We're back from Costa Rica!

Our three weeks in Costa Rica and Panama proved to be a very good learning experience. There's at least a couple stories for every day we were there. I think I shot upwards of a 1000 photos and almost an hour of video footage and I can't wait to share it with you all soon.

For now I'd just like to share a few photos from the trip.

One of the indigenous farmers we visited required taking a canoe up the river. This also means that for them to deliver their beans, they have to go the same route.

After the canoe ride up the river we had to ride in the back of a cattle truck on dirt roads to reach the farm.

 This is a Capuchin monkey. He was very angry with us for walking through his territory.

A coffee shop in Puerto Viejo was serving chocolate shots, similar to an espresso shot without sugar, using beans from a nearby cooperative.

At this cacao farm we enjoyed a few coconut refrescos.

A farmer drops off some of his organic beans at this cooperative in Panama.

This is what a well maintained cacao grove looks like.

Unlike most fruits, the cacao pod can grow directly from the trunk of the tree. (However, these might not be Theobroma Cacao... I think they are some other Theobroma species)

We found an entire river that was hot right next to a hot spring business that was charging $100 per person.

I know this photo is obscene, but it's the closest shot I got of a howler monkey. 

This tree was filled with a family of howler monkeys but they were quite far away.

Try finding some of these books at your local library... We didn't.

Caribbean postcard shot. Cahuita.

While at one of the indigenous farms we found a poison arrow frog—they are only poisonous if they get into your bloodstream.

We were told that this snake has enough venom to kill five adults.

We needed a photo posing next to a cacao tree right?

It's harder to catch waves on a bike.

We spent a morning snorkling off the coast of Cahuita—we mostly saw schools of fish and sting rays.

This very large spider was on the balcony of one of our hotels.

The mucilage around a cacao seed is very enjoyable.

We saw this three-toed sloth just as it was climbing down a large tree to take his tri-weekly poop, which apparently is a rare thing to witness.

At this farm the workers use a series of cable lines to bring large amounts of cacao back to the processing center in one trip. This guy is carrying about 700-800 pounds...

This cacao farm is the home of about 40 to 50 wild two-toed sloths.

We had dinner two nights in a row at this restaurant because the view of the Arenal volcano was so breathtaking.

We weren't 100% sure that we'd be able to bring beans back for testing, but we successfully brought back over 60 pounds.

And yes, we started a batch our first morning back. We were very excited to put all of our new knowledge to use. 

Cheers,

Robbie and Anna

Costa Rica Bound in March

It’s official. Anna and I have booked our airline reservations to Costa Rica. We’ll be arriving at the San Jose Juan Santamaria International airport on March 6th and we won’t be coming back until three weeks later. We have many goals while we are there, including finding farmers that we can work with in the future and mostly learning about what it takes to produce good quality cacao.

Our first week will be spent with Steve DeVries and Pam Williams in the Ecole Chocolat educational setting. It will be vastly helpful for us to work with people that know their way in and out of the bean-to-bar business and know the cacao growing hot spots in Costa Rica. Our original itinerary called for just one week down South, but we were able to work things out for us to stay an extra two weeks. This will give us a chance to explore and deepen our understanding of sourcing cacao from Central America.

The majority of our time will be spent in Costa Rica but we would love to visit some of the cooperatives in Panama and hopefully discover some organic growers in Nicaragua. Developing positive relationships with the farmers and cooperatives will be an essential step toward gaining momentum for Chocolate Baar. The better we prepare for our travels in Costa Rica—the better our short trip will be spent.

As March approaches, we’ll keep you up to date on some of our travel plans. In the mean time, we have beans from Panama and Madagascar on the way and they should be arriving by late next week. Can't wait to taste the finished product! Thanks for reading.

First Batch

It’s been a longtime coming but we finally made our first batch of chocolate—doing the whole process, from the bean to the bar. Considering we ran into a few speed bumps, I think we did a pretty good job. Half expecting the end product to be downright inedible, we were surprised discover that our first batch was actually pretty good.

Here’s how it happened

First of all, we happened to get a sample of some criollo beans from Haiti through a local coffee shop that was interested in importing coffee beans. We received the beans a few weeks before some of our essential equipment was delivered, so we had some time to get familiar with the roasting process.

Roasting

I’ll tell you now that our first attempt to roast a small amount of these beans was a total disaster. Using a conventional oven without a confection fan we successfully cooked them into a burned cinder. Yup, there was no chance of salvaging those little beans… and to think, they had come so far only to be botched.

After about seven or eight roasting attempts we finally found a technique to stabilize the temperature in the oven. Then we set our detailed notes aside and waited for our Spectra 10 melanger to be delivered.

