31/01/2022
🍫 Chocolate is one of the world's favourite foods and a staple of every baker. But is all chocolate the same? Let's examine that here.
👉 While we've often spoken about the Criollo Cacao that we source straight from Peruvian farms, it is not the most common kind of chocolate you would find in your grocery stores.
🥇 Mayans originally farmed Criollo Cacao, endemic to their region. Regarded as food of the gods, it was highly nutritious, flavourful and came with several health benefits. However despite a significant history in agriculture, Criollo is not easy to farm. It requires very specific soil and climatic conditions and is very susceptible to damage. It requires a lot of care and specific traditional farming techniques to farm, making it very difficult to produce in numbers large enough to keep up with market demands.
🥈 That's where Forastero and
🥉Trinitario come in. The three of them put together, make the of the cacao world, making up for over 99% of the world's cacao production. Forastero is a much more resilient and robust breed of cacao. It's what you get at your local grocery store and used in most of the chocolate products out there as it's cheap and easy to produce. It has the distinct bitter taste and doesn't come with the secondary flavourful and delectable notes of Criollo. Trinitario is a hybrid, that comes with some of the flavours of Criollo but with the robustness of Forastero.
👨🍳 Most of the world's top chefs, chocolatiers and bakers prefer using Criollo for their most premium offerings due to its superior flavour. That's why we're offering our Peruvian Criollo Cacao to Hong Kong, something that's not easily available out there. Experience what excellence means in the world of chocolate.
🛍️To browse our immensely wide line of cacao, check out our online shop (link in bio) or visit our store at 36, Wyndham Street, Central. To learn about where the different breeds of cacao come from, check out our stories.
