Complex, compelling cacao from a Pacific Island archipelago
Eight thousand miles west of Ann Arbor, about 2,000 east of Australia, and a long way from anywhere most of us are likely to land in the next few months, the cacao beans for some of the tastiest chocolate I’ve tried in a terribly long time are being grown. Once known as New Hebrides, the 83-island archipelago nation of Vanuatu, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is the unlikely source for some of the world’s most curiously compelling cacao.
The cacao comes from the second largest of the archipelago’s islands, Malekula, where about 20,000 people are spread out across a land mass roughly the same size as Maui. Two hundred or so farmers are now growing the cacao that goes into these beautifully made chocolate bars.
Cacao came to the island, as it did so many places outside of South and Central America, as a colonial crop in the mid-19th century. Sadly, until 15 or 20 years ago, all the cacao grown there was simply sold en masse to commercial brokers for the low global market price. Of late, though, Olivier Fernandez, who moved to the island with his Vanuatuan wife in 2009, has been doing things differently. He shared this last summer about the state of Vanuatuan cacao:
Working in the wild in remote, rural Vanuatu is definitely a humbling journey—one of ups and downs, and wins and battles, but, first and foremost, one of passion, people, and a connection to the cacao that we cherish. … The quality of the wet beans has dramatically improved, and that is the result of training and endless feedback provided to the farmers on each harvest day. … The journey matters the most, and I can only be grateful for all the incredible humans who are working here with us and whom we can now call friends. Clients, donors, and government officials are all instrumental in this enterprise—and to the [town of] Pinalum community, I’m forever grateful and loving what we’ve built together.
Weather is one of the biggest challenges the cacao farmers on Malekula face—the formerly once-a-decade-or-so cyclones now descend on the island every two to three years. The cacao quality has been consistently improving over the years, though, and while quantities are still small, what there is represents some of the best in the world.
The cacao beans are fermented and dried on Vanuatu, then shipped to the US, where they’re roasted, conched, and crafted by a wonderful small chocolate maker in San Francisco called 9th & Larkin. Co-founders Lan Phan and Brian Dusseault share their backstory:
One day, we got curious and wanted to make our own chocolate bars—from scratch—in our small kitchen in San Francisco. We can still vividly remember our first few attempts. Beans, husks, and nibs flying in the kitchen, smoke detectors went off, bits and pieces of chocolate stains were everywhere!
I’m glad they stuck with it through that initial awkwardness. Now, a few years later, they have a line of chocolates so good that I’m happy to include them on the list of folks whose bars I love—Shawn Askinosie, French Broad Chocolate, Marou Chocolate from Vietnam, and more. The flavors are so clean and elegant that I started to think of them as a world-class classical quartet. Everything about the 9th & Larkin bars is done mindfully and well. Lan and Brian created the elegant wrapper for the bar by rolling a dried cacao pod in paint and then rolling that, in turn, onto paper; the pattern was then screen-printed for production. It’s a lovely process that keeps the package congruous with the cacao from which the bars are made. As Lan says,
Eating chocolate is like traveling. What can be a richer experience than tasting food that is cultivated from the sun, the rain, and the soil in that area, and taken great care of by the people who harvest, ferment, dry, pack, and ship it across the seven seas to all around the world, where it’s made into chocolate?
A few weeks back, we brought in a limited quantity of these superb chocolate bars from Vanuatu. As you can tell from what I’ve written, I’ve been loving them—so swing by the Candy Store on Plaza Drive and snag a bar or two soon!