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Hey, it's Francis.
This week, we go back to a show from last year that you're going to want seconds of.
It's about cookies and chocolate.
Have a listen.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
You know, in life, there aren't a whole lot of pleasures simpler than cookies and chocolate.
Or are there?
Today we've got a couple of guests who love their cookies and chocolate bars but also find so much more to them than you might think.
Now, I don't mean to be obtuse.
It's holiday time, and that means it's time for treats.
And we'll start with Ben Mims, author of a massive new book of over 300 cookie recipes from around the world.
Ben is a prose pro.
He's been a food editor and recipe developer for Savor, Food & Wine, the Los Angeles Times, and many more.
And it's a pleasure to get to talk butter and sugar with him today.
His new book is called Crumbs, Cookies and Sweets from Around the World.
Hey, Ben, it's great to see you.
Thank you for having me, Francis.
How are you?
I'm okay, thank you.
I'm wonderful.
And I'm about to be better because well actually, congratulations to you on writing the biggest book of cookies I have ever seen in my entire life.
Thank you.
Yeah, it was quite an undertaking.
So it's cool to see how actually big it is, you know, in my hands.
It's tremendous.
It's 400 plus pages of pure unadulterated cookie.
Cookies from all over the world.
And it's funny because I can't think of 400 cookies off the top of my head.
I could probably try.
But what occurred to me when I was reading it was I guess you actually had to start by grappling with a philosophical question, which is what is a cookie?
It seems obvious.
But you get to some of these and you're like, well, how do you actually define a cookie?
And what qualifies as a cookie to you and what doesn't?
Yeah.
And it was my God.
It was something that I thought okay, I will define this and I'll figure it out before I write the rest of the book.
But it really was something I thought about for three years.
And I just kept coming back to that question over and over again.
And when I saw the heading to it recently in the book, I was, like someone pointed out, this is a really simple question.
I'm like, well, sure, but it's really not.
It becomes a very abstract concept when you really start to think about what a cookie is.
And so I kind of thought about it for three years, everything from what ingredients need to be in it, how these things are consumed in different cultures around the world, different times of the year, for certain holidays, for different occasions um, how they are physically eaten and chewed.
I went like that granular with it, um.
So it really um, and you know, i would think about it.
I would come back to it.
Certain cookies would pop up and i'd be like oh, that's kind of changed my definition slightly, or maybe this is this thing that's sometimes eaten as a cookie actually doesn't fit the definition.
So that's gonna have to go.
And now i gotta come up with a defense for why.
So it was really um, kind of a back and forth tug of war between you know this concept, for you know yeah, about three years but um, i think by the time i landed on it you know there's really no clear elevator pitch way to say it, but it does i do explain it a lot in the book about how i define a cookie, what makes it, and then how the 300 cookies that are in the book do uh do, line up with that definition.
So I love that.
The long philosophical discourse led you to be like I can't really explain it.
Yeah, exactly.
A little bit like, you know it when you see it.
Yes, kind of.
I literally pitched my editor.
I made a reference that she was not very happy about.
It was a Supreme Court case in the 1960s 70s about pornography.
That said the judge famously said you know it when you see it.
And i was like that's honestly how like to judge whether it's good or bad or what's permissible.
And i was like that's kind of what the cookies are too like.
It's really hard to say this or that.
It's like when you see it and you see how someone interacts with it, you see how they eat it, you see what ingredients are in it, then you can kind of tell.
And so it really took that kind of eye and looking at all these cookies to figure out what fit the definition throughout the whole process.
Yeah well okay, so Of all these hundreds of recipes, some of which will be very familiar to us, even if they're from cultures that we're not really privy to, and some will be, oh wow, I never thought of that.
What I want to do for this conversation is I want to build an imaginary holiday cookie Tim with you.
But first, before we get there, I want to ask one more thing.
Because in your research you came to the conclusion that cookies, as we know them, actually originate in Persia.
What led to that conclusion?
So that is, you know, it's kind of when every bit of research that I was doing showed that basically milled white flour, so all-purpose flour that we know today, and kind of the granulated sugar.
Both came from Persia in the 7th century.
And that's kind of an oft-repeated history date, and I looked more into it.
And you know there's not much there besides that claim and you can kind of, like you know, piece together how these two industries started there.
But the kind of oldest cookie that i found, which kind of dates to the?
You know, the famous wedding cookie that everyone knows is from an arabian cookbook in the 10th century and it talked about this cookie from persia um, that they call gorieba corieba.
It's like a very common name for Middle Eastern cookies now.
And it literally meant exotic cookie.
And the exoticism came from them using granulated sugar and flour, whereas the common practice was, you know, maybe wheat flour or other types of grain flours and honey, things like that, or just none at all.
