the Galapagos. So Ecuador won the match. So he's probably hungover. And unfortunately, this is a Monday morning, and those beans were probably, probably picked on Friday afternoon. And they've been sitting in 50 kilo sacks over the weekend. And so the fermentation process has started already. And you'll notice we have these things here are actually the entire insides of the pod. Nobody is actually taking the time to pull the seeds off the placenta. And so his job is actually to go through and take all the seeds off the placenta so that he can start the fermentation process. Now, there's an incredible dichotomy here, which is that in order to make good quality chocolate, what you want to do is you want to remove diseased or damaged seeds from the pile before you start fermentation. If you have a seed which is molded or mildewy, you run the risk of introducing those flavors into the chocolate later on. If the bean is cut in the process of harvesting, then then you also have another precursor to lots of different kinds of diseases. The farmer, on the other hand, gets paid by weight. And so the last thing the farmer wants to do is throw away a seed because that means it's something he's not getting paid for, ultimately. And so this dichotomy, this push and pull between quality and what the farmer gets paid has ramifications all the way up the manufacturing chain through the end of chocolate. This is actually a pile of cocoa beans. This is in Vanuatu. You'll notice that these are banana leaves. This is the traditional way that cacao is fermented. You get banana leaves on the ground, you put a big pile of cocoa beans on top of that, you cover that pile with banana leaves, and then you weight the top banana leaves down with rocks. The first fermentation process takes about three days. It's anaerobic. What it does is it the yeasts convert the sugars into alcohol. Then the pile is opened, they're turned, and there's a second fermentation phase which converts the alcohol into acetic acid. And after seven days, the seed is officially dead. It's called a seed. Now, the technical difference between a bean and a seed, of course, is that a bean will germinate and a seed will not. And at this point, the next step is to dry the cocoa beans. In Ecuador, they're actually experimenting with different kinds of fermentation. So this is a new one that they're doing. It turns out that you don't actually need to cover the pile. You can put it in these little, these little teepee like structures. And the liquid which is generated from fermentation, the pulp dissolving, will run out over this concrete pad. When you're done, you then just lift up this teepee and you can spread the seeds out on the concrete pad in order to dry in the sun. This is another fermentation facility. You can see this one is in another part of Ecuador. What happens is. I'm sorry, the beans are put up in this top layer, the top row. When the first stage of fermentation is done, these bits of wood are pulled up and then the beans are then put into the second stage and then they come cascading down the front of that fermentation facility. This one is actually managed as a pilot project by the Ecuadorian Cocoa Growers association in conjunction with the Rainforest Alliance. It looks like it's not used because it is unused. It turns out that, unfortunately, this particular cooperative venture is not run ethically. And so the people who are managing the Cocoa Growers association are taking money which is meant for the farmers, and actually using it for other things. So there are a number of different ways to dry cacao here in Vanuatu. This is actually a drying hut. They have fires which are fired by coconut husks. Because it really never gets sunny enough for long enough in Vanuatu, to dry the cocoa beans takes somewhere between three and seven days, again, depending upon the temperature and how much sun there is and how much rain. This is a little hut which is developed in Ecuador. It's called the Maquina, a machine. The idea here is that the solar gain which is generated by the plastic tarp here is able to speed the drying. And by keeping it out of the rain and off the ground, they reduce mold and mildew as well as keeping the rain from getting it too wet. Here we are in Venezuela. This is a concrete drying pad. Literally, these people will spend all day sweeping these beans back and forth and back and forth in the sun. You don't want them to get too hot. If they get too hot, they form a crust like the outside of bread. And if they form a crust, you have trouble evaporating the water and acetic acid out of the center of the bean. So they're constantly turning these beans all day long. And here we are. This is the same guy in the red cap who's hung over from the previous slide. This is a mechanical dryer which is powered by propane. And if you look very, very carefully, the beans back here look a little dark compared to the beans up here. That's because this guy wasn't paying attention and he burnt the beans. Now, one of the things about cacao that's quite interesting is that there's always a market for cocoa beans. They get graded into various stages. Somebody will always buy everything. So even if the original buyer says, I had a contract for this quality of bean and you delivered me a lower quality bean, therefore, I'm either going to pay you less than we agreed to or just go find somebody else to buy it. Somebody always buys the cocoa beans. So as you go down lower and lower in the quality scale, you will see that happen. This is my friend Sean. We're actually in the Caranero region of