Nacional or CCN-51: the question that decides everything
Ecuador has two cacaos and they are not alike.
Nacional, or fino de aroma, is the one from here — the one that made the country's reputation a century ago, with the floral perfume Europeans calledArriba because it came from up the Guayas river. It yields little and catches disease easily. Ecuador grows most of the world's fine-flavour cacao, and nearly all of it comes from plants like these.
CCN-51 is a clone developed in the 1960s to produce. And it produces: three or four times as much, resists witches' broom, ripens sooner. But in the cup it is flat and sharp, and it sells as bulk cacao rather than as origin.
Almost no farm has only one. Which is why the first thing we ask on a visit, before price, is the proportion of each — paying a Nacional price for a CCN-51 lot is the most expensive mistake available when buying cacao.
Fermentation is where the flavour is made
A cacao bean straight out of the pod does not taste of chocolate. It tastes of sharp fruit and nothing else. Everything we later recognise as cacao forms during the days the bean spends fermenting, wrapped in its own pulp, in wooden boxes or under banana leaf.
Nacional wants five to seven days. Under three and the bean stays purple inside, bitter and flat, and no amount of roasting or conching will fix it afterwards. It is a number almost nobody asks about and it decides whether the cacao is worth anything.
Which is also why we ask who ferments. When a farm sells its cacaoen baba — straight from the pod, unfermented — all of the flavour is made by someone else somewhere else. That cacao's story is not that farm's story, however good the story is.
What form it comes in
- Pasta or bola de cacao — cacao roasted and ground, nothing added. It is what gets grated into hot milk. Pure 100% or with panela, and those are not the same product.
- Nibs — the bean roasted and cracked. Eaten as they are, or cooked with.
- Dry bean — raw material. Getting from there to a bar means roasting, winnowing, grinding and conching: that is a factory.
That list explains why you will see pasta and nibs here before bars. We buy what the producer already knows how to make, rather than buying their raw material and keeping the interesting part of the work.
It began in the Amazon, not on the coast
At Palanda, in Zamora Chinchipe, there is an archaeological site called Santa Ana-La Florida. The oldest trace of cacao anywhere in the world was found there:5,300 years, about fifteen centuries before the Olmec and the Maya, who were taken to be the origin of chocolate for decades.
It was used by the Mayo-Chinchipe culture, the oldest known civilisation of the upper Amazon. Spondylus shells from the Pacific turned up at the same site, so cacao did not stay where it started: it travelled down trade routes that already existed millennia ago. Nearly all of it is grown on the coast today, but it came from up there.
This is not a line for the label. Palanda still grows cacao, and one of the associations we are talking to is there.
So altitude does not count?
Barely. Nacional cacao grows between sea level and about a thousand metres, and the most respected cacao in the country comes from hot lowland. In coffee altitude is half the story; in cacao the story is genetics, fermentation and drying.