So that kind of the concept of here's this thing made with wheat flour and sugar was at a quote unquote exotic thing to them.
And so that was kind of the first, yeah, mention of a cookie like that.
And so that kind of started me on, well, you know, these ingredients come from this location.
Then it seems to make sense that the cookies will originate from that too.
The things that get their basic shape and meaning and form from these ingredients will come there as well.
So that's where we started the book.
Oh, right on.
Cool.
So let's actually start our imaginary cookie tin there as well.
There's a cookie that you call Persian rice shortbreads, where the Farsi name is, I don't speak Farsi, so forgive my pronunciation, is Naan-e-Berenji.
Yeah, that's great.
So what are these like?
So these are made for Nowruz, which is the Persian New Year.
And it's funny, when I was writing the book and seeing all these different recipes, I think that a lot of people nowadays, we hear of using rice flour, these different grain flours as the gluten-free stuff.
And I think it's like some people just making things up now.
But these ingredients have been used for centuries.
And so this is a very clear example of a cookie made with all rice flour.
And it's not the sweet glutinous rice flour used in Asian cultures.
This is more just like ground, like long grain rice flour.
And so it has cardamom, uses clarified butter, rose water.
So it's a very kind of crumbly, dry, shortbread cookie.
It's typically...
Pretty thick and cut with like a six petal flour and then cutter and then sprinkle with poppy seeds or pistachios, things like that.
So if you've ever been to a Persian restaurant or kind of a Persian sweet shop and you're seeing these little bitty kind of very yellow eggy cookies with nuts on top, that's those.
And so those are – that rice flour really adds a nice crispness and texture to it.
Um, like most people understand, rice flour, like in fried chicken or other kind of applications, make things really crispy.
So they're very um, crisp and shattery in a less dense way than wheat flour does.
Yeah, oh cool, because the point when you're making a shortbread with wheat flour, with all-purpose flour or whatever, like you're using a lot of butter and you're really trying not to work it, there's so little water and moisture in those recipes, usually right, so it doesn't activate the gluten, so you're really exactly minimize the gluten and wheat flour.
But when you have rice flour, which has naturally no gluten,
So it's all crisp and no tender?
Is that the idea?
Kind of, and it's very crumbly.
So it's one of those things where you really have to work it to kind of pack it in to hold its shape, but you make it thick enough so that it can hold its shape when stamped and baked out.
So yeah, it doesn't have the strength of a wheat flour because of the no gluten, but when you bake it together and it kind of adheres, it kind of dissolves and crumbles in your mouth in a really nice way, which I also found before the last couple centuries was what most cookies were.
They were these very dissolvable, kind of like shattery little chunks of dough and stuff.
Oh, cool.
So it's like light in the mouth.
Very light, very light.
There's actually an Afghanistan cookie in the book called Water in the Teeth, which is the same – the name translates to water in the teeth, which is also what you just said light in the mouth, where it's just like you put it in your mouth and it kind of just flows – through your teeth and kind of dissolves because it's so light.
And yeah, it's such a beautiful poetic way to say just, you know, crumbly and tender.
Oh, I love that.
That's beautiful.
That's cool.
Well, actually, let's move into the Levant.
You know, we're sort of generally in a similar part of the world with a very classic, very famous Middle Eastern cookie, the Mamoul.
Now, it's a little bit of a different idea, right?
Because this is a wheat flour, semolina flour, and they're nut filled.
So from a very light cookie, so this is kind of a richer, denser one.
But so good when they're good.
Describe a good one to me.
I mean, I think a great one to me keeps it pretty much all semolina.
There's no extra flour because you want it to be a little nubbly and crunchy.
I do think saffron is very – it's needed in the cookie dough as well, because that's a very specific flavor that, if you leave it out, you can't really replicate, of course.
And then you know I love that this has a tradition.
You know it descended from what I found in my research, from an Egyptian cookie called Kak, which is like kind of the same dough but it has a honey, sesame seed, kind of candied ball center on the inside.
And so it was very clear to see how that cookie worked went out into the Levant and instead of honey and sesame seeds boiled down to this candy-like ball.
That's probably very difficult to do and it is but I made it simpler for the book.
You just mix nuts and sugar together and make these really wonderful spiced fillings.
So there's walnut fillings, pistachio fillings, a lot of people do dates with rosewater.
And what I found doing research for the book was that there are different shapes associated with each flavor.
And so the walnut cookie is typically round, The pistachio has like a dome, and the date-filled ones are plain, but they get stamped with these really ornate, beautiful patterns on top.
Typically the ones in the beginning, kind of referred to the sun, because I found these cookies, especially in Egypt as well, were kind of given as tokens to sun gods way back in the day.