Going for it

I was still at work when it first arrived and Anna was on the scene to unpack the 40 pound wet grinder that arrived at our doorstep. It was only a matter of hours before we began concocting our first batch.

The first thing we had to do was roast the rest of the beans. This time around we were successful in giving the beans a reasonably good roast without cooking out all the flavor and without burning them to a crisp. Fortunately that evening it was only about 0-degrees Fahrenheit outside so cooling the beans was a cinch.

Next, with the aid of a potato masher, a duck-shaped hair dryer and a large glass bowl, we took to winnowing our freshly roasted beans. This took a little longer than expected but after about five minutes we had a good amount of nibs in the bowl with a kitchen-floor full of husks.

Not wanting to overload our out-of-the-box concher, we ground all of the nibs into a fine powder in our handheld coffee grinder. We also did this with the sugar, resulting in a fine powdery substance. In addition, we threw the conch bowl into the oven at about 120-degrees along with our powdered nibs and sugar. This step helped to get everything up to temperature as a way of inducing the liquefying process.

As a way of making our first batch a little bit more manageable, we knew we would need additional cocoa butter. Impatient to get started we headed down to Whole Foods to find out if it was possible to buy cocoa butter. To our dismay the answer was no… at least, not food-grade cocoa butter. But we did find some 1oz. tubes in the Whole Body section of organic cocoa butter. Not having any other options, we went ahead and bought a few ounces at about two-and-a-half dollars each.

Conching

Once everything appeared to be nice and warm we started up the conch and began adding the ingredients slowly. This is another step that I didn’t expect to take as long as it did. We had to add the ingredients very slowly and keep the hot hair dryer pointed at the mixture for almost an hour before we were comfortable with the state of the cocoa liquor.

Now all we had to do was wait. This proved to be a difficult task—not because we are that impatient but because we live in a studio carriage house, which meant that we had to listen to this noisy little contraption at full volume all night. With the combination of excitement and the noise of the conch I probably slept two to three hours that night.

Tempering

6:00am rolled around and Anna was up getting ready to teach her 7:00am yoga class at Alaya. I couldn’t sleep anyway so I popped up and decided that the liquor was done being processed. I didn’t have to be to an eye exam until 10am so I decided to temper and mold the chocolate that morning. After failing to temper the chocolate for a solid hour and a half because it was too thick to work with I had to give up and bike over to my appointment.

That night we bought one more ounce of cocoa butter and tossed it into the mixture to be conched again. The next day we invited a friend over to show him our creation in the making and he took a turn at mixing the liquor while we were remelting it in the double boiler to temper. With his overly strong arms he broke our rubber spatula that doubled as a thermometer. After making sure that no broken fragments made it into the chocolate we set it aside once again to temper another day.

Finally, on January 10, 2010 we set out to temper our chocolate for the third time with a new thermospatula. The chocolate was nice and flowing and we had no problem reaching our high and low temperatures. We had enough chocolate liquor to make about 70 bite-sized chocolate bars. They cooled quickly sitting by the sliding glass door and when they were ready they exhibited the loud snap of a well tempered bar.

After running over to Office Depot to buy more ink for the printer, we printed off labels to wrap around each of our little bars, which read: “Operation: Chocolate, Single Origin: Haiti, Bean Type: Criollo, Batch #1 Jan. 10, 2010, Bean to Bar – Organic, Boulder, CO”

And there you have it. The longwinded story of our first Chocolate Baar creation. 

Greetings

We are long overdue for a public blog but with so much happening with us and the world in the last few weeks, we figured it’s time.

So what’s this all about? What is Chocolate Baar? To begin, Chocolate Baar is an unofficial title for a project that me (Robbie) and Anna are working on. “Baar” stands for “by Anna and Robbie.” So, this blog is officially and unofficially titled, “Chocolate by Anna and Robbie.”

I’m glad you’ve found your way here. The Internet is a vast and ever-growing space so the chances of you landing here are approximately 1 in… 108 million (according to a domain count in 2007).

You can expect to find here news about our progression towards becoming one of Colorado’s first bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturers. However, let’s give credit where credit is due. Steve Devries has been making chocolate in Denver for a long time now and he is considered to be one of the most talented chocolatiers in the world (according to Chloe). I’ve never tried his chocolate but someday I hope to be that lucky… And let’s not forget to give a tip of the hat to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that at one time or another they were making chocolate from the bean. Anyway, I’d like to believe that we are at least the first folks in Boulder, Colorado to be producing artisanal chocolate from the bean without the aid of any dirty tricks, including soy lecithin.

Choose quality over quantity: Just as we aim to make small batches of some of the finest chocolate that the world has to offer, I’m going to end this introduction now—before the word count outweighs the quality of the content.