Venezuela. And this is another way to dry cocoa beans. You just put them on the asphalt. Unfortunately, what happens is there's a tendency for the bean to absorb the Flavor of the asphalt, right? And if it's really busy, you'll actually get diesel fumes in the beans. But this is very, very common. It costs a lot to build a drying pad and sow things. So you do whatever it is you can to get your beans dry. And then of course, brokers will drive down the road, they'll go and they'll do a quality assessment of the beans and they'll just weigh in by the pile right there from the farmer. It's a cash crop. I mean, the cacao tree fruits, flowers all year round. So literally at any time, there's always something on the trees. The farmer can go into his farm, go pull down pods. If he's really in a desperate hurry, he'll sell the wet beans before they're fermented because he needs the money today, or he'll do the processing and sell them in a week or two. This is how quality analysis is done in the bean. It's a specially built guillotine, which is used to slice a random sample of 100 beans. And then you look for various different kinds of defects in the beans. So can you see mold or mildew? Can you see insect damage? Right. This particular bean here, you can see that it's got a smooth texture rather than this open, fissured texture. This is called slaty. Right? It's a defect in the bean. It means the bean has not been fermented. So you count the total number of defects and depending on the total number of defects, that will determine the quality of the bean and how much gets paid for it. This is in Chiapas, Mexico. This is the bean roaster of an artisan chocolate maker. So it's a 55 gallon drum which has been put on its side. Little bit of bean gears and things like that have been welded on. And there's a little propane burner across the bottom. They set this thing tumbling and that's how they roast the cocoa beans. This is the winnower that they use. After the seeds are roasted, you crack them and you separate the center of the seed, which is called the nib, from the chaff. And this is the one that was used by the artisan chocolate manufacturer in Chiapas. This is actually one that I built in my backyard. It's a little more modern. There's actually a squirrel cage fan here, and this is pvc. And you drop the nibs that you've. And the chaff down here. And this column separates everything. So the nibs come down here and the chaff Comes out the top. Now, I did this originally not because I wanted to make these things and sell them to Ecuadorian and Belizean cocoa farmers, but what I've learned from my trip to places where cacao pens grow is that these people are incredibly inventive. You know, if you show them how to do something, they will adapt whatever materials and techniques they've got locally to be able to make them, to be able to make this for themselves. So in Belize, which is where I went with this for the first time, if they couldn't find PVC pipe, very expensive, they can do this out of bamboo, which is growing in their backyard. One guy said, well, you know, I'm not going to be able to buy this, you know, squirrel cage fan, which I got from Granger on the catalog. What am I going to do? And it turns out, well, the guy has an old dashboard heater from a car with a three position switch. And what he can do is he can vary the airflow using his three position switch and then covering using various holes, various size holes. The airflow through what it is, they've gone. So if you show them how to do it, the important things in this thing, the important mechanics of this is this is at a 10 degree angle, can't be steeper or shallower. The diameter of the pipe needs to be a certain length, a certain diameter, and the pipe needs to be a certain length. The only other thing you want to do is figure out a way to increase turbulence in the airflow so that the shell and the nib are actually in the flow longer. And I'm working on that right now. But the whole idea is you can give this to an Ecuadorian or a Belizean cocoa farmer and they'll be able to figure out how to make this themselves. Right? And the more they can add value locally, the more money they earn and the better it is for them. This is the grinder which is used to take the cocoa beans and actually turn them into chocolate liquor, which is the first step in the chocolate manufacturing process. Again, here we are in Chiapas, Mexico. This is a cocoa butter press. It actually uses a hydraulic car jack. The chocolate liquor is put into this vessel. There is a plunger which goes down on top of this. A hydraulic jack then applies the pressure. There's a little hole in the top of this vessel. You can see it right there. And a fitting and then a plastic tube attaches to that fitting. Cocoa butter comes out the top. So they're very ingenious. This is just welded. I beam that they found somewhere. This is actually representative of the conching process. Conching is the last stage in chocolate manufacturing and one of the most important. It was actually discovered by. By accident by Rudolph Lindt in 1879. And prior to 1879, we really wouldn't recognize chocolate. It would have been very, very coarse and very gritty. Chocolate is a product of the industrial revolution. Prior to the availability of steam machinery, human muscle power could not generate enough force to be able to grind particles finely enough or to crack sugar crystals. It turns out that sugar crystals are incredibly hard and very difficult to pulverize. So it wasn't until the late 1700s, early 1800s, that we would start recognizing chocolate