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Ultimate Origins: The Word From Bittersweet

Posted by Emily Stone, November 21, 2007 at 11:30 AM

Seneca Klassen cares deeply about where his chocolate comes from. At the two branches of his Bay Area shop, Bittersweet, he does a good trade in all manner of bars marked "70 percent," "Organic," and "Single Origin." He carries brands like Domori, El Rey, the Grenada Chocolate Company, and Platations, and San Francisco chocolate lovers show up in droves to buy them. It's a pretty good deal. But in recent months Seneca has been working harder—he's been calling in favors from friends in Hawaii, Madagascar, and the Dominican Republic; he's been doing the laboriously sweaty work of roasting cacao beans in a back-room convection oven; and he's been grinding those beans in home-baked machinery that he put together with parts ordered from ChocolateAlchemy.com. He's been doing all of this so that he can make a set of bars that he has ultimate confidence in: Bittersweet Origins.

Herein, Seneca explains what all the chocolate terminology being bandied about means to him.

Seneca on 'Percentage'

Cacao mass percentage is a problematic metric for chocolate, primarily (in my retailer experience) because consumers expect a number like 64 percent or 70 percent or 85 percent to be reflective in some way of quality (i.e., the higher the number, the better the chocolate). That said, it is a useful tool, since it does deliver some basic information about sugar content, and we can confidently say that the higher the percentage of cacao mass, the lower the glycemic index of the bar. The main way we make use of percentage labeling at Bittersweet is as a tool for ordering tastings, and I think in general it's certainly not the end-all be-all piece of consumer information about chocolate, but rather one tool among many for determining what kind of chocolate experience is right for you.

On 'Organic'

Without a direct connection to the agricultural experience of cacao, it's difficult to explain to people how fundamentally organic (in both legal and generic terms) a cacao orchard is. The midges that pollinate cacao live in the leaf litter directly beneath the trees, and use of pesticides and herbicides within an orchard is impossible without killing your pollinators. The majority of chemical use in cacao happens around the margins (clearing access roads with roundup, etc...), rather than on the crop itself. That said, I do believe that organic certification is a useful and important tool and process for the future of cacao and chocolate, although at the moment there is definitely something of a quality gap in the availability of fine eating chocolates that are certified organic.

On 'Origin'

This is the area of chocolate/cacao definition that's most important to me personally, and that I feel has the strongest downstream potential to really change the marketplace. Consumers have a preexisting understanding of origin and terroir from their experiences with other varietal products like wine and coffee, and insofar as it's possible to tap into that existing framework of understanding, we can really ramp up people's quality of experience and comprehension of cacao quite quickly. The main difficulty in this area is the lack of a formalized appellation system in cacao, so that claims of origin can be either overbroad ( i.e. National), or not entirely trustworthy (witness the number of products labeled "Chuao" on the market...). Still, I think those developments will come, and in the end that interaction between genetics/varietal and place/appellation will (I think) form a fundamental underpinning for those consumers interested in a really compelling and revelatory experience of chocolate.

About the author: Emily Stone, proprietor of Chocolate in Context, is a chocolate enthusiast, itinerant traveler, and a lover of literature who lives in Pittsburgh. She's been a movie reviewer, a reproductive health researcher, and an independent bookstore owner. Her writing has appeared in the magazines Budget Travel, Travel + Leisure, and Time Out New York, as well as on the websites World Hum and Epicurious.

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Tags: chocolate