The World's Best Brownie

Let's start this blog post with a quiz. Quick: name a staple of Italian cuisine, an Irish vegetable and a Swiss confection. Did you say tomato, potato and chocolate? I might have if someone had posed that question to me. It seems logical, right? I mean what would pasta and pizza be without the tomato? Didn't the lack of potatoes in Ireland in the late 1840s and early 1850s cause a mass migration out of that country? And what are the Swiss known for if not clocks, chocolate and refusing to get involved in anything that doesn't concern themselves even if they should sometimes exercise a higher social conscience?

Know what all these things have in common? Before the sixteenth century, the Europeans didn't know about any of these foods. They had no clue. They only got a hold of these three by "discovering" the Americas. I find it strange that each of these foods is now so undeniably linked to countries that appropriated (and that's a kind word) them in the last 500 years or so.

So why am I quizzing people about food when I'm supposed to be blogging about my August trip to Ecuador? Well, it's certainly not so I can write about tomatoes and spuds; those things grow just about anywhere you plant them in the United States where I live. But not the cacao plant, which requires wet, tropical environments to thrive. And Ecuador as it turns out is one of the top ten cocoa producing countries in the world. I've never tried to go seek out a cacao plant on a vacation before but I thought that might be worth doing on a trip to a country so involved with supplying the world with chocolate.

Cacao fruits growing in Mindo. The top photo shows a cacao fruit, dried cocoa beans and some cocoa nibs.

Now it wasn't always this way in Ecuador. The Incans, who had expanded their empire north into Ecuador from their home base of Peru just before the Spanish arrived, were not a big chocolate civilization. Nor were their predecessors (in other words the folks they conquered) the Quitu. No, to get at chocolate's roots, you need to look a bit further north to present day Mexico where the Aztecs, and before them the Mayans, held the plant and its fermented and dried bounty in the highest esteem.

Before I go too far, maybe I should offer a little bit of a disclaimer before going forward. The tone of this post might make the Spanish acquisition of chocolate from the Aztecs seem like a friendly exchange of goods. Nothing could be farther from the truth. When the Spanish arrived in the new world, there was a lot that blew their minds and the tomatoes, potatoes and chocolate were about the least tempting of what the Aztecs and Incas had in their possession. I'm sure the food (which also included the never before seen crops of corn and peanuts) was great; but the real prize for the Spanish was the seemingly incalculable quantities of gold and jewelry that the natives possessed.

I'm sure it didn't take long for the Spanish to start planning how they could dispossess the locals of their wealth, either by conning them out of it or just slaughtering the lot of them. They ended up using sort of a mix and match approach here and despite the vastly superior numbers, neither the Aztecs nor the Incas were any match for the Europeans' guns and horses, neither of which they had seen before. And if the shooting and the mounted conquistadors didn't do the job, the smallpox, influenza, cholera and all manner of other diseases took care of most of the rest. Eventually they got everything they wanted, which was pretty much all of it.

Right before (and I really do mean like immediately before) they decided to start killing and duping the locals, some of the Spanish were treated like gods by the people they met in Central and South America. When the Aztec king Montezuma II, ninth ruler of Tenochtitlan, met conquistador Hernán Cortés, he welcomed him and his army into the city and held a banquet in their honor, including providing them with some of the first chocolate that any European man had ever tasted. This was not the chocolate that we know and love today but instead a bitter brown drink that was typically reserved for royalty. It was this sort of roots level stuff that I hoped to find in Ecuador.

Now, our time in Ecuador was mostly spent in the Galápagos and the country's capital of Quito and we knew we weren't finding any sort of cacao plantations in either place. The Galápagos are windswept, barren, volcanic islands 600 miles into the Pacific Ocean and Quito sits at about 9,350 feet above sea level. Neither environment is suitable for growing chocolate trees. We'd have to go somewhere in between: still in the tropical mainland but at a much much lower elevation than Quito. In short we'd need to take a little road trip.

About two hours north and west of Quito is the village of Mindo, a community that seems to be built these days on ziplining, bird watching, tubing and butterfly gardens. There also happens to be a chocolate factory there named (inventively enough...) Mindo Chocolate. It was here we decided to head to learn more about chocolate in the place of its origin, and although I'm sure we didn't taste anything like the Cortés was fed in Tenochtitlan about five centuries ago, we got to taste plenty, including some of the bitterest liquid I've ever tasted.

Mindo Chocolate's factory, if you can call it that, is located in the back of the El Quetzal de Mindo restaurant and B&B just off the main drag in Mindo and it's worth a stop. We didn't partake in the ziplining or tubing down the rivers in Mindo but we did visit a butterfly farm and see some amazing hummingbirds. But the half hour to 45 minutes we spent at Mindo Chocolate was the best thing we did all day, and that includes our stop at the equator on the way back into town.

The tour at Mindo Chocolate takes you from the cacao plant in the ground all the way to the final product and you get to taste everything along the way, which is everything from enlightening to suck all the moisture out of your mouth bitter to I-can-understand-why-people-are-addicted-to-chocolate amazing. It's educational and delicious at the same time. What more could we want out of vacation?

