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by Nancy Oster
Photographs by Maya Schoop-Rutten
“As a child growing up in Switzerland, I never thought about where the chocolate I ate came from,” says Maya Schoop-Rutten, owner of Chocolate Maya in Santa Barbara. “I grew up in Geneva by the lake, near a beautiful forest where I was free to ride my bike, run around, build stick houses, and go fishing, sledding and skiing. I ate chocolate with my breakfast every day and grew strong bones because of it. In Europe chocolate is part of our diet. We go to the butcher, the fromagerie, the wine shop and the chocolaterie. There is a chocolate shop every couple of blocks.”
In Maya’s family home, chocolate was kept in a beautiful pine green armoire. Its three doors were colorfully decorated with delicate flowers painted by her mother. Two shelves in the armoire were reserved for chocolate. “Every night after dinner we would open the magic door and choose some chocolates.”
That green armoire now sits in Maya’s living room. “The magic door still provides some amazing chocolates, from many different regions of the world,” Maya says. However, her son Helek and daughter Ila know firsthand about where the chocolate they eat comes from, an important issue to all of them.
Chocolate Around the World
After working about 10 years as a cook on boats that traveled the globe, Maya landed in Santa Barbara and opened the Comeback Café. For the next 12 years, she served daily breakfast and lunch to locals and visitors.
But Maya missed European chocolate. She says, “I was going to Europe every year to fill my suitcase with chocolate. After one summer trip to Europe, it just clicked. I decided to sell the Comeback Cafe and open a chocolate shop in Santa Barbara,
so I could share this wonderful food with everybody!”
In 2007, she opened Chocolate Maya. Chocolate bars from around the world line one wall of her shop. The front counter is filled with truffles from France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland and the United States. A few particularly delicious truffles are her original creations, skillfully made by an expert candy making mentor, using high quality chocolate carefully balanced with other fresh ingredients. “Chocolate is a delicate confection that needs to be handled with a lot of love and care,” she says.
Noting the range of flavors for chocolate grown in different areas of the world, Maya realized she wanted to know more about the process of making chocolate—how the beans grow and what influences their flavors.
“How many people know where chocolate really comes from?” she asks. She points out that an excellent cheese does not begin with the cheese maker, it begins with the cow. Artisans in Switzerland, Belgium and France make chocolates, but they don’t grow the beans.
Cacao Beans
Cacao trees (Theobroma cacao) are like grapevines, affected by the weather, the region and the soil. But cacao trees only grow within a latitudinal band 22 degrees above and 22 degrees below the equator (not in Switzerland, Belgium or France). For healthy growth and maximum yield, they need 80 inches of year-round moisture, protection from strong winds, a minimum temperature of 65°, high humidity and shade.
Tiny midge flies related to no-see-ums pollinate the flowers, which grow right on the trunk and older limbs of the tree. These flowers don’t attract bees, so trees in humid, moldy rainforest environments (where the midges breed) yield the best harvests.
The cacao tree originated in the Amazon region of South America at least a couple thousand years ago. During the Aztec period, cacao beans were a highly prized form of currency. The cost of a tomato was one bean, three beans for an avocado and 100 to 150 beans for a turkey.
The first cacao tree variety was probably the criollo, which is considered the most aromatic and flavorful, but least hardy. It has been largely replaced by the less delicate forastero variety (about 80 percent of commercial beans). About 10 percent of beans grown today are the trinitario variety, a cross between the forastero and the criollo.
The chocolate I grew up eating is quite different from the chocolate Maya sells. Large chocolate companies buy from multiple sources, creating blends of beans for flavor and cost-effectiveness. Some chocolates have some of the cocoa butter removed and replaced with other less expensive oils.
Maya’s chocolate is pure and clean tasting, with the origin of the beans listed on the wrapper and no cocoa butter substitutes. Maya recommends trying bars made with a single variety or all from one region or plantation, so you can compare the flavors.
Cacao Harvest
Maya says, “How can you eat, love and sell a product without knowing the roots of it? It became obvious to me that I had to travel to the source.”
To learn more about the farmers and how they harvest cacao beans, Maya has visited cacao farms in Guatemala, Venezuela, Java, Bali and Cuba. Her children have met the farmers and seen cacao pods hanging from the trees and beans drying in the sun.
Her first voyage in search the cacao harvest was to Venezuela.
“We visited Chuao, a beautiful mystical farm, far away from the big towns. We took a small boat to a remote beach, hiked a well-kept trail and arrived in heaven. The essence of fermenting cacao beans was inebriating,” she says. “I was jet-lagged, very tired. One of the farmers gave me a couple of freshly dried cacao beans and told me to eat them. An incredible boost of energy took over my whole body. Before I knew it I’d climbed to the top of a nearby hill for a magnificent view of this fabulous country. I felt like Superwoman!”
Maya spent 10 days in Venezuela visiting cacao farms in Chuao and Rio Chico. She says, “We found out how hard people work to keep their trees healthy and saw how they pick, ferment and dry the beans.” She adds, “About a third of the world cacao crop is lost each year to disease.”
A healthy cacao tree yields about 20 pods yearly per tree. Maya has helped pick the colorful yellow, orange, red, green and purple pods, cut them open and scooped out the bitter seeds, which are embedded in a sweet pulp. Each pod weighs about a pound and produces 20 to 40 seeds—enough to make two dark chocolate bars.