And so now they're kind of stars or just different ridges to catch lots of powdered sugar.
And so they're a really unique cookie that has lots of different ways to tailor it to your own taste.
Ben Nims is author of the new book Crumbs.
More with him in a minute.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
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I'm Francis Lam, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're filling up the cookie tin of my dreams with Ben Mims, author of the new cookbook, Crumbs.
Let's get back to it with him.
All right, let's head north, I guess, into Italy or southern Italy.
You have a recipe.
I got it.
When I saw this photo, I was like, oh, give me all of those right now.
Yeah.
It's the mustachiole, which are these southern Italian cookies flavored with sweet spices and orange zest and honey, and dipped in chocolate.
Mm hmm.
Mm hmm yeah, this cookie really kind of highlights um, how i feel we think of cookies in a more modern context now, and what i mean by that is.
So the name of the cookie comes from uh muslim, which is great must which, so it's like the runoff from wine production.
They boil it down.
Boil it down light maple syrup or pomegranate molasses until it becomes this kind of thick tar like sweetener, and so that is what is used to sweeten cookies, or it was these particular cookies, and so What the cookie basically is is a gingerbread cookie made with this grape molasses, and then it has some orange zest in it.
This one from – it's a Neapolitan version.
They cut them in diamonds.
They cover them in chocolate.
What I found when I was doing research about this cookie is that there were – dozens of cookies that have basically the same exact ingredients and done more or less similar ways, but named different things or some kind of variation on the Muslim name.
And so I ended up putting two variations in the book.
One is you know the Mustachiole Salentini, and that is literally the same cookie, but instead of rolling it flat and cutting it, you drop it like a mound of cookie dough, and then you just dust the top with cocoa powder.
Then there's the more famous version, which I think a lot of people know, called Rame Di Napoli, which is the same dough you know, uses drop, but then you brush the top with orange marmalade and then you cover it in chocolate, and then pistachios on top.
So it's like there's always orange, there's always chocolate, there's always spices, there's always nuts somewhere.
But they just like it just showed how people play around with different things.
Now you know you think about chocolate chip cookies now, or even certain pies for Thanksgiving or whatever.
People are always like keeping the same components but playing around with them.
So it's just like taking the same familiar flavors and how it goes from place to place.
It might manifest in a different form.
Yeah.
Well, it's interesting too because these are Italian cookies.
And in Italian cuisine, there's such a huge tradition of cookies.
I think it's one of the biggest chapters in the book, actually.
You have a very rich chapter there.
When I look at the sweet spices, the orange, the honey, I'm like, oh, wow.
These are also such like...
Arabic flavor profiles.
Oh, 100%.
And you can sort of see that history like the history of when the Arabs went up through Sicily and up into the.
It's so interesting to see how popular those flavors are.
The Italian cookies were one of the main reasons I went the way I did, which was to create this kind of Mediterranean chapter which encompassed Italy, Spain and then most of North Africa.
Quite honestly, because as I was looking at all the cookies together, you see certain ingredient overlaps and the Italian cookies, by and large, were more North African than they were anything European.
And so that's why I ended up sticking them in that chapter, because it kind of made sense that all these countries that are more Mediterranean in their part of life for most of the country will incorporate and be kind of touched by the culture of the Mediterranean, more than even countries like France that might touch the Mediterranean but are way more Western European.
That was really fascinating to see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, let me get off this landmass then.
Because I want to come across the oceans.
Maybe we'll take a pit stop in the Caribbean.
I think every cookie tin needs a thumbprint cookie.
I'm a huge fan of thumbprint cookies, jam filled cookies.
And you have a really awesome looking one, very fun looking one called Mantecatitos.
And these are popular both in Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
Can you describe them for us?
Absolutely.
So these are – so they get their name Manteca de Toast from the Spanish Mentecados, which in my research found really meant cookies made with pork lard.
So Manteca is pork lard.
So Mentecados are little treats made with pork lard.
So that obviously showed some clear influence from Spain to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
And so they're basically –
Little Poverone-type cookies, crumbly thumbprint cookies, made with pork lard although you can absolutely use butter or something else nowadays if you want to flavored with almond extract.
So I found that a lot of Latin American cookies or Southeast Asian cookies if they were descended from these European colonization cookies that were influenced and brought to their cultures – if they used almond and almonds weren't readily available, a lot of them started using almond extract to still get that flavor but not really have to import the nut.
But these are really fun because they're really simple and yeah, they're thumbprint cookies that use guava paste.
It's very tart, it's very bright, it's very floral and tropical.
But traditionally, Right, yes.
But traditionally, people who make them, they don't just stick with one filling.
So it is.
You can put maraschinos in there, you can put sprinkles, you can just dust them with powdered sugar.
