Brazil travel log, part 1: Of Cacao, Cocaine and Piranhas

"98% of the population does not work on cocaine," our affable guide in Bogota reassured us. My wife and I looked at each other, and doing some mental math I figured that meant about 1 million people still rely on the white stuff for their livelihood. Chewing coca leaves crushed with lime (powdered calcium hydroxide) was a popular ancient Indian tradition in Columbia that is now marginalized. Hot chocolate was on the other hand reserved for high ranking tribe members, but is nowadays a widespread practice amongst all Columbians. I refer you to this excellent article for more details on making Columbian Hot Chocolate.

It's easy to see why people in Bogota like hot chocolate: it's cool and damp all year round. After a 600m funicular ascent of Monserrate, you're 2 miles (3,200m) above sea level, and you can see from that vantage point many greenhouses dotting the cityscape. As it turns out, Columbia is the world's largest producer of roses. Chocolate and roses seem like a natural match, don't they? (By coincidence, we were there on Valentine's Day)

Ancient Indian coca-chewing selfie (Bogota Gold Museum)

A less natural match in my mind is hot chocolate and cheese, but that's the tradition here. The cheese imparts a slight saltiness to the chocolate that isn't really unpleasant, but doesn't enhance either. The cheese settles into a gooey layer at the bottom, but made me think that an interesting gringo take on this could be emulsifying cream cheese into thick hot chocolate. E-mail me to find out where you can send the royalty checks.
Monserrate, the massive Gold Museum, the Botero Gallery, and the street art are all attractions worth seeing in this still quite pre-touristic city, and they can be done in one day by an industrious traveller. Indeed, Bogota was only an extended layover for us, as we were making our way down to the Amazon Rainforest.

Chocolate Santafereño: cacao + panela (raw cane sugar) + salty fresh cheese mixed in. Arepa bun for dipping.

With its headwaters in Columbia, the Rio Negro is poetically as black as coffee. It winds its way down to Manaus, Brazil where it meets the muddy brown Rio Solimões to form the Amazon River. At "The Meeting of the Waters" a peculiar thing happens: the rivers run next to each other downstream for many miles without mixing. This is because of the different speeds, temperatures, turbidities and acidities of the rivers. Starting in Manaus, we did a three day boat trip up the Rio Negro. Our guide happened to own a small chocolate factory in town (Sweet Manaus), and I suggested a two sided caramel-chocolate log in honour of this phenomenon. Just waiting for this to show up at Trader Joe's and the like.

The Meeting of the Waters

The Amazon Basin not only has cacao trees, but is also its cradle, with a recent study showing 9 of the 10 varieties found here. That's right, forget Criollo vs. Forastero, the tremendous biodiversity of the Amazon extends into cacao too, and has yet to be really exploited.

Fishing for Piranhas on the Rio Negro, Amazonas

The boat's cook gave us a great sense of the local home cooking. Not surprisingly fish predominates (a local favourite is Tambaqui), and it was all delicious, even the piranhas we caught ourselves one morning. Unbeknownst to me, piranhas are omnivorous (eat plants too), and play an important ecological role as scavengers. What also surprised me was finding out that the delicious juice we were drinking with our fish was the fresh fruit pulp of the cupuaçu, a tree that's in the same genus as cacao. The sweet juice tasted a bit like ya pear with a tinge of green mango.

Like cacao, it has pods filled with beans that are covered in quick spoiling white pulpy deliciousness we never get to experience living far from the equator. And it's very common in these parts. "That's what I make my chocolates with" our guide said. Cupuaçu seeds have the same desirable body-temperature melting fats as cacao, but processing it is a finnicky cottage industry, so you'll probably not see many cupuaçu candy bars lining North American store shelves until the superfood marketing people burn out on açai.

And yes, you do see wild açai everywhere in the forest. Crossing another Amazon stereotype off the list, we ran into several Brazil nut trees. I always though that opening a Brazil nut was really tough. It turns out we have it easy. 

A pitcher of juice from the cupuaçu,‎ cacao's kissing cousin

Our native guide spent about 3 minutes wielding a machete to open up the double-walled shell that encases 20-22 of the hard shell nuts that we tend to see around Christmastime. Right off the tree, the nuts taste surprisingly similar to fresh coconut. Sweet Manaus makes candies with Brazil nuts, though ironically, the nuts aren't all that popular in Brazil...at least amongst humans. You may wonder how such a tough nut would ever get planted, and the answer is agoutis. These rodents (which eluded us on our forest walks) love cracking open the tough outer shell and feasting on the insides. In case you're worried about all those first world pet agoutis missing out, I met a girl once who's Master's thesis was developing an agouti toy to simulate opening a Brazil nut shell. Yep, first world problems.

