High-quality cacao beans make Venezuela a land of fine chocolate
Online News Editor
September 13, 2022 2 minutes
Caracas, Sep 13 (EFE).- Marianela Moser and her two employees work from the early morning hours in a small workshop in the Avila mountains outside Venezuela’s capital, where they temper, mold and package different chocolate products.
But at nightfall a group of 10 elves from a nearby forest come inside and impart the taste and aroma that characterizes Chocolate Picacho, says Moser, who founded that brand in 2007 and invented that mythical story with her youngest customers in mind.
“For chocolate to be just right, it needs to be as shiny as princess hair … as crunchy to the ear as elves’s footsteps in the woods, as dark as a moonless night and as soft in the mouth as the silk of a princess’s dress,” she said of the chocolate at her workshop in the highland village of Galipan.
Named after a mountain in the Avila range that is visible from the workshop, Chocolate Picacho is one of more than 50 industrial and craft chocolate brands in Venezuela, where that treat is sold virtually everywhere, including pharmacies and hair salons.
More:
https://www.laprensalatina.com/high-quality-cacao-beans-make-venezuela-a-land-of-fine-chocolate/
Monument to cacao in Miranada State, Venezuela
From 2009:
A painting of cacao pods in Puerto Colombia, Venezuela. The passions surrounding the crop have turned it into a contentious political issue.Credit...Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
By Simon Romero
July 28, 2009
HENRI PITTIER NATIONAL PARK, Venezuela — Kai Rosenberg acknowledges that he might be a little insane. He owns a cacao plantation in this swath of untamed cloud forest in northern Venezuela, where ocelots dart under towering saman trees and howler monkeys shriek at visitors.
So far this decade, squatters have tried to wrest control of his land, a fungus nearly wiped out his entire crop, government inspectors have solicited bribes and export officials have given him countless headaches with demands for a barrage of permits.
Even worse, intruders armed with machine guns broke into his house one night. In the struggle that ensued, he said, one shot him in the throat. Evacuated by helicopter, he recovered after six operations. But he went back to growing the Venezuelan cacao bean, the raw ingredient for chocolate coveted in Europe and the United States.
“Maybe I’m actually more than a little insane, but that’s a job requirement for working in cacao,” said Mr. Rosenberg, a German Jew who was born in Hamburg in 1940 and moved to Venezuela at age 18.
Venezuela produces about the same amount of cacao as it did three centuries ago: 15,000 tons a year, less than 1 percent of global cacao output. But that amount stirs the passions of critics and devotees, turning a luxury crop destined for foreigners into a contentious, and sometimes violent, political issue.
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/world/americas/29cacao.html
(You'll want to read everything from this reporter, one of three NY Times Latin America-focused journalists, as he, along with the other two, has always maintained an agressively pro-business posture which has to be remembered as a qualifier.)
Simon Romero
= new reply since forum marked as read