And the point is to kind of use all these different toppings and flavorings inside to kind of show the breadth of how kind of wonderful these really crumbly almondy sugar cookies are.
Yeah.
I mean I would totally just go for all the guava-filled ones, but you also have really fun ones that have those little tiny non-peril sprinkles all over.
So I can imagine that little crunch of the sugar.
Those little tiny sugar sprinkles would be super fun and super pretty in a tin.
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, so now I want to head to Guatemala because there's a cookie here in your book that is so unlike anything I've ever seen.
And they're called champarradas, which are interesting because champarrado is the context I know that word from is in Mexican cuisine, where it's basically like a thick hot chocolate made with corn, made with masa right.
In Guatemala.
That word, I guess, or a very similar word, means these cookies that are well, you described, it's almost like a tortilla cookie.
It's like a cookie tortilla, that's 100, and you know that word comes from the word for, like you know, masa or masa harina.
So these cookies have masa harina in them.
You know this cookie, which is like what you make corn tortillas out of.
Yes yeah, the nixtamalized corn, ground and dried that you make corn tortillas out of.
Um, So many cookies throughout the world I found kind of descended from other kind of grain-based products that cultures around the world would make, whether that was a big giant loaf of bread, let's say corn tortillas, or any other kind of thing like that.
And so this cookie itself was really special because it clearly shows how tortillas became a cookie.
Because you make this dough which has masa harina in it, It adds their peel and seal the kind of dark raw cane sugar from Latin America.
It does have eggs and milk and Mexican cinnamon, so it's a little bit different.
But you shape it in a tortilla press.
And I add in the book that you can also roll it out and just stamp it out, but I think that's really – fun to kind of show how.
You know, we think the tortilla press can only be made for tortillas and that's how it is, but like you can use so many different things, like they do, to shape these things.
Um, and i even found a video on youtube of a woman making these and it's so mesmerizing to just like see her mix this dough, kind of stamp it out flat.
Um, you bake them.
Now i think she baked some, but she also, you can, you know, literally cook them as if they are tortillas in a pan on the stove top.
And then Did they come out crisp, or did they come out like sort of tender, like a tortilla?
Slightly, yeah, bready and tender.
They're not crunchy.
So they are slightly more bread-like than what you would normally think of, or more cakey, I would say.
But they're really delicious especially, you know, brushed with egg wash.
Have some sesame seeds on top.
So they're really nutty, not too sweet, have all that kind of dark molasses-y sugar in them.
And the mozzarella just makes it taste amazing.
So it's a very unique, wonderful cookie that's so cool.
I can't wait to try that because i'm obsessed with yeah masa masa, harina corn tortillas, like when you get a good one, that like sort of almost floral smell that comes off of them.
Yes, i'm just obsessed with that flavor and to think absolutely basically, like a sweet cookie tortilla, honestly amazing, make them and, you know, put dulce de leche on them, put some kind of jam on them, you can like, make them whatever.
That would just be so much better.
So, you know, you investigated literally probably thousands of cookie recipes, because there's hundreds in the book.
So you had to cut down.
Was there a cookie that you'd encountered, that you tasted somewhere around the world, or you'd seen or you heard of, and you're like I can't figure out how to make that?
Hmm.
Um...
I mean there were a couple of cookies in the book where I had to watch several YouTube videos and, like my God, dig through you know archaic Facebook archives of random people I never met before to try to find these videos they uploaded literally like in Africa and places like that, to try to see how these cookies are made.
I don't know how I found many of them.
It was just like hours and hours of searching online until I just came down some wormhole.
But there was a cookie in in Ghana, the Ayigbe biscuit, which is like tapioca starch, yeah sugar and then coconut milk, and that was it.
And honestly, anything that was made with tapioca starch or all cornstarch which there's several from Latin America and Southeast Asia that just use, that were very difficult, just because trying to get the exact measurement.
So it's not that kind of like putty sludge that we used to make as a kid, but it also is just enough to hold together but not become too dry.
But those were.
The African cookies were really interesting, because they make the dough, stamp it into balls, but then they put the balls next to each other in such a way so that when they bake they kind of touch a little bit and then they all kind of rise together.
So it would not have been quite the same if you separate them out like we do on a cookie sheet.
You had to like get them to touch each other.
So they kind of rise typically and then you break them along the lines and that's what gives them that specific shape that they have.
So there's little details like that.
That kind of drove me crazy, where I was like sure I could have just put the balls on a cookie sheet and said here it was.
But I really wanted to replicate for people exactly what you would get if you went and had these in their place of origin.
So that was probably the trickiest just because those cookies, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia –
They obviously don't have as many cookbooks and a culture of recording their recipes as Europe and America does.