Brazil nuts: an agouti's delight

As we traveled through the rest of Brazil, one thing was obvious: Brazilians love their sugar. They make a gajillion pounds of it, and consume it too (as food and converted to ethanol fuel). Sugar cane loves lots of sun, and vast tracts of inland rolling hills are covered with the stuff. Cacao on the other hand is a rare shading loving fruit tree, which explains its natural niche under the rain forest canopy.

Sugar cane fields, Pernambuco State

The Amazon isn't the only rain forest in Brazil, and during our travels I was intent on visiting the Atlantic rain forest of the Bahia state, down the so-called Cacao Coast. Once upon a time this area supplied close to 15% of the world market for cacao. The heyday of this area was the 1930's, and a slow decline due to cultivation globalization was accelerated in the 1980's by an unwanted Amazonian visitor: a bacterium that causes Witch's Broom. The bug causes rapid abnormal non-fruiting branch growth, and the branches eventually loose their leaves and looks like a witch's broom.

Nevertheless, there is still cacao, and I needed to see it. After a 3 hour queue in 42°C on the Salvador dock, then a 1 hour ferry ride, then a 40 minute delay while they fixed the gate, then 3+ hours of harrowing driving on somewhat paved roads, we ended up in the laid-back town of Itacare, where marmosets watch surfers from trees at the junction of the dense rainforest and the Atlantic Ocean. From there, Alan gave us a 1 hour Land Rover ride over a washed out dirt road to get to Vila Rosa. Alan is a transplanted New Yorker on a self-described Quixotic mission to restore an old cacao plantation to its 1930's splendour. By my reckoning, the restoration of Vila Rosa has definitely been worth it. Most of the other cacao plantation houses in these parts have succumbed to the relentless forces of nature over the years. 

The epic car journey to the Cacao Coast

Besides spending about 10 years painstakingly rehabilitating the building into a living museum, Alan has used his background in landscape design to harness and transform those natural forces into stunning environs for the house. He has built a kayakable reservoir, cascading waterfalls, a diveable pond, and deftly curated the native plants (the area holds a world record for vegetal biodiversity) with landscape classics. Floating in the shade of a Sombrero tree, rotating my gaze between the banana tree, a mottled frog and the birds circling high overhead, I felt that particular serenity you only get from being unplugged from the modern world and absorbing the spectacle of nature all around you.

Vila Rosa: restored plantation from Brazil's cacao heyday

Vila Rosa is just getting into the pousada (B&B) business, but with full board. In addition to good home cooked food, we were able to try a multitude of fruit juices from the estate. If you recall, cacao is a rare shade loving fruit, and the forest canopy around Vila Rosa includes about 40 different types of fruit trees. Growing quality cacao in a responsible way and paying workers respectable wages is not a great money making proposition. Doing a tour through the estate, it's obvious that more than being a cacao farmer or inn owner, Alan is a steward of the land.

Various approaches are used to combat witch's broom here, from selective replanting to grafting new plants onto old Criollo stock. We crack open a ripe pod (a bit hard to find at this time of year, though each tree has its own mind about this sort of thing), and pluck date-sized fruits from inside to suck on. While we enjoyed cupuaçu juice in the Amazon, cacao pulp is even more delicious, tasting quite a bit like lychee, with distinct floral notes and a touch of acidity as you'd get from a not-quite-ripe nectarine.

Cacao: pod + pulpy bean-containing fruits

The harvesting season lasts almost 9 months, and while we were there during the lull we get a walkthrough of the equipment for and logistics of producing market-ready cocoa beans: fermentation and drying. The cacao pulp is pressed out and saved as juice before fermentation (which both builds the flavour of and prevents germination of the beans). A clever retractable roof over the sun drying bed reduces the potential for spoilage and makes it double as an all-weather veranda for guests. We husk and taste a bean straight from the drying bed, and it's remarkably palatable compared to the "superfood" cocoa nibs I've tried in North America.

We also get a walkthrough of the process to transform dried cacao beans into chocolate, as there is a demonstration scale factory on-site to do the roasting, husking, grinding, and tempering. I can't do this process justice here (e.g. explaining the importance of Form V crystal structure), and would suggest any Alberta readers to attend the excellent Chocolate Snobbery 101, where in fact one of the single-origin chocolates uses beans from the same region. Other readers interested in Bahian origin chocolate may have luck internationally finding the products of Alan's friends at AMMA Chocolates. Personally I liked the 45% cacao most.

We gave the three resident black Labradors a goodbye petting, left Vila Rosa and started to wind our way back to Salvador to catch the start of Carnaval celebrations (a post for another day).

I've always appreciated good chocolate, and our travels in Brazil made me appreciate cacao's birthplace. Here the tree is part and parcel of the biodiverse landscape, and it's a lot of work to sustain. Brazil now accounts for only about 5% of world cacao production, having given way to increasingly monoculture-like farming practices in equatorial Africa. Echoing a sentiment we heard often across the country, Alan lamented "everything in Brazil is hard". But doing it right was well worth it.