Does Organic Chocolate Taste Good?
It’s all well and good to eat organic chocolate because it’s free from pesticides (which is good for the environment as well as your health) but does it taste any good? Organic chocolate will never be the chocolate of choice if the flavour and texture isn’t there. It seems chocolatiers and chefs don’t think organic chocolate is a quality product. Personally, if I’m going to buy a block of chocolate then I’ll choose an organic brand but I often buy hand made chocolates from my local chocolatier which aren’t organic but are definitely delicious! So which is the way to go? Why don’t chocolatiers use organic chocolate? Is organic chocolate lacking in quality? This is what Craig Sams (the co-founder of Green & Blacks) had to say on this issue via a comment at Chocolate in Context.
I’m surprised that the ‘word on the street’ among chocolatiers and pastry chefs is that no organic chocolate tastes as good because the trees are not old enough. This is questionable on a number of counts:
1. Cacao trees live longer under organic cultivation because they aren’t subjected to the pressures from intensive cultivation, lack of shade and chemical fertilisation, all of which shorten lifespan and increase disease susceptibility
2. Organic chocolate is grown by smallholders, never on plantations. On plantations there is pressure to harvest the pods too soon, to rush the fermentation and to use heat-assisted drying to shorten the drying time. Time is money for a plantation, for a smallholder time is flexible, if they aren’t doing something with cacao, they can plant beans, weed corn or some other farm jobs. Getting the moment of harvest just right, doing the fermentation slowly in small batches and sun-drying the beans once they’ve fermented all encourage the enzyme activity that develops good flavor precursors in cacao and drive out astringency. Then roasting just tweaks those flavors instead of having to drive out bad flavors.
3. The varieties of trees (Amelonado, forastero, trinitario and criollo to name a few general categories) hugely affects flavor and blends can capture the complexity of different varietals.
4. A lot of flavor comes from anthyocyanins and polyphenols that the plant produces as a defence against disease and insects. Organic cacao has to produce more of these as it isn’t protected by pesticides and fungicides. Strong, healthy, disease-resistant trees produce less cacao, but the quality is consistently good.Our experience at Green & Black’s is that all these factors are more important than the age of the trees (though some of our growers have trees that are 100 years old and most were planted in the 1970 and 1980s and went through the 3 year conversion period to organic. It’s a fallacy to assume that all organic cacao comes from trees that were newly planted, (though new plantings are definitely on the increase).
I’ll probably continue to eat both types of chocolate, purely because I can’t find great hand made organic chocolates but still want to eat the occasional chocolate truffle. It’s interesting what Craig Sams had to say so I hope he’s right and more people start using organic chocolate in chocolate shops and restaurants. What do you think?
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