So there wasn't that much out there.
So those took longer to figure out just because it was not so readily accessible.
But once I did it was really nice and fun and kind of helped paint the whole picture of the full cookie book in the end.
So it was great.
Yeah, right on.
Yeah.
Well, Ben, this has been so fun going around the world in a cookie tin.
Thanks so much.
Thank you so much for having me, Francis.
Ben Mims is author of Crumbs, cookies and sweets from around the world, and he left us with a recipe for those guava-filled butter cookies.
Find them at splendidtable.org.
So I'm sure you already know the story of chocolate, how it started as a food or a drink really, for indigenous people in Mexico.
The Olmec, Maya and Aztec revered it as a food of the gods.
Those Spanish colonizers brought it back to Europe, added sugar and the chocolate bar as we now know, it was born.
Now, a lot has happened in chocolate over the past 500 years or so, but we're kind of living in a brand new era of chocolate, and one that takes its cues from the original era of chocolate.
Rowan Jacobson is nothing if not an obsessive about food and its origins.
He's written eight books, including the James Beard Award-winning The Geography of Oysters, and his newest is Wild Chocolate Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul.
So hi, Rowan.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Hey, great to be here.
You know, I think we are both pretty big chocolate lovers.
I think I can assume that about you.
But I actually want to start our conversation about chocolate actually by talking about coffee.
Because I think what happened with coffee in our country is what some people think is happening or what will happen with chocolate.
And I know you know about coffee as well.
Maybe you can describe for us in your words what the three ways of coffee are.
Yeah, I actually, I think that's a great way of looking at it.
And so yeah, with coffee, the first wave is, if we're old enough, kind of like what we all experienced, maybe as kids, that our parents drank, which was, you know, like Folgers out of a can and that kind of thing.
So pretty low quality coffee that was already ground.
So it wasn't being treated very well on the, on the making of the coffee end.
And also the, the coffee beans themselves weren't very good.
And that was, you know, just standard American Joe for a while.
Yeah.
It's great.
Like its greatest ability was availability, right?
Totally.
Yes.
It was, and it was everywhere.
It was ubiquitous.
Um, and then Starbucks came along in the eighties maybe.
And um raised the coffee game uh, which was new to most americans, and they did it by just having much more intense coffee.
That wasn't really watered down, you know they were.
They were dark, roasting their beans, so they were introducing some more flavor into the beans just almost by burning them and and just you know, making that that first wave of sort of italian style more intense drinks.
So that was like the second wave of coffee.
It's like wow, coffee has flavor yeah, but They still weren't.
The material they were using wasn't necessarily that much better than you know the Folgers era.
They were just like sourcing commodity beans.
So then once people started like paying attention and going, like you know, this stuff could be pretty great if we use better raw material.
Then you got that awesome third wave of coffee that...
We're all familiar with today, where you source very fine quality beans and then treat them really well and then treat the coffee making part really well.
And you get the beautiful coffees we have today.
Yeah.
This is where you find the baristas with like the tattoos that make you feel like you're too old.
Yeah.
The really beautiful latte art.
And again, like really a focus on, oh, what kind of beans we have.
You go to the cafe and like oh, we have, you know, the Ethiopian yogurt chef, and we'll make that pour over.
And, you know, that style of coffee is the third wave of coffee.
So what do you see then is the equivalent in chocolate?
Yeah.
So I do think.
I think chocolate is probably the same path, but forever for whatever like.
Chocolate and coffee are kind of like separated at birth twins.
And for whatever reason, like coffee has always been a few decades ahead of chocolate.
So chocolate kind of follows coffee.
Um, and, and that same arc is happening.
So, you know, we can all think about the Hershey's bars of our youth that were, you know, we love them for whatever reason, but let's, let's face it.
They were not like amazing quality products.
The?
Um.
The cocoa beans that were being used were pretty cheap and they were being watered down with a lot of dried milk and sugar for that mainstream grocery store product.
Then if you had access to European chocolates back in the day, You know, then you could get dark chocolate which it was kind of like the equivalent of the Starbucks move.
Same, like, maybe not great quality beans, but much more intense.
Like, where a supermarket bar of milk chocolate may have had, you know, 25% cocoa in it.
Suddenly, you know, with dark chocolate, you could get 50% cocoa content or 60%.
It was a much more intense flavor.
And same thing as with coffee.
Everyone's like, this stuff's pretty awesome.
Right. what would happen if we actually used good beans to do it?
And that has been much more recent.
Like I said, chocolate follows way behind coffee.
So it's really only in the past 20 years have we started to see these chocolate bars where people have gone to the trouble to source really awesome beans and treat them really well.