in a bar form. If anybody's had Mexican hot chocolate, the little bars of Ibarra, you notice how coarse it is. Well, there are a couple of reasons why. Number one is that you cannot have a refined chocolate product like we might get from Switzerland or someplace else, unless you have a reliable source of electricity and refrigeration. When the average temperature is above 85 degrees, the chocolate will start melting. So if you leave the chocolate coarse and leave the sugar crystals very coarse, and then what you're going to do is you grind it up to put it into hot water or hot milk, right? You can get away with the fact that crystals are very coarse. You do not need to work any harder than you need to. So with the advent of steam power, we have machinery which is able to go and grind the cocoa beans and the sugar fine enough till we get to the point where you can no longer feel them on your tongue. So, Rudolph Lindt. It's the classic tale of invention. He's working to find a way to make his chocolate taste better. And he closes up shop on Friday afternoon and forgets to turn off a piece of experimental machinery. Goes away hunting for the weekend, comes back on Monday morning, realizes that he's left his machine on, and figures that what he's done is his chocolate is ruined. And it turns out it's the most amazing thing he has ever tasted. So the conching process does several things, some of which are mechanical and some of which are chemical. The mechanical things it does is it continues grinding the particles until they're very small. It breaks up clumps of particles into individual cocoa particles, and it covers everything with cocoa butter, so you can no longer feel those particles on your tongue. Importantly, it also evaporates also any residual water that's in the chocolate. Now, if anybody's cooked with chocolate, you know that if you add a Little water, it seizes, it gets very well. It turns out that that water increases, which is in very, very minute amounts, increases the viscosity of chocolate. And by evaporating it out, you can thin the chocolate out. That's one of the reasons why they use lecithin as an emulsifier. What it does is it binds with the water in the chocolate, makes it unavailable to the cocoa butter crystals. Right. And doesn't get stuck in their matrix. And so the chocolate can be thinner. And the other thing it does is it actually evaporates some of those volatile aromatics that we no longer like, acetic acid, which is generated from the fermentation process. So Lindt came back on Monday morning. Voila, he's got this wonderful chocolate. And it wasn't until 1879, as I say, that we actually would have created a chocolate product that we would recognize as chocolate. So if anybody here has read the memoirs of the Marquis de Sade, and I'm not going to ask you to raise your hands if you have, but he proclaims a love for eating chocolate. And what he's eating is a very gritty, very coarse, very dry product. Nothing like what we're used to eating today. The politics of chocolate. There is a lot of press. There's a lot of news about bad labor practices. I suppose the best way to describe it, child slavery and forced labor in Western Africa. And to combat this problem, one of the primary organizations that does this are the various fair trade organizations, the main fair trade labeling organization, which is out of Brussels, and then other organizations like Transfer USA here in the United States. And unfortunately, fair trade isn't as fair as it could be. The first one, which is that I alluded, we saw that picture of the fermentation facility, which was unused. One of the assumptions that the fair trade organizations make is that the cooperatives that they certify are, in fact, even though they're democratically run, they're actually, in fact run ethically. Right. So that the people who run the organizations, you just have to assume that they have the best interests of their members at heart. And unfortunately, they often don't. So there's an enormous amount of graft and corruption at the local level, which, unfortunately, because of the way the certification process works, it's very difficult to root out. So for every success story in the fair trade movement, there is another story where the premium which is paid for the chocolate actually never makes it to the the farmer, which is really quite unfortunate. Another aspect of fair trade that doesn't really quite Work for me is that the fair trade premium is set by some people sitting in an office in Belgium, not the farmer, and who decided what was fair in terms of the price. If you actually look at the offices of TransFair USA just outside of Berkeley and you go, wow, these are really nice, really, very impressive digs. And then you go look at the living conditions of the farm farmers and you go, there's a real disconnect here. There is no risk taken on the part of the fair trade labeling and certification organizations. They get paid the same price irrespective of what the market price of cocoa is. They get their 10 cent per pound or whatever the fee is, and they get it from anybody who wants to use the fair trade sticker on their product of chocolate. They get that no matter what. If the fair trade price is very, very low or the market price of cocoa is very low, the farmer doesn't get a huge premium. As the price of cocoa goes up, the difference between the fair trade price and the market price gets narrower. And how does that work? So the farmer does all the work and they're the last person in the chain who actually gets to cooperate. In many places now, there