60. DISCOVERING CHOCOLATE—A TALK DELIVERED TO THE LOUBERSIANS

April 14, 2026

On Sunday, April 12, I gave a talk to 11 Loubersians, people from the village of Loubers.  I covered the following:

• My background
• The cocoa tree, fruit, and seed
• Importance of fermentation to flavor
• Tasting chocolate for three attributes:  smoothness, roastiness, fruitiness
• How to temper, enrobe, dip,  and mold chocolate
• Tasting three truffles with red wine

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Hi, this is Tom Newhouse. This is podcast number sixty. It's called Discovering Chocolate, a talk delivered to the Lubercians. And by the way, the piece you just heard was Bach's Prelude in F major from the well-tempered clavier. This past Sunday, I gave a chocolate talk to 11 members of the nonprofit Luberts Sevou or Luberg, it's you. The president of the nonprofit, Michel Vase, had reached out to me as he really liked what I'm doing for the Ivorian cocoa farmer. It's very rare that I get someone who enters the store and starts talking like me about the suffering of the cocoa farmer and how we might reduce that suffering. He asked me if I would be willing to give a talk and demo about my nonprofit, the store, and the cocoa business in general. While we were setting up for the talk on Sunday, I asked Michel what he had done as a profession. He told me that for much of his life he was a salesman for a large French corporation. After retiring to Loubert's, he developed a farm that sold strictly organic products: sunflower oil, ancient local flowers, eggs, and vegetables. Recently he sold the farm and he and his wife live in the village. In a way, Michel is like the farmers, what I want the uh cocoa farmers to do. He was growing the sunflowers and then making oil. He was uh growing wheat and then milling it into flour and selling it in stores. Um that's really uh much higher up on the value chain, and you stand to make more money. But anyway, he sold the farm and he and his wife now live in the in the village, Luberce, which is about uh five kilometers from here. Michel established the association or nonprofit Luberce Sevu in order to encourage the Lubercians, of which there are ninety-five, to get out of their homes and participate in the local community. While I was searching the web for his name, I came across the Wikipedia site for Luberce. Uh the picture in the very short Wikipedia entry is of a little town's of the little town's most notable edifice, a sixteenth century church that looks as much like a fortress as a church, complete with crenellations and meurtrier, the crenellations being at the top of the wall and behind which you hide while before you shoot an arrow. In the Meurtrier, you hide inside and you shoot an arrow through a very narrow window, maybe four inches wide and three feet long, going vertically. Um these are the crenellations and meurtrier are two of the features added uh to a lot of buildings in built in the medieval times and even uh shortly after uh to project a feeling of security and power. Because you know, farmers who grow vegetables don't didn't make a lot of money, and the only place to hide was the church when there somebody was attacking. And so that's the only way to survive is to get is to hide in the church. Uh here's a rundown um of what I said during my talk and demonstration uh yesterday or on Sunday. And if you want, you can uh follow along by clicking on the attachment to this email and reading um the outlines. My my name is Tom Newhouse. So this is what I talk, this is my talk. My name is Tom Newhouse. Tom is a common name in English and German, and not so common in French. The closest thing in French is Tom, T-O-M-M-E, which means cheese. Years ago, I lived in Aix-les-Bains, uh department of Sabois, where their most popular cheese is the Tum or Tom Tum de Savoie, and people called me by that name. I started my professional life uh as a cook. I was bored with college and I wanted to add some adventure to my life. So I moved to France and got a job in Hôtel des Bains. Years later, I I eventually got my doctorate in psychology of taste, and I taught for 32 years in two different universities. Um I founded a chocolate store in San Luis Obispo, California, um several decades ago with my wife, Eve, and we sold Fair Trade Organic Chocolate. At the same time, I started to visit 15 cocoa farms in Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon every year. At the time, these three countries represented two-thirds of the world's cocoa crop. I would bring students and other people with me as I was hoping to interest people in finding a solution to the very poor position of the African cocoa farmer. In 2006, I established Project Hope and Fairness in the hopes of developing a nonprofit that would garner interest in the plight of the cocoa farmer while raising money to build chocolate production facilities in the villages. Our first such facility was in the village of Depa in 2012. It was at first a rice hulling establishment with a small room where we put a small mélange, a refrigerator, and a few molds. Within a year, David, the manager, uh, built a small building where he moved all the equipment, including a new grinder that we had purchased for his cooperative, Sokal Plan. A couple years later, the board and I raised the money to build a second rice hauling and chocolate making facility, this time in the village of Pesouin, nearby. Servando, the manager, established a cooperative called SCAP, meaning Societe Cooperative Agricole de Pesouin, using