COUNTRY NOTES: We all like Chocolate, and it’s Good for You

By Nicholas Asheshov —

Peru could and should be one of the great chocolate-producing countries, and a new Chocomuseo  in Calle Berlin,  Miraflores is aiming to push this idea a step further.

The  Miraflores Chocomuseo follows the Numero Uno Chocomuseo in Cusco, a roaring success.  I have been to the Cusco one a couple of times, the latest earlier this week, and it’s full all the time. 

Here, in an old building in the center of town just off the Plaza Regocijo, you can watch them roast and grind the cacao beans, known as nibs, and add organic sugar produced in Piura, and a score of fillings, from corn and aji to sauco, lucuma, maracuya, aguaymanto, raisins, nuts, and coconut .  There are a few tables where visitors can eat thick, sweet, rich chocolate paste with a touch of aji -—a Maya idea— and hot tea made from the husks of the cacao beans.

One of the liveliest features of the Chocomuseo here in Cusco are the two-hour courses in how to make chocolates.

You start learning about how and where cacao orchards do best, which is down in the hot-house end of the jungle anywhere where it is well over 21º C and where there’s plenty of water and humidity. A couple of hours later you walk away with a simpatico bag of little chocolates that you yourself made by pouring warm paste into moulds where you have put your favorite fillings.  Good deal for S/.70 and the tourists love it.

The Cusco ChocoMuseo was set up by Alain Schneider, a 27-year-old Frenchman, and his partner  Clara Isabel Dias,  also French. After studying engineering at universities in France and working for Air France, Alain and Clara went to Nicaragua where after doing NGO work, they set up the first ChocoMuseo in Granada, a colonial town.   Then came Cusco two years ago and, later, Antigua in Guatemala, and  now Miraflores with more to come  in the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and El Salvador, and doubtless, elsewhere.

Over a cup of, naturally, chocolate, here at the Cusco Chocomuseo, Alain  told me something of what he has learned about the cacao and chocolate business in Peru, of which he is today an important player.

Alain is one of those charmingly lively French boys who is, also, well-organized enough to be running an international network.

“Every three days we have a Skype conference with the managers of each of the Chocomuseos where we go over the figures and discuss what’s working and what’s maybe not,” he says.

 So here we have the internet, French chutzpah and talent and Wall St. producing a charming, lively and useful money-spinner that is sure to provide the basis for new businesses, perhaps chocolatey and perhaps not.  There’s home-made beer, for instance.

Alain mentions, too, a friend who is setting up a Pisco Museum —-we used to call it a bar, but these days it has to be called something toney.

One of the things that Alain and Clara Isabel have found is that in Peru, getting their hands on a steady supply of good cacao beans is not that easy.  “An early lot we had from Quillabamba was fine.  But the next lot we had to throw away, no good,” he says.

Here in Urubamba, I have had the same experience.  The other day I bought a bar of chocolate-cacao paste under the brand name of COCLA, but it was so bad that it went into the rubbish.  Cocla is the big coffee and cacao purchasing group based in Quillabamba.  This has produced an unusual and certainly unwanted situation. 

The Cusco Chocomuseo buys no cacao from down-the-road La Convencion, where a lot of cacao is produced.  Instead, Alain Schneider is buying it mostly from a supplier in Tocache, a pueblo on the banks of the great Rio Huallaga, well to the north and downstream of Tingo Maria. It is here that cacao and chocolate takes on one of two important political roles. 

As everyone knows, Tocache  is a center for coca plantations and the cocaine industry and at least until last year, an operations focus for Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), both feeding off each other.  Now USAID and others have been pushing cacao as an alternative to coca, and have introduced a hybrid variety, CCN51, which is a good producer but the flavor, Alain Schneider tells me, is nowhere near as good as the traditional ‘chuncho’ native Amazon varieties.

I first visited Tocache in 1982, riding upstream from Juanjui in a powered canoe that was doing a bus service up and down this great river.  Then Tocache was still a sleepy village.  Three years later it had a Credito bank branch where locals would take in bagfuls of $100 notes and receive, in exchange, Credito bearer certificates of deposit. Twin-engined planes bound for Colombia buzzed across the dawn skies, ushering in an uncomfortable three decades of wealth and violent death.

But today Alain Schneider buys his six tons of cacao beans from Tocache, indicating a much more positive future for one of Peru’s pleasantest and most bountiful regions.

He also buys some in Piura which, although it is on the coast, is just a couple of degrees south of the equator.

Cacao has another positive political characteristic.  It is naturally an Amazon tree and, like coffee, needs shade from higher canopy-style trees, like mango, avocado and orange.  This means that it is ecologically better than most other jungle farming, like cattle, soya, sugar and oil palms.  All these, like coca for that matter, see the forest razed and replaced with boring mile upon mile of mono-culture, only marginally less damaging to the world than a layer of cement. 

Under a canopy is how the good cacao, rather like coffee, is cultivated anyway:  Other places that produce good cacao include Ecuador and the Caribbean coasts of  Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica, where the plantations are often right on the beach. Brazil’s Atlantic coast around Salvador de Bahia is also a famous producing area.  The big West African and Southeast Asian plantations are pretty awful, however.

Amazon and Central American cacao from the native chuncho, criollo and trinitario varieties has a noticeably better flavor and is used for the best Swiss, Belgian and French chocolates.  This is partly, it seems, because if it is done properly, the fermentation of the cacao seeds gives them a flavor that cannot be equaled by the hybrids either here or in Africa.

The fermentation is carried out in boxes with the fruity pulp and then the seeds are dried out in the sun on concrete or hard earth.  The seeds are then transported to the United States, Europe, or to chocolate-makers like, now, the Chocomuseo.

Peru’s chocolate has been getting a publicity lift from Astrid Gutsche, glamorous wife of Gaston Acurio, Peru’s maestro chef, under the brand name Melate.  Through Astrid, it also features a space of its own now, alongside coffee, at the annual Mistura food fairs.

“Our new Chocomuseo in Calle Berlin will, we hope, make Peruvians more conscious of just how good their chocolate can be,” Alain Schneider says.

Also, chocolate is good for you.  Studies carried out in universities and health research places in England and elsewhere have proved, it seems, that chocolate is a wise choice for couples seeking to increase the quality of their relationship.  More research, clearly, needed.  

The Peru ChocoMuseos  Lima are in Cusco (Plaza Regocijo) and in Lima (Calle Berlin 375, Miraflores).

Published in Caretas, Sept 20, 2012

Nick Asheshov is a Director of The Machu Picchu Train Co., Urubamba. A veteran journalist, noted explorer and entrepreneur, he was editor of the Peruvian times from 1969 to 1990