are some wonderful successes. People may have read the New Yorker recently, the New Yorker article which talked about Frederick Schilling of Dagoba. And I talked with Frederick when he was here a couple of weeks ago about that, and he says, in his experience, the fair trade price is a floor and people negotiate from that floor. And so companies like Degoba routinely pay twice the market price. On the other hand, my experience is people will go, this is the fair trade price, this is the market price, this is the fair trade price. All I'm going to pay you is the fair trade price. So what happens is it actually creates unintentional negative price pressure by saying, here is a de facto ceiling which represents the fair price for cacao, which is unintentional, I'm sure, not where anybody wanted to go. The final part that I wanted to mention about fair trade is that it doesn't address the primary issue of that will in fact get the farmer more money, which is fair trade. And the other certification organizations focus on does the farmer have good living conditions? Is there water? These are all very important things. But there's no incentive on part of the farmer to increase the quality of the product that they're producing. If the farmer was actually trained and incentivized properly to increase the quality of their product, every farmer out there would be able to get two to three times more what they're currently getting for their cacao. And that's really important because in the next 10 years, the worldwide demand for cacao is expected to grow by 50%. And so where are we going to get cacao or where are we going to put 50%? Where are we going to plant 50% more cacao than we have right now? The best way to do it is just to clear cut the rainforest. That's not going to happen politically for a lot of reasons. Nobody's going to say we're going to cut down millions of acres of rainforest to plant cacao so we can have more chocolate. Where is the demand coming from? Number one is that China is coming online, they're not a big chocolate consuming country. India's coming online, they're not a big chocolate consuming country. And the fact is that every single one of us are looking around and going, you know, I really want higher cocoa content chocolate. I used to be okay with 50%, but now I want 70% or 80% cocoa. And, and so all of a sudden you need to have a lot more cocoa than is currently there. The point is that the certification organizations, Fair trade is one and others don't address the entire problem. They have their own issues with respect to the cost of certification, which is borne entirely by the farmers. And so a lot of the money that would go to the farmers actually gets paid to the certification organization to pay for the cost of certification. And it represents a start. So fair trade, in conjunction with farmer training programs and other sorts of things, are going to be where we finally are able to increase the quality of life for the farmer by increasing the quality of cocoa. If we can increase the quality of cocoa, we'll be able to meet the demand that we've got going forward over the next 10 years. And it turns out that's a controversial perspective because at some point the Fair Trade movement gained institutional status, which makes it very, very difficult for people to actually even question the fact that it's not a good and the right thing to do. That it is, in fact the people in the world. There are in fact, very militant organizations, especially in Europe, where if you question fair trade, they will firebomb you. Which I think is a very, very perverse turning of the whole movement. And that's the end of my prepared talk. We're right at 12:40. The next slide says questions and answers. So actually what I wanted to say is this is part of a mural that's on a cinder block wall outside of a cocoa processing plant. In Rio Chico. Rio Chico is in the Bar Lavento region of Miranda State in Venezuela. So if you'd like to come down to the microphones and ask questions, we have a few minutes and then we go upstairs to chef's table. Now, just so you know, I have a chocolate that I brought with me which we'll serve at chef's table, which has a very interesting smoky taste to. It turns out that smoky flavors are not normally found in chocolate, but this particular chocolate is dried. The cocoa beans are dried over wooden fires in Indonesia. And so the cocoa beans pick up the flavor of the fire. I'm not going to ask anybody to identify the wood. Right. So if you're into really into wine and all that kind of stuff, it's not mesquite smoked, I can tell you that. But I'm not going to ask anybody to try to identify the wood. So please. Hi, thanks for the talk. You mentioned some of the problems of fair trade. Coco, can you talk about what the course of action is for avoiding those problems? Like is there a list of good vendors or. Right. The question is, I did mention some of the problems associated with fair trade. What are some of the courses of action that can be done to help rectify the problem is that we tend to, we consumers, people here in developed nations tend to look at organizations, nongovernmental organizations like the Fair Trade Label Organization and transfair, as a solution to the problem. And that what we can do is we can feel good by transferring everything onto their shoulders. They must be doing it. And the answer to the question is a very good one, is that chocolate manufacturers need to get directly involved. There's a wonderful case down in Belize where Green and blacks, an organic chocolate manufacturer actually has a