funds raised by Project Open Fairness. We did not provide Cervando with a machinery to manufacture chocolate. Instead, I focused on training him in chocolate bar manufacturers, specifically bars that are filled with fudge and with a flavor such as candied orange peels and candied pineapple chunks and uh nuts. In 2023, uh, with the help of Roger Nyepo, we established a third production site in Nduci, which is near the big city of Abidjan. Uh and we we formed partnership with uh another nonprofit that uh Roger was the president of called ASCAF. And together we built the production facility. And now we are beginning to work with another cooperative based in Lakota Côte d'Ivoire. It has 385 members, of which 85 are women. And the management is 100% women. And Jerome, uh whom I taught to make chocolate and he knows a lot about the chocolate business otherwise, rents the machine in the cooperative and makes the chocolate that he sends to me. In addition to making chocolate bars that they send sell locally under the name Chocolat de Village, which I established uh three years ago. Uh and that's the name of my store, also, Chocolat de Village, Village Chocolates. My goal is to expand the production capabilities and to sell chocolate produced in the cooperative all over Europe. I have tested our chocolate against the big name chocolate sold in virtually every supermarket in Europe, and um again, and also against Valrona, a high-quality French chocolate. Our chocolate, Chocolate de Village, comes pairs very favorably with the two. So uh out of maybe 500 people that I've tested, it's about equal. One third, one third, one-third people like supermarket chocolate and Valrona and our chocolate uh equally for various reasons. The supermarket chocolate, because it's what they're used to. It's smooth, it's sweet, and has a strong vanilla flavor, which is what people are used to tasting. Uh Valrona, which is more of a high-end chocolate, which does not add vanilla because it relies on quality beans that are well fermented. And the same for ours, quality beans, well fermented. It's just that ours is a different bean. Uh the uh valrona is made with a bean from South America. The cacao tree is an understory tree that originated in the forests of the Amazon River basin. Thousands of years ago, it spread throughout Central and South America by way of birds and humans. More recently, it has been planted throughout the tropical world, anywhere between 20 degrees north latitude and 20 degrees south latitude. As an understory tree, it has large leaves to trap the little bit of sunlight that percolates through the upper story trees. The fruit, which is a lar is a large pod that resembles a rugby ball, and it hangs mainly from the tree's trunk. The fruit has a thick skin, about half an inch thick, and the inside of the fruit is filled with about 30 to 40 seeds, each enveloped by a white placenta comprised of 23% sugar. So it's a very sugary meat, uh fruit meat, um, and that ferments and develops the precursors to chocolatey flavor. One harvests the seeds by pulling them out of the pod. You essentially you split the pod with a machete or with a a stick, and then you pull out clusters of seeds that are all covered with this white placental material. And then you make a hole. Uh well you you find a dip in the forest floor and you line it with uh with banana leaves and you pile the the uh beans on top of that. It could be uh as much as 500 pounds, and then you line uh you you cover the um pile of seeds with banana leaves, and then you put uh sticks and stones on top of that to discourage monkeys and squirrels from eating them. During the and now begins the stage of fermentation. During the first two days, the soft white material surrounding each material seed that's 23% sugar undergoes an alcoholic fermentation. Um after two days, you open the pile and stir the beans to even out the temperatures and the flavors and to reintroduce oxygen. Then you recover the pile and ferment two more days. Now uh the um uh the alcohol which has been produced, ethanol or uh is um just standard alcohol, um, is then converted into um acetic acid because the oxygen that you reintroduce oxidizes the um ethanol or alcohol into the acid of vinegar, acetic acid. Then you recover the pile and ferment it again a third time, and this time the acetic acid is converted by oxidation into fruity-tasting aldehydes and ketones. Uh, besides development of flavor, fermentation also oxidizes a purple pigment called anthocyanin. Anthos in Greek means flour, and cyan meaning blue. So it's it's a blue pigment. It's quite bitter. It's the same pigment you get in red wine grapes and in purple cabbage. Uh, and uh you it's it's bitter. So you ferment that, and that that ferments and it turns brown. So it goes from purple to brown. Uh, beans that are underfermented retain some of the purple color and some of the bitter flavor. So this the inexpensive, poorly made, poorly fermented beans are what's used in your supermarket chocolates. Um, and so that's why they have uh as much as 55% sugar and a bunch of vanilla is to come the sugar to counteract the bitter flavor and the vanilla to compensate for a lack of fruity flavor because fermentation develops fruitiness in the third step, as I mentioned. After fermentation, the bean the beans are are dried under the sun, usually. And classically, uh they're they're dried on mats of palm fiber that are laid out on bamboo frameworks that are about three feet off the ground, which allows efficient drying. And children are