![]() ![]() “He offered the basics only,” Alex said, noting that he learned most everything he knows from books and trial and error.Įventually he came up with a process that works, using chocolate from Belize, the Dominican Republic, and Bolivia (Mexico doesn’t export enough chocolate to make it practical). “If we were to pass a sugared mass through the liquor molinos,” Alex said, “it would fill the room with smoke, and the whole thing would caramelize.”Īlex eventually convinced a molinero named Carlos to show him some basic techniques, for example how to carve the flower-like pattern into a flat stone using a hammer and chisel, as well as how to delicately re-carve the patterns as they wear down, about every 14 weeks. Why it is such a big deal? Each ingredient (chocolate, sugar, corn, and so on) needs a different stone with a different pattern, and one tiny error in the pattern can totally alter the result. In fact, when it’s time to repair the stones, molineros will even take them off the mill and go somewhere private to fix them! Molineros traditionally pass the methods for “dressing” the stones (carving the patterns) from father to son (they’re rarely women), and it’s hard to penetrate that inner circle. If you try to apprentice with one of them, “they look at you like, ‘Who is this gringo?!’” Alex explained. And they’ll be damned if they give away their trade secrets. The rotary stones are carved with intricate patterns that are the work of an individual mill worker, or molinero. They grind it roughly using a metate and add in things like sugar, almonds, and spices, then drop the tablets into hot water and drink it down.īut it wasn’t that easy. ![]() Taza makes stone-ground eating chocolate in the Mexican tradition: In Mexico, most people still drink their chocolate. Joseph Fry discovered how to make it into a solid back in 1847, and since then, we Americans have never looked back.Īll of us except for Taza Chocolate, that is. Europeans and North Americans used to drink it alongside their tea and coffee in bitter form too, while they talked philosophy and politics (if history had gone differently, it could have been the Boston Chocolate Party instead of the Boston Tea Party).īut the idea of eating chocolate - well, that’s new. In Central and South America, it was a savory, spicy, hot beverage mixed with corn, chiles, and all sorts of spices, then beaten until it was frothy and served to royals. My favorite is chokola’j: “to drink chocolate together.”īecause for most of its life, chocolate has been a drink. The Eskimos may have 50 words for snow, but I’d much rather be a Mayan, since they had lots of different words for chocolate, in all of its many forms. ![]()
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