full time staff member on the ground in Punta Gorda working with the Toledo Cacao Growers association. And he makes sure that that thing runs cleanly and fairly and can help deal with a lot of the issues that the farmers are having. I said earlier that I felt like I hadn't learned anything until I had gone down to Ecuador. And I'm more than willing to arrange a tour for as many Google employees as would like to come. We'll book it through your travel office or something like that. We'll go to Ecuador. There's this wonderful plantation a couple of five hours drive east of Quito, which is some wonderful whitewater rafting and kayaking and caving and other kinds of things we can do that we can actually go and spend four or five days on a plantation and in a cooperative and understand exactly what it's like. And at that point, you'll really have a good sense for what it takes to actually enforce these kinds of things. Yeah, yeah. My question is very similar to his, but you were saying that no matter what happens, the beans get bought. That's correct. If quality is an issue along with quantity, what roadblocks are put in place so that if, you know this, another plantation says, well, gee, you know, we should go for quality. Let's do the quality. What's to prevent them from making the extra money? Because for some reason, they don't do it now. Why not? It's very, very difficult for an individual farmer by themselves to say unilaterally, I'm going to try to increase the quality of my crop. Because the average smallholder plantation is about five acres. They're producing a ton or two tons a year at the absolute most. And that's a lot. And that represents no chocolate manufacturer anywhere in the world is going to go out and buy £1000 of beans from this farmer and £1000 of beans from that farmer and £1000 of beans from the other. So what happens is they have to band together in cooperatives, and the cooperatives have to achieve a certain critical scale. And it turns out that there's not a whole lot of history in many of these places for getting together and doing that. So it really requires an unusual group of people. I mean, an example is that I was down in Venezuela where some of these pictures were taking, negotiating, buying beans with somebody, and the guy says, I want cash when I deliver the beans at six months. And we're saying, okay, we'll give you 50% of the money now, right? And then when we pick up the beans, we'll give you 30%. And a week later, after we've evaluated the quality of the beans, we'll give you the last 20%. Farmer says, no, I want 100% of my money when I deliver the beans. So in some places, the concept of, ooh, I can have a lot of the money now and do something with it for six months, is completely and totally foreign to them. They're just. The history and the economics of these places don't lend themselves sometimes. However, that cooperative in Mexico, we offered them a futures contract, said, we want to have the right to buy your harvest three years from now when those little trees grow up. We want the right of first refusal on the first 20 tons of your crop. And they said, okay, it'll cost you $1,000. We said, fine, so the level of sophistication is all over the map when it comes to that kind of stuff. And it's very, very difficult to do. It requires, often it requires a sympathetic person from the outside right to be able to come in and gain their trust and organize it for them, because they're just not interested in doing it. I mean, one of the things which is interesting about chocolate for me is it's not just about the taste of chocolate. I mean, it becomes this lens through which I get to look at chemistry, biology, genetics, politics, economics, geography, cultural anthropology. And until you actually are on the ground and you can understand. How did agrarian land reform screw the cacao industry in Ecuador? And it basically took Ecuador from being the number one cocoa producing country in the world at the time in the 1880s, and relegated them to zero. Because what they do is they took these big haciendas which were very, very efficient, broke them up, took all these people from the cities, sent them out to the country to become farmers, none of whom had any experience whatsoever in being farmers. So five years later, they've sold all of their land back to the hacienda owners, original hacienda owners, and now they're tenant farmers. And what happened was at the same time was this very efficient mechanism getting cacao from the farm to the port. All of a sudden the farmer is selling to a middleman who's selling to a middleman, who's selling to a middleman who's selling to the exporter. Everybody's shaving their few cents all along the road. But what happened in Ecuador is very different from what happened in Bolivia, which is very different from what happened in Mexico. So every single country is different. And again, one of the challenges with an outside organization like the Fair Trade Labeling Organization, Fair Trade in general, is they have one set of policies for the entire world that makes it easier to administer, but it doesn't recognize that each one of these countries is culturally extremely different. And not only that, but northern Ecuador is very different from southern Ecuador. I mean, if you get in the lowland ports by Guayaquil, you know, what works socially for them is not the same thing as what works in Quito, which is up in the highlands. So it's a lot more difficult to do than it seems like afar, you know, why can't they organize? There are lots of cultural reasons why they can't or won't.

