Quotes About Cacao

Wampusirpi has an organic cacao cooperative, which produced blocks of pure chocolate, shipped downriver to market. It is said by chocolate aficionados to be some of the finest single-source chocolate in the world.

Belgian chocolate is my weakness. I like over 72 percent cacao, which shows you how much of a dark chocolate snob I am.

Even today, chocolate is made by fermenting the beans for several days to allow richer and more complex flavors to emerge. They are then dried, roasted, and cracked open so that the nibs—the meaty part of the bean—can be extracted. The nibs are ground into a powder or paste that, along with a little sugar, becomes dark chocolate. If milk is added, it becomes milk chocolate. And if the fat, called cacao butter, is extracted by itself and mixed with sugar, that is white chocolate.

Dogfish Head makes a cacao beer called Theobroma that is intended to be a modern recreation of an ancient Olmec recipe.

Dogfish Head makes a cacao beer called Theobroma that is intended to be a modern recreation of an ancient Olmec recipe. Based on residue analysis of pottery dating to 1400 BC, plus some hints from the reports of Spanish explorers, their recipe includes honey; chili pepper; vanilla; and annatto, a reddish spice derived from the achiote tree

Bahia is the Amazon's geographical next-of-kin: the same climate, forest canopy, diverse floor. But there is no wild cacao; the tree was introduced, most likely by a Frenchman, Louis Frederick Warneaux, who, in 1746, sowed seeds near one of Bahia's large rivers.

You can easily compare chocolate to wine. What makes a good wine is usually a good terroir, a good grape, and the weather has something to do with it. Chocolate is the same, from where the cacao bean grows to what type of tree it grows on.

Cacao has great nutritional value, a lot of protein, which strengthens a person, and without sugar it is not fattening.

Interrupting my thoughts, Mrs. V asks, "What continent produces the largest crop of cacao beans, which give us this chocolate?

Cacao is rich in happy phenethylamine chemicals called PEA. These compounds have been associated with feeling good and falling in love.

The cacao content is a wrapper's most important datum, and the acceptable benchmark is seventy per cent. The figure is a measure of 'cocoa mass.'

If kept dry, a chocolate with a high cacao content, I've discovered, rarely spoils.

The ancient Mexicans used to spend all the day and half the night in dancing with only cacao for nourishment.

Stepping across discarded, rotting pod shells toward the cacao trees, she wondered if these were the prized white cacao beans that produced the legendary chocolate that Aztec kings had consumed. Did these trees yield the smoothest, most flavorful, aromatic cocoa that had been the ultimate lingua franca between chocolate aficionados, chefs, and growers around the world?

Madame hesitated. I could see her natural suspicion at war with the scent that came from the box: the smoky, espresso scent of cacao; the hint of clove; of cardamom; of vanilla; the fleeting aroma of Armagnac- a fragrance like lost time; a bittersweetness like childhood's end.