Word: cacao
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Rosenblum, author of “Olives” and a former editor of the International Herald Tribune, offers a tour of the people, places, and companies that have made chocolate great. From the intricacies of how cacao is refined to which Parisian chocolatier is truly the best, even chocolate connoisseurs will find nougats of new information in Rosenblum’s work...
...perhaps the most pressing issue for Rosenblum is not how chocolate came to Europe, which company prepares it better, or where to get the best mole. It is how cacao is grown and the way the chocolate market functions from cacao pod to couverture. To answer this question, Rosenblum travels to the most common sources of cacao—including Venezuela and what he calls West Africa’s “chocolate coast...
...Tome and Principe, two islands that compose a former Portuguese colony south of Nigeria, Rosenblum visits the cacao plantations of Claudio Corallo, who, like all cacao-growers, loses 21 percent of his crop to disease and 25 percent to pests. His house has no electricity, and his day starts at 5 a.m. and lasts past sundown. Despite this, Corallo’s situation is probably preferable to the backbreaking labor his employees endure. And yet he sees few of the tremendous profits collected by the large chocolate companies that compete for his beans...
...Chocolate” has any flaw, it is that the information is too scattered. From Mesoamerica, Rosenblum jumps to France and then back to Mexico and then to France again. Though some chapters focus primarily on growers, information about cacao cultivation is also woven into other sections of the book. Sometimes it is difficult to keep track of Rosenblum’s journey...
...says Ernesto Catena, 37, leaping over Malbec casks at his family's Catena Zapata winery in the Mendoza region. Even Uruguay, whose coups until now were usually only military, is seeing its obscure Tannat reds served by U.S. sommeliers like Richard Di Giacomo at Miami's pan-Latin restaurant Cacao. "The real fun of wine is sharing new discoveries," says Di Giacomo. And as Casa Silva's plans show, the designer-grape push is broadening wine tourism for countries like Chile and Argentina, once remote outposts to all but Patagonian penguin watchers but now magnets for vini-vacationers tired...