Yeah, there's a certain kind of chocolate which is produced in the Modica region in Sicily, which is quite different in texture and the ingredients which are very minimalist compared to the more conventional chocolates. Can you tell anything about the way it's produced and where the differences come from?

The question is there are some chocolates which are produced in Sicily, on the island of Sicily, in Italy, which are texturally very different from the chocolates that we buy. And the answer is there are a couple of companies that specialize in making chocolate according to 3 and 4 and 500 year old recipes. And so in particular two that I know of.

Sorry, how old again?

1600S, 400 year old recipes. And so what they do is they predate the industrial revolution. These things are made by hand. And so what they're doing is they're actually celebrating the way chocolate was originally made. So the sugar crystals are very, very large and the cocoa crystals are very large. And so the texture of it is very dry and very crumbly compared with the chocolate we're used to now.

Yes. Is this closer to the sad chocolate?

It is its own style of chocolate. I don't know that it's closer to anything. It represents what technology was capable of doing at that time with the cocoa beans. Keeping in mind that until the late 1800s, the vast majority of chocolate was consumed in beverage form, not eaten. So it really isn't until the 1800s that we start seeing this change from chocolate being drunk to chocolate being eaten. Something that really didn't happen completely until just before World War I.

Personally, I would say that then this modern process is a change for the worse. The taste of the Sicilian ones is absolutely fascinating.

It is, it is, it's quite interesting. And a lot of it has to do with the way the beans are processed. It turns out that fermentation and drying have an enormous effect on the flavor of the chocolate. And you can do all sorts of things, including the way the beans are roasted. There is a modern guard, if you would wish, of American chocolate manufacturers. There are four small ones. And for some reason they're all in the West. There's one in Orem, Utah, there's one in Springfield, Missouri, there's one in Columbia, Missouri, there's one that's in Denver. And they're actually probably doing the most interesting things in chocolate making anywhere in the world right now. But they're experimenting with old style techniques and beans. I mean, one of the companies, their motto is 100 years behind the times. Right. In terms of the way they're approaching making their chocolate. And they're really challenging. They really want to challenge the conventional notion. One of the reasons why most chocolate is fairly Bland is because it's blended. I mean, the goal of Milton Hershey, the genius of Milton Hershey was he figured out a way to make chocolate affordable to everyone. And he did that primarily by adding a lot of milk and a lot of sugar and not very much cocoa. But it turns out that once Milton Hershey started his industrial processing, one of the hallmarks of industrial processing is that everything is the same. So his goal from a manufacturing process perspective was as much anything as, how do I ensure the chocolate always tastes the same today, tomorrow, next week, next year? That's primarily done by blending. And when you blend things, you tend to lose the individual interesting characteristics that there are. Right. And replace them with something which is a little more bland and a little more homogenized. But he also wants to make sure that Hershey's tastes different from Cadbury, tastes different from Fry, tastes different from everybody else. Right. And it's. When you get these small manufacturers who are doing things by hand, they can have a lot more fun. And ultimately, it, like, makes a lot more interesting chocolate. But you have to give up the notion that the chocolate is always going to taste the same. So you have to give up something to do that. We like that in wine. Why we don't have the same reverence for it in chocolate is something I don't understand.

This is a rather simple question. Where in New York can I buy the best quality chocolate?

Oh, man.

Are there boutiques, chocolate boutiques you recommend?

I'm going to answer that question slightly differently. Okay. And refer to, actually a quote that I make in the book. The relationship you want to have with your chocolatier is the relationship your grandmother wanted to have with her butcher. So what you want to do, no matter how you go about doing it, what you want to do is you want to go and establish a relationship with the people from whom you buy your chocolate. And a trust relationship eventually develops where you can walk in and say, hey, what's good today? And they'll know your buying habits and what they've done and what's fresh, and they can tell you what's good today. So that's. I mean, it's a very European style. You don't go and go to the local big box store and buy 10 pounds of chocolate and put it in the fridge and take one piece out every day to savor it. There's a direct relationship between freshness and quality. So first thing is, if you can find a place where they're making it on premises and you can buy something within 24 hours of when it's been made. That's a great, great start. So where are there places like that in New York City? Okay. Jacques Torres, right down the street. Jacques Torres, right across the. It's down the street here. Yeah, it's actually right across this. Yeah, it's at Hudson and King. Hudson and King, Right. Mary Bell, which is down on Broome Street. Probably the. There's probably some of the best chocolate that's being made in New York City right now is a little tiny hole in the wall shop on Thompson street just south of Spring, called Keys K e e, apostrophe S Keyes, Christopher Norman, which is down in New Street.

