Chocoa: Days 3-5

This is the second half of the Chocoa series, the first of which was days 1-2.

Day 3 started with a lecture from Hershey's that I won't even bother to talk about, mostly because I can't quite say what they were talking about. Everything was in French, and we had been provided with headphones with the English translation, but the translation was being done live and was missing a lot. Occasionally, the French speaker would be talking, and the translation would be maybe five seconds behind. Sometimes, the translator wouldn't translate a part of it. I tacked that up to what I call "corporate crap" and continued on with my day, which was now missing an hour of my life that I would not recover.

The rest of the day was rather uneventful, but that night, I attended a dinner that a lot of other people were going to as well. The food was of that type that tries its hardest to be fancy by way of a good deal of expensive ingredients and French and Italian names, but was still not really that good at all, mostly because the chef used chocolate in every dish.

Luckily, we got there well before the dinner started, and I managed to do some networking. There was a group of two (one woman, one man) that I remember well. The man did most of the talking (I apologize for not remembering your name), and he and I talked for a while about Guatemalan cacao.

The dinner (disappointing though the food was), did spark some conversation, and  I further developed the idea of transparency while I was there. Now, I have a bag of date sugar sitting in my kitchen. Apparently, my father plays tennis with the CEO of a date farm, so that's how that happened. I don't really know if the extra moisture changes anything, but I don't think it should. Honestly, I think I might just tour a sugarcane farm in India, because I go there a lot to see family, but that's in the future and the date sugar is right there, side-eyeing me with its overwhelming large label.

Day 4 started a lot better, with a panel talking about the "Cocoa Visibility Paradox". This is basically saying that the more advanced your farm grows, the harder it is to keep stats on everything. Numbers really matter, especially for keeping track of workers and yield. This kind of makes sense, but the speakers made sure to point out that the farms in question all across Central America and Africa were constantly upgrading their tech and information systems. I think it's an interesting problem, especially because of a few minor points within the overlaying question. One key point was about how deforestation impacts farmers using spreadsheets to track average yield per tree. Suddenly, their trees are falling, and their numbers are now skewed, so they have to run another calculation, and once again the trees fall.

Another interesting point was about "defense versus offense" and how that shows up. Defense on a cacao farm shows up in the form of the cacao being produced sold mostly as wet beans and the remainder being planted right back, which solidifies the farm and prepares for a stance change. Offense occurs when the planted trees start yielding, and then the farm starts fermenting and selling beans rapidly, trying to maximize profit over a short window (the harvesting season). Once the season ends, the farm will shift back into its defensive form and continue producing wet beans. Occasionally, during the shift from offense to defense (but not vice versa), some farms will buy and sell coffee beans, but I really don't know why and have no decent explanation. Maybe some farmer out there can tell you. Perhaps this whole thing is wrong anyways.

Anyways, that was about all for that day, and day 5 was when the floor opened. The expo had started, and I wanted to make absolutely sure of a few things.

First, I needed a lot of chocolate. This kind of goes without saying, but when you leave school for a week, you either need a really good explanation (and where I go to school, "Amsterdam for an international chocolate conference" doesn't cut it) or a lot of stuff to bring back and prove to your teachers that you can do work and go shopping at the same time.

Second, I wanted some whole vanilla beans. I've seen a lot of recipes that call for vanilla beans, and I could never make them. Often, I'll eat dinner fast, and then my family will put in like three different orders for desserts they want me to make. I then decide which one to make (it's usually either flourless chocolate cake or a lemon souffle, which I guess are basically the same thing but with different flavors). Now, armed with these theoretical vanilla beans, I could make far more desserts than before.

Third, it's just fun to be in the midst of a few hundred chocolate vendors. I talked for a while with a chocolatier from India, Manam Chocolate, whose farm was decked out with tech to the point where they had line graphs for each tree.

So I set out with these three goals in mind, and thankfully, I accomplished all three of them. I just used a vanilla bean to make candied kumquats, and I bring two or three chocolate bars to any special event (last day of tennis practice, one of my friends' birthdays, etc).

Those things, combined with the transparency idea, made Chocoa a valuable experience and well worth missing a ridiculous amount of school (assuming I don't miss any more classes, I have a total of 116 missed periods, which amounts to about 11.6% of the entire school year).

This is the menu of the dinner I spoke about. As one can see, these are such "delicacies" as tuna carpaccio (thinly sliced raw tuna) with white chocolate sabayon (a dessert sauce made with egg yolks) and capers, as well as the unforgettable beef wellington with 80% chocolate jus (a sauce where the base is the juice left over from cooked meat).

This is the show floor, or at least, half of it. This is one of two rooms, this being the one on the right side of the building. The chocolatier I talked about, Manam Chocolate, is on this side too, as well as Diamond Custom Machines, which is Bhavani Veerapaneni's company (you'll recall he was the one who advised me on using my melanger).