And so now we've had this golden age of chocolate, where we're seeing bars that are better than anything we've seen before.
Yeah.
How do you describe...
How do you describe the flavor, the mouthfeel, when you taste a really beautifully made craft chocolate bar today versus, like you said, even something you could have bought at a grocery store 20 years ago?
Yeah.
I'm glad you mentioned mouthfeel because I feel like that's a big part of chocolate in particular.
But first, it kind of goes back to what you were saying about coffee.
There's no one way to describe the flavor, because one of the remarkable things we've all started to discover with chocolate is that there's a huge variety of flavors depending on which beans you use.
So you can get some that have that like really deep flavor fudgy, like spice box uh element to them, and then others you almost wouldn't think they were chocolate.
It's like they're real fruit elements, like it can taste like citrus and raspberries almost.
So part of the fun is that we have this like wide range of flavors to explore.
But back to mouthfeel what?
One of the things that differentiates chocolate from coffee is that coffee is a very low fat bean.
So, you know, maybe the little bit of oil that shows up in your coffee has, you know, an importance to the flavor, but it's not that big.
Chocolate is like 50 to 60% cocoa butter fat.
And that is essential to the experience of chocolate is that you know like almost overwhelmingly rich way it coats your whole, whole palate and your, your senses.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And you can really tell when chocolate bars are made from a leaner bean versus ones that are merely made from a richer, more cocoa buttery bean.
Some of them are very almost dry and astringent and some just feel like you're bathing in it.
You put a bite of this chocolate in your mouth and you're like, oh my God, I'm swimming in this stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
I like that leaner bean.
I wish I'd used that in the book.
But it's true.
And actually, that goes way back.
Like the Maya a thousand years ago in Central America, were looking for those really rich fatty beans and actually cultivated them.
Oh, interesting.
Tell us about that, because this is the original way chocolate was consumed, right?
Yeah.
So the cacao tree is native to the American tropics.
And for at least 4,000 years and probably longer...
The Maya and a lot of those other cultures in Mesoamerica used chocolate as this either daily or special occasion drink.
They always drank it.
They didn't really have it as a solid product, but it was a drink that was essential to their culture and their cosmology.
It was, you know, what you had at a wedding.
It was what you served. very important people, and it was like a way of honoring your ancestors.
So it had a huge amount of ritual significance for millennia in the Americas before the Europeans arrived.
And then it changed.
Rowan Jacobson is the author of Wild Chocolate.
More with him in a minute.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.
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I'm Francis Lam, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters.
We're talking with Rowan Jacobson about what's behind the best chocolate bars in the world today.
Let's get back to it with him.
You talk about how cocoa beans now you know, going from this very almost sacred product in Mayan cultures and indigenous cultures to chocolate, catching on in Europe during colonization, it becoming a thing that eventually became a commodity, like corn right.
So talk about that.
Like, You've been to cacao farms for your research.
Tell us what these farms are like and how they can differ from one another.
What is a commodity farm like versus what a small farm is like?
And then we get into the title of your book, which is Wild Chocolate.
Yeah.
Yeah, actually, that's a great question, because they're so different.
So your typical cocoa farm around the world would be in Africa, where about 70 of our cacao is produced.
And it would be a very small operation.
It would basically be one family who might have a couple of acres.
And they're producing less than a ton of cacao per year.
So not a whole lot.
And they're probably very isolated in a remote part of Ivory Coast or Ghana and they're being paid very little money for that cacao because it is a commodity crop and there's, you know, there can be 12 or 14 middlemen up the supply chain between the farmer and the retail store in the us or in europe.
So the farmer gets a tiny amount of money and it's really a hardscrabble operation where you know he might earn a thousand to two thousand dollars a year.
Uh, And then there are a lot of labor issues that come with that, because he can't afford to pay his workers and he really can't quite afford to make a living.
But he's also growing his cacao, probably in what used to be rainforest and got cleared and is now basically a monocrop of cacao trees.
So that's like sort of standard for where most of our like bulk chocolate comes from that type of operation.
But in the American tropics and a few other places around the world, you find the specialty cacao market, which is a very different situation and is now earning much higher prices for the farmers, which is part of the good news.
But the other part of the good news is it makes really amazing chocolate.
The ones I've visited in Central America and South America, it really feels more like a forest.
Like you're wandering through a mixed forest of cacao trees and often coffee trees and avocado trees, and then other just wild trees.
And it'll often be quite mountainous in these areas.
And it's really a low-tech operation.
So the cacao tree produces these pods every year that are kind of like the size of a delicata squash.
And so you just have to go through and harvest the pods, and then you dry the beans that are in the pods and grind those to make the chocolate.
But so these operations are really like a way to make a living from the standing rainforest.
