In craft chocolate we spend a lot of time focused on the word origin. In fact, it’s not just a word, but a layered concept. It’s generally accepted, and played a big part of craft’s popularity trajectory, that craft chocolate’s purpose and aim is to highlight cacao flavor diversity; to stand apart from the norms of chocolate and the standardized, one-flavor-fits-all products most of us grew up eating (and let’s admit it, enjoying).
Industrial chocolate typically creates blends of various origins to achieve its uniform, predictable, consistent flavor, and because it uses commodity, bulk cacao of questionable quality, it historically uses a small % of cacao in relation to the (sometimes many) other ingredients included. It’s also not uncommon for sugar to be the first ingredient, meaning, the predominant ingredient.
(Pet peeve: fake origin names used by big chocolate companies for their multi-continent/multi-country blends to make them sound like craft/single origin).
Making cacao-forward dark chocolate, with either two (cacao + sugar) or three (cacao + cocoa butter + sugar) ingredients, and a higher ratio of cacao to the sugar is how we champion origin, and cacao terroir. A note on %: in craft, for dark bars 50% and higher is the norm, with of course, 70% or thereabouts being the norm of norms—I’m only stating this bit about 70% out of fact, not because I believe 70% to be the end-all/be-all %.
What is single origin
When someone says My favorite origin is Brazil, Brazil is just the origin country starting point. Within Brazil there are many differentiations of that. In the bean to bar/craft/specialty/fine chocolate arena, origin is a multiple choice question.
In terms of WHERE THE BEANS WERE PRODUCED, Clay sums it up this way:
The origin mentioned is most often a country (e.g., Brazil), though the origin can be more specific – a region/state within a country (e.g., Pará, Bahia, Espiritu Santo in Brazil), a village and its surrounding farms (e.g., Chuao in Venezuela), or a single farm/estate (e.g., Fazenda Bonança or Vale Potumuju in Bahia, Brazil).
Clay Gordon, The Chocolate Life
What, exactly, is origin in craft
Many of us have come to think of a specific cacao origin~~say, Kokoa Kamili’s Tanzania~~as expressing a flavor personality that we then think of as “the origin.” For example, if a bunch of craft makers were standing around and someone said “Zorzal,” many of us would immediately think of the flavor personality of Zorzal Cacao from the Dominican Republic.
An origin’s flavor personality isn’t, of course, just the varietal of bean + the country: it’s a whole bunch of other factors, including soil composition (microbes and minerals etc), climate zone, weather, water/hydration, the tending practices: in a word, terroir.
So, origin is also a distinct FLAVOR PERSONALITY associated with a SPECIFIC LOCATION.
The best word that sums up flavor personality + specific growing/production location is terroir.
Like it or turn your nose up at it because it sounds snobbish, but terroir IS the idea the founding dudes of craft (Scharfen Berger, et al) brought to the chocolate table. Terroir is how we as makers connect the dots from “I’m ordering Fiji Matasawlevu” to handing a bar of the chocolate we crafted with it to a customer. We want, and need! them to understand how craft is different, and why it’s different. Wait, isn’t there something missing?
Yes. Terroir isn’t just about flavor + place, but the connector between those two things is the people on the planting→tending→harvesting→post-harvesting steps. It’s weird (and sad, really) to think that not that long ago when someone said “chocolate” it wasn’t a word connected with cacao (and all that cacao truly is), and definitely not connected to —→ who grew it.
I’ve long loathed the notion of my chocolate as a luxury, seeing cacao and the chocolate I make using it as food #itsnotcandy for those of us refusing to let go of hashtagging everything #sorrynotsorry lol.
There’s no reason why chocolate—all chocolate—shouldn’t be understood as a luxury, with diverse expressions of cacao terroir named, respected, discussed. But that only happens in the smallest of forums, and it’s mocked in the general culture to care about such things as chocolate, or coffee, or sugar. I’ve said it before, but people who would generally claim to care about matters of social justice or decolonization turn the other way when it comes to the commodities upon which their days and pleasures are built. They would prefer the land be exploited somewhere else rather than understand most of what they eat as a luxury, to be regarded as preciously as the August tomato or the wildly priced truffle tasting menu at a fine-dining restaurant.
~~Alicia Kennedy, food writer and author
When we choose an origin to use for making our chocolate, what are we buying?
You makers who live and source at origin can skip ahead. For the rest of us, if we buy a sack of beans from Alchemy or Meridian or Silva the other commonly-used cacao retailers,
Were the beans we’re buying grown on a single tree on a single farm?
Are we buying beans grown on one farm?
Are we buying a specific ferment pile that fits exactly into a single sack?
Unless we’re practicing true direct trade where we go to origin, meet with the farmers, discuss and decide on payment, or buying a nanolot described exactly as that with the total kg of beans produced listed as less than a metric tonne, then the answer is likely nope.
Most of us buy from established, hard-working cacao co-ops, which source the beans and often (the best do) oversee fermentation and drying, blending and bagging, and arrange for shipping, distribution, storage. The point is, this is single origin.
Sarah Bharath shared this explanation in the Next Batch’s Soil to Seed to Bar class:
Cocoa genetics are very complicated, and we have only hybrids in Trinidad, so we cannot separate beans based on ‘dark purple only’ or ‘pink/medium purple only’ or ‘white only’. So we do our mixed varietal fermentations based on final verified taste of the chocolate coming from the fermented beans.
That phrase mixed varietal fermenations is what the majority of craft makers work with.
Many makers are not crafting at origin (a vacation origin trip does not count), and likely have not participated in harvesting the cacao and the post-harvest tasks, including the blending of the beans, that we order. We order beans with a sense of the flavor personality based on descriptions offered by the producer and the retailers.
When we buy a pallet of beans are we buying the beans from one farmer’s trees/harvest efforts/post-harvest production methods? 99% of makers can’t answer Yes to this question.
For example, when Uncommon Cacao sources beans for their Maya Mtn Belize origin, they purchase from a wide array of farmers. Not every farmer may have cacao available at each buying phase. Not every farmer has the same exact trees/varietals growing on their land, nor do they necessarily harvest from the same exact trees each time. Weather may have effected several farmers’ yields, timing and access to labor, the need to tend other crops may have impacted large growers or small.
Post-harvest blending is how co-ops (think, Uncommon Cacao and others) manage origin flavor consistency. Sarah Bharath, quoted earlier, who specializes in post-harvest production (fermentation, and post-ferment processess) and oversees the Trinidad micro-lots project for Meridian Cacao, also taught us how even on the same farm flavor outcomes vary drastically. Blending is a necessary task after the beans have been fermented and dried.
This aspect of blending happens long before the beans land in our hands. If you are wondering, But I thought I was buying single origin beans? Yes, you are.
Best practices for labels and packaging
List the origin! Listing “Peru” is not enough, and in fact, is an injustice on multipe levels. I looked at two different maker’s bars today. One had a $55 bar where the maker only listed the country of origin, with no other information to help educate the buyer about why the bar would be worth $55; the other maker has every bar priced at $3 and does not prominently list any origin. Both of these aproached edge backward to old-school industrial/commodity practices where no origin is listed.
Not listing an origin routinely means a blend of origins was used; this is a practice in craft, as well as industrial chocolate. If it’s a blend of origins that you’ve created, it’s best to say it’s a blend. Some well-known, highly-awarded makers have crafted blend bars along with their single origin offerings; Patric Chocolate, for example.