Wild Chocolate: Across the Americas In Search of Cacao’s Soul by Rowan Jacobsen

This is a fascinating combination of history, travel, agriculture, and chocolate. Traveling as part of a team with the Heirloom Cacao Preservation Fund, Rowan travels to southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, Brazil, and Bolivia in search of the best cacao varieties and beans and to meet the farmers and the people working to get their beans from farm to factory to table. There are varieties of cacao beans most of us have never heard of or tasted, such as Criollo.

Rowan makes many journeys by bus and down creeks and rivers, sleeping in hammocks, getting bitten by ants, mosquitoes, and gnats.  He learns about challenges of collecting freshly harvested cacao pods and along with farmers, how to dry, sort and ferment cacao beans, and then getting them shipped to a city or another country to be made into an amazing variety of chocolate bars.

Bean to bar chocolate is more expensive than the mass-produced chocolate, and Rowan explains why, and where to purchase it online, or in a few cities. I haven’t ordered any yet, but did find a single origin bar to try at a local store (not the same as true bean to bar or wild chocolate) and found it to be very complex and tasting of raisins. I didn’t love it, but look forward to trying new varieties of gourmet chocolate.

The author has also written about apples, oysters, truffles, and honey bees in crisis, among other topics.

Brenda