often responsible for stirring the cocoa beans so that drying happens on all sides of the bean, driving off some of the remaining acetic acid and lowering the moisture content. At night, they cover the beans up, they fold up the mat over the beans, put the stones on top, and uh that uh it essentially stops drying when the sun goes down. Uh, drying stabilizes the centers of the cocoa beans, otherwise, which would mold quickly in the warm, moist air of the tropics. The rule of thumb is 6 to 8 percent internal moisture for optimum quality. So your cheap chocolates are often made with beans that are not properly dried, and they have to be dried in ovens. They do not have the, again, they do not have the fruity flavor that you really want, and they have a bitterness. Um, if the molds continue, start to develop, then they elaborate fat-splitting enzymes that break off fatty acids from triglycerides, triglycerides being fats, and fatty acids being the glycerides, and um, that uh produces a chocolate that does not uh harden well. So it's very hard to temper the chocolate when it's not been properly dried and uh to to prevent molding. It should be noted that about 90% of the forests of Cote's voir and Ghana have been chopped down to and converted to growing things. A lot of it is cocoa, and those two countries produce 60% of the world's cocoa. Chocolate growing in Africa began in the early 19th century on two Portuguese islands, Principe and Sao Tome. Originally they had established large plantations to and used slaves to grow and harvest processed sugar. But around the early part of the 19th century, uh the colonists on these two islands, Principe and Sao Tomei, uh petitioned the king of Portugal, because they were Portuguese islands, uh, to give them some money so they could uh get out of the sugar business because they couldn't compete with Brazil. Um and so they continued to buy slaves from uh nearby Angola, and they bought cocoa tree seedlings from Brazil. A British sea captain by the name of William Fitzwilliam Owen had been assigned the work of establishing an English colony on nearby island of Fernando Poe, which is now called Bioko. During the three years of his assignment, which started in 1827, he captured a lot of the Portuguese ships and brought the slaves to that island and um gave them land and their freedom. And as a result, that island was turned into a cocoa producing island that was a member of the British Commonwealth. So at this point, there were three islands off of Nigeria and Cameroon, Principe and Tautome, which were Portuguese, and Fernando Poe, which even though it has a Portuguese name named after a Portuguese explorer, uh, was British. In 1870, Tete Kwarchi, a newly minted blacksmith, left his parents' farm in Mon Pong, Ghana. It was actually called Gold Coast at the time. Uh, and he moved to um uh to the uh Bioko or Fernando Poe, and um he worked there for six years. And uh when he got his freedom afterward, it was an indentured servitude kind of thing where he uh gave up his passport for six years and he uh was not paid for six years, but at the end he was paid and got his passport back, and then he brought a bunch of cocoa seeds back to his parents' farm in Ghana or Gold Coast. And this was the beginning of uh cocoa growing on the mainland of Africa. And only 60 years later, 1930, 60% of the world's cocoa was coming from Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. Today, there are about two million cocoa farmers in Africa. Most of them are smallholders, meaning that they only own about five hectares of land, which is about 12 and a half acres. And on this land, they wouldn't might grow two hectares of cocoa. They grow other things, uh 12 other crops very often. Um they don't, the Ivorian farmers don't fertilize uh because it's uh fertilizer is very expensive. And of course they can't get it now because the Strait of Hormuz is closed, so the firm fertilizer is not available. Um and uh if they didn't fertilize, they would get about 400 kilograms of dried beans per hectare. And if it were fertilized, they get uh double that, uh sometimes triple, uh depending upon rainfall. Uh if they did fertilize, uh so in if they did fertilize, they would get double or triple the yield, so between 800 and 1200. Since good quality beans now sell for 2,500 per 1,000 kilograms, that's a one metric ton, uh, and it was 12,500 just a few months ago, it dropped to 2,500, as I mentioned in a previous podcast. Um, so the farmer might earn$2,000 from that$2,500. The average farmer makes 4% of the retail dollar. That's another way of looking at it. Uh, with fair trade, they might make 5%. It's not much of an earning and not much of an increase. So our system, Project Hope and Fairness System, is to change that situation by encouraging the farmer to get into transformation or adding value. Remember, I mentioned that Michelle uh was grinding, milling his own wheat flour, and then if he made bread, then it would go all the way to the finished product. Uh and you can make a lot more money if you do that kind of thing. So if the farmer's family is employed making chocolate, cocoa powder or cocoa butter from their their beans, uh they stand to make as much between 20% and 40%. That's five to ten percent, five to ten times what they make uh with fair trade. By the farmer becoming far more important part of the value chain than cocoa farmer becoming cocoa cocoa farming becomes economically sustainable. Uh and so this is what I said to the group of Lobercians. At this point, I switched