All these places sell chocolate that they make and brand themselves?

That's correct.

So you don't recommend places that sell 100 different kinds of chocolate, all in bar form that they buy from?

Well, there are two different things. All of the companies that I mentioned are confections, so truffles or bonbons and things like that, which is different from bars. Okay. So different set of criteria. When you're looking at bars, you want a wide selection. And so some of the widest selections include The Dean and DeLuca on Broadway, Zabars, many of the Amish markets, Whole Foods, they just have a broad selection of bars. Not unfortunately. But the great part about this is that you have to go in and eat them and decide what you like. So there's a lot of wonderful research to be done.

There's no sommelier.

You know, I do it. I do that. I mean, there's a store in ABC Carpet called Chocolat Michel Cliesel. They're a French boutique. And they actually have a couple of members of the staff who will go through the entire process and teach you how to taste chocolate. And that's actually a large part of what the book is about, is actually going through the process. How do you develop your own taste and your own palate for chocolate? But the people at the Cluiselle boutique will do that for you. All the chocolate there is manufactured in France, and it is shipped ocean freight here to the United States. And it's kept very cold. It's kept about 34 degrees, which will reduce the spoilage for it. But it's still, by the time you get it, weeks, if not months old. Right. And it's not the same as being able to walk into a store and have something where the bottom has been put on 20 minutes ago. So I would encourage you to experiment with both of those avenues.

So is it okay to buy chocolate in the bar form that is not kept in a cold place, you don't.

Need to refrigerate bar chocolate. I mean, a bar of dark chocolate will last for at least a year at room temperature milk chocolate for at least six months if you keep it in a wine refrigerator, two years easily. So bar chocolate is a very different animal from confections. Thanks. You're commenting about how improving quality is necessary to deal with 50% increase. Is that because there's a lot of loss or what is improving quality going to help us? Well, yes, the question was about what does improving quality have to do with helping to increase, meet the increase in demand for cacao? It turns out that depending upon where you are in the world, crop losses due to insect, insects, insect predation and diseases are between 30 and 70%. And so if you can teach the farmer to do a much better job of maintaining and managing his farm, right away you're going to be able to see the average yield on a farm double or even triple. And so it turns out that the best way to meet the demand is actually to increase the fall quality by training the farmers to do a better job all the way around.

I have a question about dutched chocolate.

Industrial chocolate?

Dutch.

Yes, Dutch chocolate. Okay.

So I hear that most people that really like chocolate frown on dutched chocolate. And however, like Cooks Illustrated did a, did a taste test and they found that Dutch chocolate was like by far preferable to most people. Okay, So I don't know. I don't really know much. I mean, I've read the article and they had some theories about like, yes, there's, you know, dutching the chocolate by. I forget exactly what the process is. They, they put in some alkali mixture or something. And their theory was that it, like chocolate is so bitter sometimes that the bitterness kind of stops you from enjoying the actual flavors of the chocolate. So they thought that getting rid of that by dutching was actually pretty helpful. While other people seem to disagree, it.

Turns out that the dutching process, which means processing with an alkali, it's called the Dutch process because it was invented by Conrad Van Houten in Amsterdam. Right, in HOLLAND actually, in 1827 or 1828. So it was called dutching because it came from Holland. And so what you do is you take the beans or the liquor and you soak them in a solution of potassium carbonate or something like that. And the reason why we're doing it is it's a shortcut to get rid of the acid that's left in the beans after Fermentation. So we're actually doing it to reduce the acidity of what goes on. So dutching makes for a milder chocolate, which is less acidic, and therefore some of the flavors, the cocoa flavors, come forward because we've gotten rid of the acidic flavors. Now, it turns out that by changing with the ph of the dutching agent and the strength and the amount of contact time, I can have something which is a very, very light brown to something which is totally black. How do Oreos get their color? Because the ph of that cocoa powder is like. It's incredibly alkaline, and that's what happens when it gets that color. And so manufacturers actually play with that quite a bit. So it turns out the Dutch processed chocolate for most people actually is more palatable because what they've done is they've gotten rid of a lot of the really nasty acidic flavors that way. Unfortunately, with the Dutch processing, when you do it that way, you have no control over the process. You get rid of all of the acids, even the ones you want. So there are lots of processes of deacidification. Another one is just to inject hot steam into the liquor mixture, and that just evaporates all the volatile aromatics. You have no control whatsoever over what you lose. Which is why industrial chocolate, again, tends to taste a little bit bland, because they just get rid of the flavors indiscriminately, which is why the artisan manufacturers, by definition, an artisan manufacturer does things in batches. An industrial manufacturer uses continuous processing.