It's quite beautiful to be in them.
It's quite buggy.
You get bitten by a lot of things.
But it's this pretty amazing form of agroforestry that is totally sustainable.
Yeah.
I've actually had the pleasure of visiting a couple of cacao farms myself, and I was amazed that it looked nothing like a farm in the way that I know of a farm.
It's not man-made rows of crops, rows of cacao trees.
It really was like you'd follow this farmer and he was walking in the forest and they would know the land so intimately.
So they would know where every tree was.
The farmer I spoke to like had names for all these trees.
You know and, and it would, he would just know.
Like you, walk in the forest, you know exactly where all the cow trees were and and then, like you said, all the other trees that he would feed his family with, you know, for fruits and stuff.
But then you have this third.
I wouldn't say model because it's maybe the opposite of a model, it's just, it exists in the world in chaos, but wild chocolate.
So what is what is wild cacao versus these um, you know, agroforestry cacao farms?
Yeah,
So wild cacao is this thing that none of us thought existed 20 years ago, but it's turned out to be a very real thing.
So what you described is like a perfect description of your typical Central American or South American cacao farm.
And, like you said, those trees.
The farmers know their trees and often the farm goes back in the family for generations.
So you can see why they kind of associate those trees with their ancestors, because probably half their ancestors are buried on that same land.
And so the trees and the ancestors are intimately connected.
Yeah.
But you keep keep following that back long enough.
And those original trees came from somewhere.
And that part was lost on chocolate experts for a long time, because by the time that you know, when the Spanish showed up in the 1500s, the Maya and the Aztec like they were already running these pretty elaborate cacao farming operations.
So no one was talking about wild cacao.
But it turns out.
Cacao is native to the Amazon and has been growing there for hundreds of thousands of years.
And it's still there.
It just kind of got forgotten about because the Amazon is hard to get into and it's hard to do business in any way in the Amazon.
So things kind of get forgotten about in there.
And this was the case with the original strains of cacao.
And there were a few small indigenous groups that still knew about them.
But basically, there was nobody who was making chocolate with this stuff.
And then, starting about 20 years ago, a few people started to realize that not only were there these ancient strains of cacao in the rainforest, but they actually made awesome chocolate if you treated them right.
And the industry was very skeptical for a while.
But they got over it once they started tasting the chocolate.
And once people started raving about these first chocolate bars which is kind of where I came onto the scene I got a hold of one of those things and I thought it was incredible.
So I reached out to the guy who was doing it and trying to convince anyone that it really was wild.
And so I asked if I could come down and check it out, and he said yes.
This is the gentleman you write about, Volker, right?
Yeah, Volker Lehmann.
Tell us about him.
He's sort of an amazing and sort of epic and tragic story.
It is indeed epic and tragic which, of course, is good from the writer's perspective, although not necessarily as good from his perspective.
But yeah, he's had a whole, he's experienced all the highs and lows of being an entrepreneur.
I'd say
But he was doing development work in the Amazon for decades, like trying to come up with ways for the people who live there to make money off the standing forest.
And he kind of like getting to know some of the indigenous cultures down there.
He'd learned that they had this cacao that was wild um, and they kind of used it on a very like just they didn't even really sell it, they just would make their own uh chocolate drinks out of it sometimes.
But he realized how good the quality was.
Uh, if you, if you sort of put it through a more high, high level fermentation and drying process, which is the key to making great chocolate.
Um worked for years to convince any chocolate maker to try to partner with him and finally did.
It had this hit with this bar called Cru Sauvage that was being made by a Swiss company but with his beans from Bolivia.
And it became a hit.
So then, people all over the world wanted the chocolate, which meant he needed to get more and more beans out of the rainforest, which meant he started having to source his beans from a huge chunk of Bolivian Amazon beans.
And that's where the trouble started, because that means you're just.
You know you're traveling by you know canoe and small boat up these rivers and trying to get enough people to work with you in all these areas and handing money out across half the rainforest to buy beans from people.
And you know like this is an area where you've got constant floods, where everything breaks down, where there's no roads and where there's a whole lot of narco traffickers.
And so he managed to make a business out of it for a little while, but then eventually he lost everything, once nature turned against him, basically.
Oh, man.
That's so rough.
But it's interesting to hear about this idea of these, in many cases, indigenous groups, but in other cases, just local farmers, local smallholder farmers and people who are trying to tap into this resource in a sort of commercial way to make money, as opposed to subsistence.
And there's also someone else you write about who has this notion that there's a special quality of the cacao tree, which is that it can grow in shade.
And he sees that as an opportunity to use the rising demand of quality cacao as a way to reforest.
Famously, the Amazon is incredibly deforested, and that's a huge driver of climate change.
