CAMP CACAO
On a warm, bright summer Sunday, Parisian boat people lazed on their decks and sipped chilled white wine. Aboard La Vieille, however, it was hard labor worthy of Captain Cook’s Endeavour. Claudio da Principe was in town from São Tome, chocolate samples in hand. Steve de Vries had taken a train from Amsterdam, fresh from a tour of European machinery. Jacques Genin brought some of his morning’s product. Chloé, unwilling to miss the gathering, had popped over from London bearing gifts. It was the end of my two-year stint in chocolate boot camp, and the gang was there to see I didn’t skip a single push-up.
I had learned a bit. For instance, I equipped my old wooden boat with cooler bags and ice so Jacques’s peppered mint ganache did not melt into dark brown soup. It was no longer necessary to question Chloé, yet again, on the subtle nuances of the Manjari longueur en bouche. But as I listened to my various mentors argue away the afternoon, I finally caught on to the basic point of it all. With chocolate, there are no straight answers. There are only strongly held opinions.
In the end, not much has changed since Columbus tossed away those cacao beans half a millennium ago. It comes down to the most simple of questions. What do you like? What else have you tried? If
after tasting Caraibe you still prefer Cadbury, no shame in that. Just watch your back at the Salon du Chocolat.
There are few enough real experts; in any case, no one can speak for someone else’s palate, let alone past life associations. If you like Hershey, count yourself lucky. If you crave Valrhona’s best, mortgage the house if you must. Life has few enough pleasures.
Claudio was first to show up and last to leave. He spent hours on deck in baggy shorts and sandals. At a casual glance, he looked like the other Sunday afternoon schleppers with nothing but Sancerre and suntan lotion on their minds. We all knew better.
Claudio’s eyes missed nothing as he kept up a steady patter about mysteries on the Seine that had puzzled me over the years. That huge Bateau-Mouche left no wake, for instance, because of furrows designed into its split hull. His hands never stopped moving. As he talked, he retied the silly knot I had on my marlinspike lanyard, and he spliced every rope on deck.
From time to time, Claudio seized my notebook to sketch out what he wanted to explain. On one page, he drew an elaborate coiled still to show how he made cacao brandy. On another, he depicted the steel ridges in a Lloveras Universal machine he had purchased for lack of anything better; from the design, he knew the thing would produce hot spots that could singe his precious nibs. I saved them all. One day, the museum at Vinci will want them.
Mostly, however, Claudio mused about roasting cacao beans. He was the farmer of the bunch, and he knew from handling coffee berries how crucial it was to get things right. With too little heat, flavors stay locked inside. With too much, the beans are toast. He was obsessed with roasting, and no store-bought machine would satisfy him. There had to be a better way, he knew. He also knew that some morning at 5 a.m., it would come to him.
Late one night, long after the Andalusian pata negra ham and deep into grappa, Claudio reached a high philosophic plane. “Why are people so jealous of their secrets?” he asked. “It is because there are so few secrets. The big secret is to have everything in balance, the trees, the beans, the final product. Everything must be well executed. If you do
that, it is hard to have bad chocolate. If you don’t, it’s impossible to have good chocolate.”
Steve, the self-taught technician, blew in at the last minute. He had been wrestling with heavy metal so he could move beyond grinding beans in his kitchen with a flour mill. Catalogues littered the deck table. Steve had traipsed faithfully to every industrial fair in Europe and America, and he had scoured the Net until his eyes ached. The machinery he bought in Mexico and Germany was a start, but his goal was to produce the best chocolate in the world.
Jacques, who to my mind already produced the best chocolate in the world, listened closely to the others. Actually, he only made chocolates—ganache and pralines from Valrhona base. He had never seen a cacao tree or roasted a bean. And he was fascinated to hear about basics.
He lit up when Claudio produced a Perrier bottle whose contents seemed closer to those of a Molotov cocktail than to a flask of fizzy water. It was his distilled mucilage from cacao pods, powerful enough to strip varnish and yet incredibly tasty. Jacques finished the bottle and waited for another.
Before long, Jacques had arranged for Claudio to ship him a load of São Tomé’s finest nibs. “I don’t know what I’ll do with them,” he said, “but I think you’ll like it.”
Claudio nodded agreeably, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t like it. He prefers his chocolate rough, flavorful, and straightforward. Sophisticated French art forms, he believes, are best left in the Louvre.
Just that morning, I had taken Claudio and Steve to Michel Chaudun for a taste of his hallowed chocolat aux eclats de fèves. Both turned up their noses. Each had a different idea for doing it better. “It’s over-roasted,” Steve said, “but you notice I’m eating it.” In fact, I noticed that the whole sack was empty within minutes.
Then we stopped to see Jean-Paul Hévin’s jewel-like creations. Claudio stuck with the fruit jellies, and Steve passed on everything. The high-fashion folderol, coupled with the saleslady’s scrutiny as she determined whether we were worthy enough customers, troubled their spirits.
Back at the boat, Chloé beamed as strong opinions, and no answers, flashed across the table. It was a curious Babel. We spoke nine languages
among us. But neither Claudio nor Jacques knew English. Steve had Spanish but no French. No matter. chloé’s little clutch of protégés had clicked. They covered the gamut from inspired grower to focused dreamer to master doer.
As an appetizer, we passed around chocolates brought aboard in Ziploc bags, Tupperware, tinfoil, plastic sacks, or original fancy wrappings. We were mixed on Steve’s Felchlin from Switzerland. Steve liked it. So did Chloé, sort of. Claudio offered: “Mechanically well made, but you can’t say it’s exciting, like a great wine. It’s like an old lady with a face-lift.”
Chloé had some Domori, made by an Italian near Genoa with an attractive Web site and a flair for overstatement. His label for Gem read, “I split the elements, the different cacao varietals into a refined mass, and cane sugar with crystals; Gems in the pre-Columbian gold.” This time, we all agreed with Claudio’s judgment. He made a face and pitched his piece of chocolate into the Seine.
But there was also a box from Enric Rovira that Steve and I had brought back from a trip to Catalonia. Rovira seemed to be completing a circle after five hundred years. Spaniards brought beans to the Old World, and they lost control of them to the Swiss, Dutch, Englishmen, and Frenchmen who mastered chocolate. Now a Spaniard—okay, a Catalan—was taking chocolate into space. Rovira, more gifted as an artist than as a chocolate maker, had crafted his Planetary Collection. In his solar system of superb, shiny globes, each planet was filled with a different ganache and hand-painted to look like new worlds.
Who knows whether it was dopamine, phenylethylamine, chocolate-triggered memories of childhood, or simply the rocking of an old English boat on an older French river in the company of friendly cacao lifers from a lot of different places. It didn’t really matter. My original plan was to follow the chocolate trail to its end. Happily enough, I discovered, there is no end.
After a while, I grilled fat Argentine steaks on the barbecue. Jacques, who was due for heart surgery in three days, ate two of them, bloody red and liberally doused in coarse salt and olive oil. We wolfed down a bowl of corn on the cob and a bucket of salad. Next came the cheese, most of which Claudio finished with great wads of good bread.
And then it was time for dessert. You can probably guess what flavor.