Thank you for sticking around and continuing to follow our journey. It's Fall now, and hence crunch time for the chocolate world back home is about to begin.
Not here.
Here we are settled into a family routine which includes school, soccer, dance, sailing and all things social. Nonetheless, I have had the opportunity to work with truly delicious Costa Rican chocolate for a couple of private events, which involved lots of "friends and family" but also included the debut of Dolce Federica's Kamasutra Collection during a women's retreat...leading to my first big bonbon order. Unfortunately I am not really set up here for selling commercially and had to turn it down. I have to say that working with chocolate at these temperatures is so much more challenging; a climate controlled environment is easier said than done but an absolute must!
On the other hand, I am happy to announce that the partnership with The Eclectic Chic Boutique in Montclair will continue this Fall and Winter, with some online new and some traditional chocolate classes to be taught remotely. In-person classes are planned for here in Portero - let me know if you're going to be in the hood.
I recently attended my first Feria (trade fair) in Liberia, the capital of the Guanacaste region, and I was very happy to develop a new source for Costa Rican chocolate.
Riddle me this: Why is authentic white chocolate very difficult to find here? At least two reasons.
To begin with, some background. Cocoa butter is the main ingredient of white chocolate. It's obtained by extraction, the separating of two components of the cacao bean - cocoa butter (fat) and the cocoa solids. The first reason white chocolate is hard to come by is that this process requires a special machine that the small average artisanal producers in the area don't own.
Second, cacao butter is very expensive. Despite the fact that cacao is grown here, it is very common to find white chocolate made with vegetable fats rather than cocoa butter. The difference? Cocoa butter is a (great, healthy) fat that gives white chocolate a very soft and creamy texture. The replacement vegetable fat is often palm kernel oil (also farmed in the country) resulting in a product called "compound" chocolate or "chocolate flavored" chocolate. This product made only with vegetable fat, milk powder, sugar, and vanilla is still often labelled as white chocolate although it contains no ingredient from cocoa beans. It’s candy, a confection...but not chocolate.
People often ask "Is white chocolate chocolate?" Well, if made with cocoa butter, white chocolate is still chocolate - just without the cocoa solids which give chocolate its dark color.
In these past months we checked out the local chocolate makers everywhere we travelled. We headed a bit south to the beautiful beaches of Samara, and northeast to the hot springs and volcanic area of La Fortuna. We had close encounters with sloths, toucans, owls, colorful venomous frogs and pizotes, local mammals from the racoon family. We learned about coffee farming and processing in the 'Blue Zone' of Nicoya (coffee I then used to make bonbon fillings) and took part in a local chilli pepper eating competition (or better said - my son did, because that was definitely not for me!)
On a short trip back home for a family wedding, our relatives enjoyed a chocolate tasting I organized with a selections of costa rican chocolate bars.