And there's this notion that maybe the demand for cacao can help reforest.
Can you talk to us about that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is this kind of blew my mind once I wrap my head around it.
So cacao is it likes to be in the the understory.
It's a little tree.
It's maybe, you know, 15, 20 feet high.
So it likes to grow in the shadow of the the giants of the rainforest.
And it's uniquely adapted to that environment, which is very low light.
So it's one of the only crops I can think of that can produce a full yield in basically 0 sunlight, like in the total shade of the rainforests.
And that um, that's kind of like the Holy grail from this um, this reforestation uh perspective, because everyone's always looking for.
You know ways to produce a crop in the rainforest, but it's really hard.
And usually there's, Oh, chop everything down.
They clear cut the forest and here's a crop that you need.
That is what happens.
Uh, yeah, exactly.
And that it, so it flips the whole thing on its head.
So instead of um cutting down the trees and growing soybeans or grazing cattle, you can suddenly make money from the standing forest by just picking these pods, so that you know the trees will last for decades.
So you're not even cutting those trees down.
So.
It's it's a beautiful way to, you know, energize restoration.
You, you plant your cacao and then you plant these trees that will shade the cacao, which the cacao wants, as they all grow up together.
So not only does it protect existing rainforest, but it's actually a way to support growth of brand new rainforest.
And the person you're mentioning is is in Belize, and his vision is to grow new rainforest by just planting cacao in all these places that have been degraded by other forms of agriculture that weren't so sustainable.
And his name's Jacob Marlin, and he has an environmental nonprofit in Belize called BeFree, the Belize Foundation for Research and Environmental Education.
Right on.
And how do we as consumers support that kind of growth, support that kind of cacao?
And, as you mentioned earlier, some of the best chocolate in the world is being made with this type of cacao.
So are there chocolate makers we should be buying from?
Are there chocolate makers we should buy from anyway because it's delicious?
Tell us about that.
How do we support that kind of thing?
Yeah, and it can be tough to connect with that world because you've got the people who are growing these heirloom cacaos in the middle of nowhere in Central America or South America.
They're very isolated.
So how do you get those beans?
How do you get them to the U.S.?
How do you get them into the hands of this new wave of bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the US who are really eager to work with those beans?
Yeah.
You kind of need that matchmaker in the middle.
And that's one of the important developments that's happened in recent years is the rise of basically just a couple of companies that serve that matchmaker role, that hook up the bean to bar makers doing artisan level chocolates in the US with people growing these great heirloom varieties of cacao down in the tropics.
And so when you can connect those two, that suddenly you get this whole new movement.
That's taken off.
So there are now all these bean-to-bar chocolate makers in the US because they can finally get the stuff fairly easily.
So that just lowered the bar to entry down low enough that a lot of people are in it.
Yeah.
So there yeah, the US is really leading the charge on this and making the most amazing chocolates.
Who are some of your favorites?
So there is, I just, I was just in Utah.
Utah is strangely a hotbed of artisan chocolate making.
And there's a producer called Ritual in Utah that I just visited.
Ritual's incredible.
Oh, God.
Oh, good, yeah.
And so they're using equipment like this, like dinosaur equipment that's more than 100 years old that they brought over from Europe, like giant old machines out of like a bygone era that just produced incredibly luxurious chocolate in a way that the modern machines kind of don't.
So that's partly why their chocolate is so good.
And the other is because they're sourcing from some just amazing small batch producers of beans.
And they in fact use the beans that Volker Lehmann produces in Bolivia from Tranquilidad, which is the name of his little wild cacao forest that he has down there.
But everything they have is amazing.
And that's a good way to explore a lot of the different varieties.
I usually send people to a website called Caputo's which has probably the broadest range of really good chocolates of any internet or of any online retailer.
So you can go to Caputo's and you can actually specifically look at all of their heirloom varieties.
Oh, amazing.
Cool.
Well, I know where I'm going to go shopping for my holiday gifts.
And thank you so much for this, Rowan.
Thanks.
My pleasure.
Rowan Jacobson is author of Wild Chocolate, Across the Americas in Search of Cacao's Soul.
And hey, if you want to check out some of these new craft chocolates, Rowan mentioned a store, capudoscom.
That's amazing.
I also like themeadow.com.
And some of the makers I really love include Dick Taylor Askinosie and my friends at Dandelion Chocolate who, full disclosure, wrote an incredible book I edited years ago called Making Chocolate, which is everything you need to know if you actually want to start making your own bean-to-bar chocolate.
Well, that is our show for this week.
Thank you for listening, and hey, treat yourself to something good today.
We'll talk to you next week.
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Thanks for listening.
I'm Francis Lam, and this is APM, American Public Media.
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