The First Chocolate Batch of the Year
"We must not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began.” – T.S. Eliot
By Susana Cárdenas A.
The memory is as present as if it were yesterday. The equatorial golden hour, my father's hands selecting the cacao, the large pot, the manual mill and the aroma that permeated the kitchen and perfumed the entire house. For a 10-year-old girl, that experience of creating chocolate from the cacao bean and sharing it with her friends at school was a moment that would mark her life.
Our first micro batch of 2024 is now ready
I learned many things from Ramiro, my father, including breaking stereotypes and using ingenuity. He belonged to the first class of chemical engineers from the Central University of Quito, Ecuador, who, upon losing his father, emigrated to the Ecuadorian coast far from the Andes in search of a new life.
He was an innate inventor who would have been happily building the chocolate factory of the brand that today bears his last name since, in his life, he created and designed hundreds of machinery for local industries. As a professor at the University of Manabí, he educated thousands of students, encouraging them to use their imagination and look for solutions to problems.
From him, I also learned to be resourceful and to use what I had at my disposal, like that afternoon when we prepared chocolate together at our house in Manta. We roasted the Nacional cacao from their farm in a large pan, ground it, and mixed it with sugar, and since we didn't have moulds, we used an ice bucket. That was the moment of a true bean-to-bar made at origin.
Who would believe that decades later, we created our first micro-batch of chocolate in 2024 in the same city where we did it for the first time? And not because we look for it but because life wanted it that way. Nacional Cacao is harvested in Chone (90 kilometres away), fermented in Calceta, and manufactured in the port of Manta, the Manhattan of Manabí, Ecuador.
A complete factory is built, smaller than the ones we usually work in, which complies with all protocols and has a committed human team.
With young and talented team at the chocolate factory in Manta, Ecuador
It was a beautiful experience working with young hands whose origin is the Manabí countryside. The result was fabulous. We roasted the cacao at low temperatures to maintain its exquisite aromas; we conched it for 60 hours, reaching 17 microns, a beautiful reddish colour typical of Nacional cacao and an extraordinary flavour profile.
I have you very much in mind, Ramiro. Now I understand your teaching marked my life. You would have been happy that this speciality chocolate was crafted in the place of origin of cacao, Manabí, is conquering the world.
Our Tierra Hermosa Chocolate collection is available in La Chocologue in Paris, Chocolate Covered and Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco and in the U.S. at Yahara Chocolate.