A young boy climbs a cacao tree to pick a ripe pod for us! On Saturday we met a cacao farmer down here in Soconusco, Chiapas, named Don Isidro. He took us to meet his family and have dinner with them. The day started by meeting him at a highway gas station. Since we were late, [...] Read more »
Last week we visited a chocolate shop called Tout Chocolat in the Condessa neighborhood of Mexico City. It took some work to get there: dragging the kids through the busy Mexico City subway system was no fun, neither was getting turned around several times before getting the map right. We were hot, tired and disgruntled [...] Read more »
Churreria “El Moro” The first thing we did when we got to Mexico City was go for churros and hot chocolate. Mexico City is crowded and hectic and I couldn’t face it without some ammunition. El Moro is an old school Churreria that’s been around since 1934. The atmosphere is no nonsense cafeteria style with [...] Read more »
It’s been 8 years since I was in Japan last and have been enjoying every minute since our arrival 2 weeks ago(hence the long pause in blog postings). One of the things I was really looking forward to was getting at some good chocolate in Tokyo. All my European favorites are here including Hevin, Marcolini, [...] Read more »
(After visiting Hoi An and Nha Trang, we headed back to Saigon for our final first true cacao encounter in Asia) Back in October we were contacted by Samuel Maruta, a chocolate maker in Vietnam, who had seen our blog. He had invited us to visit his operation in Saigon. Over e-mail we were able [...] Read more »
[After taking a long flight across the Indian Ocean, Kerstin arrives in Bangkok, Thailand!] I had read about a certain chocolate buffet that takes place on the weekends at the Sukothai Hotel in Bangkok. I knew it was going to be nice because it was billed as a champagne and chocolate buffet. I decided that [...] Read more »
If there is one thing that I have learned while being in Madagascar, it’s that there isn’t much of a chocolate culture in Madagascar. Cocoa was introduced in the 1920′s by the French so there is no history of native chocolate preparations. If people consume cocoa, they either eat it fresh from the pod or [...] Read more »
The day after we visited the family farm and the coop, we got a special tour of one of the biggest cocoa plantations in Madagascar, the Somia plantation. Somia is run by Bertile’s Akkeson’s family (Bertile is the man we had lunch with on the beach on at Nosy Be) and supplies beans to some of [...] Read more »
Madagascar grows some of the best cocoa in the world and Ambanja is where it all comes from. It’s on the northwest part of the island and we went there on Sunday to visit a few plantations. Two technicians from the American chocolate company Madecasse took us to two farms and explained the harvesting, fermenting [...] Read more »
After visiting Chocolat Bonnat in Voiron, France, we made our way back to Paris and boarded a flight for Madagascar. It was a long flight (about 10 hours), and we arrived in the airport in capital of Antananarivo, nicknamed Tana, at midnight! After waiting in immigration for an hour for our visas to be issued, [...] Read more »