Okay, so you're kind of saying that the people that are making chocolate in smaller quantities kind of do a similar process, but in a more controlled fashion.

They let the deacidification process happen during conching. Okay. So what they do is they actually control the temperature of the chalk, the liquid in the conch, so that they can selectively evaporate out flavors that they don't want, aromas that they don't want, chemicals that they don't want, as opposed to just doing them in batch. Right. Chemically or with heat. Okay. All right. That's how they do it. It's one o'. Clock. Yeah. So I think we'll make this the last question. What is your favorite chocolate, and where do you buy it? What is my favorite chocolate? There are two answers to that. The glib answer is, whatever I happen to be eating at the time. That's the politic answer. The correct answer is or not the correct answer. But the more truthful answer is a little more complicated. I like origin chocolates. So chocolates where the beans origin is identified. And they tend to be vintaged, even though they might not actually be vintaged. So the beans that are grown in Venezuela to make, you know, from the 2006 harvest will make a bar that tastes this way. Those same beans in the 2007 harvest will make something that tastes different. And I might like the 2006, but not like the 2007. Okay. So it's hard for me to hold onto the notion of having a favorite bar because the kinds of bars I like change all the time. So I like manufacturers. So, for example, one of my favorite manufacturers is a Swiss company called Felklin. They're not known to most people. They sell primarily to pastry chefs. Just starting to find it in retail shelves. I like the way they treat their beans. They have this wonderful chocolate, which is made from beans harvested from wild trees that grow in belongings. Olivia, which is called Cru Sauvage, which might be one of the best chocolates made in the last five years. So that's another company. There's two French companies, one called Bonat B O N N A T. They're actually the company I discovered in 1994 that got me launched into this whole journey of chocolate discovery. Another French company called Prelude. These four companies here in the United States, Amano in Utah, Askinozzi in Missouri, Patrick Chocolate, also in Missouri, and then DeVries chocolate in Colorado. These are places where you just admire the craft and their approach. And they'll make 2 tons of chocolate and the beans will be gone. They'll get a new set of beans and they're going to do the best they possibly can with the beans. And it's just different. What do you say about John and Kyra? I think it's a small. John and Kira. Yeah, Kira out of Philadelphia. John and Kira's is in Philadelphia. John Doyle was an activist foodie and has been for some time. The company has got, in addition to a mission to make good quality chocolate, there are social missions associated with the chocolate. So one of their chocolates, which is called Drew Elementary Garden Mint, they actually work with an inner city school in Philadelphia where the school children grow the mint that is used to make the chocolate. And so they pay the school children. These are inner city kids who get an opportunity to learn how to garden, make some money, do some things which are good. And the project has been so successful, they actually have opened it up in other schools in other places around the country. The chocolate is what I would call of the French style. It's a ganache. Which is enrobed. And like most French chocolates, the flavors that are in the chocolate tend to be very subtle. Right. They don't beat you over the head like most American chocolates. Do I mint. They use real mint. And so what they're doing is they're infusing the cream, and then after they strain the mint leaves off the cream, what they do is they take a spoon, and then they'll just sort of crush the leaves to get the bitter oils out of the mint. So there's this multidimensionality to the flavor of the mint, which you don't get when you're using a flavoring of some sort or another. So they do very, very good work. They do very good work in that style of chocolate, which is the French style. They have got a biodynamic honey that they use. They're working with organic coffee farmers in Mexico. I mean, they're really trying to do some. Not only make good chocolate, but to do good things with people who provide them with their ingredients, which is a good thing. Thank you, and thank you all for coming.