The next step is fermentation. Maya explains, “The fermentation and drying processes are extremely important to create quality chocolate. Different regions have different methods and of course they all have secrets!” The longer the fermentation (six to eight days), the better the aroma.
The fermented seeds are then sun-dried for one or two weeks, to prevent mold during storage and shipping. She adds, “Fermenting and drying artificially accelerates the process for quick exportation, but produces a mediocre chocolate.”
Roasting and grinding is done after the beans leave the farm. Cacao beans are sold as a commodity, usually passing through one or two middlemen before they are delivered to factories where they are turned into cocoa powder or bars of chocolate.
Chocolate Bars
Maya’s biggest surprise came when she asked the farmers about what happens to the beans after they leave their farms. Few farmers had ever seen a chocolate bar. “In Indonesia they could only tell me that they’d heard that the beans travel to a place with high mountains and are put into funny-shaped boxes.” Maya watched as they tasted chocolate bars she had brought along with her. “The look on their faces was one of curiosity and amazement,” she says. They were familiar with cacao as a drink but not as a confection.
Cacao drinks are found throughout the regions where the beans are grown. In Mayan and Aztec culture, cacao beans were roasted and stone ground into a paste that was heated with water and often mixed with ground corn, chili peppers and other available spices. Sometimes honey was added. Returning South American explorers and missionaries took cacao beans home and introduced them to their fellow Europeans as a sweetened drink.
In the 1800s European cocoa enthusiasts eventually discovered a way to extract the cocoa butter from the paste to make a powder that dissolved easily and didn’t form cocoa butter lumps as it cooled. The extracted cocoa butter was sold to confectioners who developed the chocolate bar by adding a portion of the cocoa butter back into the sweetened cocoa mass.
These cacao farmers were not familiar with chocolate confections for several reasons. Chocolate bars quickly lose their gloss and snap when exposed to the warmer temperatures of the tropics, so storage is a problem. But the primary reason is that most cacao farmers can’t afford luxury items like chocolate confections.
Support for Cacao Farmers
In her travels Maya finds the atmosphere on the cacao farms varies widely. She says, “Cacao farming is hard work, I have visited small farms where everybody was humming, chanting or whistling as they picked cacao pods from the trees. And I have visited large cocoa plantations where nobody was smiling. They were dressed in ragged clothing and dragging their feet in the jungle soil with very little to show for their hard work.”
Cacao production has a long history of slavery and child labor. According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s 2009 List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor, both child labor and forced labor are still practiced on some cacao plantations in Ivory Coast and Nigeria. The use of child labor has also been documented on some plantations in Cameroon, Ghana and Guinea.
While controversy rages on this topic, people like Maya Schoop-Rutten are working passionately to encourage consumers to support the fair treatment of cacao farmers around the world. “When I’m in the shop, I always think of them all working—picking the pods, and I want to the general public to understand that we all have a choice. We can choose to buy our chocolate from companies that pay the farmers fair trade prices for their beans.”
Big Tree Farms in Bali is one example. Maya says, “Big Tree Farms teaches the small grower the best way to process their beans. Then they buy the nicely fermented beans from the growers at a fair price.”
Maya isn’t working alone locally in her campaign to support cacao farmers. Tom Neuhaus, founder of Project Hope and Fairness and co-owner of Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates in San Luis Obispo, raises money to personally take needed equipment to small cacao farms in Ghana and Ivory Coast. Understanding the economic pressures that lead to child and forced labor, he explains, “Our intentions are to treat the illness of poverty rather than merely to certify chocolate as abusive-child-labor-free.”
Maya also talks about her friend Jason Vishnefske of Santa Barbara Chocolate Company, who sources his chocolate directly from Peru, Ghana and Cameroon to ensure that the farmers receive the highest fair market price, then ships the beans to Europe or San Francisco for high-quality processing into the chocolate he uses for his confections and for sale to other confectioners.
While the Fair Trade certification is one way to identify ethical business practices, not all small farms or cooperatives can afford certification, so the Fair Trade sticker is not the only way to choose your chocolate. Maya says, “Read labels, look for the origin of the chocolate. Go beyond the label and learn about the company that makes the chocolate.” Maya’s goal is to bridge the gap between the cacao bean grower and the consumer. So next time you’re in her shop, point to a chocolate bar and ask her about it.
Nancy Oster is a baker, cook and food writer who especially enjoys writing articles on subjects where the research requires tasting.
Sweet Earth Organic Chocolates
Tom Neuhaus and Joanne Currie
1445 Monterey St., San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
805 544-7759
sweetearthchocolates.com
Project Hope and Fairness
Tom Neuhaus
805 597-7213
info@projecthopeandfairness.org
http://projecthopeandfairness.org
Tom’s African trip blog:
sweetearthchocolates.blogspot.com
Santa Barbara Chocolate Company
Jason Vishnefske
santabarbarachocolate.com
888 812-6262
Formal chocolate tastings
are available locally at:
Chocolate Maya
Maya Schoop-Rutten
15 West Gutierrez St.
Santa Barbara
805 965-5956
chocolatemaya.com
Chocolats du CaliBressan
4193 Carpinteria Ave., Suite 4
Carpinteria
805 684-6900
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