Plants of the Gods: S6E3. The Ethnobotany of Heirloom Chocolate: An Interview with Denise Castronovo

Well, we live in a world where Hershey says they make about 60,000 Hershey Kisses every minute of the day.

where billions of M&Ms are produced around the world.

But it would sound like, seems like, that these bigger corporations will just get bigger and more powerful.

There's enormous amounts of consolidation in the chocolate industry.

But we see the birth and the growth of companies like yours, artisanal chocolate.

People want the real thing.

So talk to us, if you will, about why people want the real thing and what distinguishes the artisanal chocolate versus much of the mass-produced stuff that is so much more common.

Yeah, thank you for asking that.

The main thing is many different industries have gone through this artisanal rebirth, actually.

Like you saw it with beer, the craft beer industry, coffee, and really chocolate now is still in its emerging stage.

It's still growing in this area.

So it's a lot of educating the public that there is this fine flavor specialty cacao out there.

And chocolate can have over 600 different flavor notes, which wines, I believe, have about 300 or something like that.

And a lot of this flavor comes from the different varietals of cacao, the terroir where they're grown.

And then also how we manipulate the chocolate as chocolate makers to bring out those flavors in terms of roasting and processing the chocolate.

So it's really a different mindset of always making a uniform product that tastes the same to making one that can change based on the harvest of the cacao, based on where we get the beans, whether it was a dry season or a rainy season that particular year for that particular harvest.

And it's really turning chocolate into a gourmet food that it's never been before.

Well, wine drinkers make a big deal of how they drink wine, smelling it, looking at the color, stuff like that.

But when I watch you eat a piece of chocolate, it's a lot different than when I see somebody grab a cheap bar at 7-Eleven.

So tell us the way to really appreciate a good bar of chocolate in terms of the snap and the color and things like that, which should be looking at and smelling and sniffing and hearing and all the other senses that should come into play.

Yeah, sure.

So when you first taste a piece of fine chocolate, what you want to do is break off a piece and it should have a nice snap, but also not be too brittle or dry.

And then you want to rub the piece of chocolate between your fingers.

and really take a smell of it.

So when you take a smell of it, what happens is your nose can actually sense thousands of different odors but taste you have five taste sensations so it opens up the palate and helps like train the palate of this is what's coming so then you take that piece of chocolate and you put it in your mouth you can take maybe one bite but you really want to let it melt in your mouth and And the fine European chocolates or even the way we make them in America should have like a really nice smooth melt feel.