Cacao beans being fermented before drying.

Every so often I think about the foods we eat and the drinks we drink and wonder what on Earth would make us put whatever it is we are eating or drinking in our mouths to begin with. Some foods are easy to understand: find an apple or mushroom on the ground and eat it; if you don't get sick then it's OK to eat again and if you do then stay away in future. Other foods that involve a fundamental transformation of the ingredient into something decidedly unappetizing make me think a little harder. Beer comes to mind here. After spending time in Mindo, chocolate definitely falls into the latter category too. For the record, I'm glad my predecessors on this planet tried both.

So how do we make the fruit of a tree into a chocolate bar? Or, if you are an Aztec, into a bitter drink that you only allowed royalty to drink? Let's see if I can explain. And terminology is a little bit important here. It all starts with the cacao tree which when mature grows cacao fruit or pods. There's a picture of some pods earlier in this post. They ripen about six months after flowers first appear on the tree and at that point they are harvested and cut open to reveal a series of white seeds called cacao beans. When we first started our tour at Mindo we were invited to pop one of these seeds into our mouths. They tasted sweet and fruity and felt (as we expected) a little slimy. They are not digestible in this form so we spit them out but these seeds are what hold the chocolate.

After the seeds are removed they are fermented for four days under banana leaves (see above photo). Apparently the fermentation removes some of the bitterness from the beans, which is important considering what we tasted later on in our tour. After four days the seeds are laid out to dry on wire mesh racks for about 15 days in the dry season and about twice that long during the rainy season. The result after this step? A surprisingly sweet and deep chocolatey snack. I'd like to say that I could sit down and gorge myself on these things but I suspect the pleasant taste I got out of one little nibble wouldn't continue if ate three or four of these things. And the chalk-like texture might ultimately be a problem.

This is the point in the process, I am assuming, that someone long ago put one of these things in his or her mouth and decided it was worth figuring out how this happened so they could, by some degree of trial and error, reverse engineer what nature had let happen naturally. So just to be clear here, what I think happened is that someone once upon a time found a brown thing on the ground, which turned out to be a dried seed of the cacao tree which had been, prior to drying out, fermented under banana leaves for a while, and took a taste. And they liked what they tasted and proceeded to figure things out from there. Make sense? Sounds reasonable to me.

At this point we still don't have chocolate. There are a couple of more steps. First the beans need to be roasted, which is done in a rotating cylinder that could easily fit in one corner of my living room. 30 minutes of heat applied while in the drum, then a rest for about two and a half hours and your beans are roasted. Kind of like coffee I guess. After that they are ready to be crushed and have the shells separated from the cocoa nibs. This takes place in a wind tunnel type apparatus about the same size as the roaster. Now that we have the nibs, we are pretty close to getting something resembling the chocolate we know and love.

The "factory": a room about the size of my living room where the beans are roasted and separated to nibs.

Next step? Grinding the cocoa nibs into a paste called chocolate mass. The paste is a transformation of the nibs into a semi liquid consisting of cocoa solids and cocoa butter which are on the verge of separating into their component parts. You can use the paste to make chocolate if you wish. Keep going and they will in fact separate. Cocoa butter is the fat component which is used to make white chocolate; cocoa powder is used to make hot chocolate for drinking or chocolate bars when it is combined with a fat like butter.

Centuries ago, the Aztecs likely got about as far as the grinding and separating process and sometimes might have added honey or some other naturally sweetened nectar to the powder or paste to make it sweeter. The Swiss picked up where the Aztecs left off, figuring out how to transform what the Spanish brought back from the new world into the chocolate bars we eat today.

So after all that learning, who's ready for some chocolate? Well if you are, you'll have to get some for yourself. Back in Ecuador I sure was and following our tour we got to try all of the eight varieties of bars that Mindo Chocolate produces. We also might have brought a few back with us to the United States.

But before we got a taste of the finished product, we were treated to a couple of tasting experiments. We were presented with a small plate which had on it a tiny plastic spoon with a cup of some chocolate liquid and a square of brownie sitting next to it. The liquid was pure cocoa without any of the butter and it was the most vile tasteless stuff I've ever called anything to do with chocolate. It tasted more like liquid metal than it did like chocolate. On the other hand, it tasted fantastic when it was combined with a small amount of ginger syrup, which was sort of the point of the exercise.

We were then asked to taste the brownie which mercifully WAS sweetened. In fact, it was way way way better than I ever could have hoped. If there's a better brownie on the face of this Earth, I'd like to see it because this thing was out of this world good. If brownies can generally be divided into fudge and cake categories, this was neither. It had all the richness and gooeyness of a fudge brownie but without being heavy like fudge brownies are. This thing was melt in your mouth amazing and I mean that literally. The secret? It was made with the paste that comes from grinding freshly roasted cocoa nibs. Everyone should make brownies this way from now on. This was the best thing I ate in Ecuador without a shadow of a doubt. Who knew I'd go all that way and end up raving about an all-American dessert.

Thus ended my chocolate education. For now. I'm richer for it. I suspect I'll be dining on more chocolate soon enough on the other side of the Atlantic. But that's potentially another story.

The world's best brownie.