topics to actually tasting chocolate, which as you see on the outline is point number three. Earlier in this presentation, I discussed the importance of fermentation and drying. Now I'm going to talk about the how fermentation and drying impact uh chocolates. And I uh had uh I list on the outline three attributes smoothness, roastiness, and fruitiness. Smoothness comes from the fineness of the grind. If the particles of cacao and sugar are smaller in diameter than 12 microns, the chocolate is smooth. With the supermarket chocolate and the Valrona discussed earlier, they both use a ball mill, which reduces particle size to 12 microns in just two hours. Whereas with chocolate de village chocolates, uh we use a mele longer that uses stone wheels, and that will reduce particle size to about 12 microns in 48 hours. But sometimes the particles are a little larger. On. So the chocolate is a little less smooth. You have to take it all the way to 72 hours to get the smoothness that you want. The second attribute is roastiness. Fermented and dried cocoa beans are roasted for about 30 minutes to a temperature near 300 degrees Fahrenheit internal temperature of the bean. This loosens the skin so it's easy to separate from the beans and it deepens the flavor. But you don't want to over roast because then that gives a burnt flavor. And it also gets rid of the fruity flavors that from the aldehydes and ketones, which get burnt out. And then the third attribute is fruitiness. Again, fruitiness is a result of fermentation of acetic acid to aldehydes and ketones in step number three of the fermentation process. Supermarket chocolates lack fruitiness because they're not made with well fermented beans. That's why supermarket chocolates usually have vanilla. So we tasted three chocolates on a little card, and I had uh attached to a little card. And I I made this, I talked all about fermentation and flavor. Then they also tasted some beans that were um cooked in a sugar syrup and just served as beans or uh and dried as beans or cooked in a sugar syrup, dried and then co uh uh coated in chocolate and cocoa powder. And uh then they could taste uh uh the combination of chocolate, fruity-tasting chocolate with fruity-tasting beans. Uh section four on the outline lists three methods for using chocolate. So before I want to mention the uh the step of tempering. You melt chocolate. At this point, if you were just to use it, it would produce a very ugly looking product because uh the uh cocoa fat rises to the surface and makes uh an ug uh a powdery look. Uh so you want to properly temper the chocolate, that is, introduce very small crystals that will then induce the formation of larger crystal of more crystals. And if it's if they're properly distributed throughout the chocolate, the chocolate is shiny. So that's basically the the basics of tempering. Uh so again, you you melt the chocolate to about 50 degrees centigrade. I melted it in uh for them in a stainless steel bowl placed in an electric oven, set at 55 degrees centigrade. And uh during the I I melted it during the spoken part of my presentation, and then when I was ready to talk and when I was ready to show them how to make chocolate, how to use it, um most 80% of the chocolate what had melted, leaving a a little disc, a solid disc, which then I scraped with a wooden spoon to uh m make more crystals come loose into the liquid and drop the temperature down to 30 degrees centigrade. So it went from 50 degrees to 30 degrees, and then it had crystals floating in it. That produces tempered chocolate, and that's how I did it do it in a bowl. It's called bowl tempering. And from this I made three truffles. Uh I took truffles that I'd already made in my store. I had candied orange ganache centers, hazelnut centers with genuya, which is uh milk chocolate plus hazelnut paste, and coffee center uh ganache balls. And all three of these I rolled in chocolate, tempered chocolate, and then the hazelnut truffles I rolled in praline bits. Praline is chopped hazelnuts, chopped almonds, and sugar, uh caramel, all chopped up into a coarse mixture. Uh so it's crunchy. That the orange truffles I rolled in organic sugar crystals, so that's crunchy. So it's creamy on the inside, crunchy on the outside. And then the coffee I um just rolled them in temperate chocolate and uh and then dropped them in powdered coffee. The I I also made uh orange strips, orange peel strips dipped in chocolate, let them set and then dip the other ends so that they're completely covered in chocolate. Uh and then I also uh uh made uh chocolate bits for tasting. So uh we took the three truffles that I made, and then uh in step five on the outline, um you will see uh we tasted a Merlot of red wine with which is a fruity tasting wine. We tasted it with um the three truffles. And the hazelnut sort of complements the nutty flavors of the red wine, the coffee complements the toasty flavors uh uh front associated with ripe grapes, and the orange flavor uh associated uh complemented the wine's fruitiness. I hope to continue to give these lecture and demos uh in in my community. Uh the association where I gave the talk is called the four C's, which means communauté de commune corde et du coste, three four C's, and that means community of villages in the region of Kord and the coasts. Cos C-A-U-S-E is a geological term that means plateaus separated by valleys that are produced through erosion, uh, and then it produces all these little uh hills that are flat on top. Um and there are and usually there are villages up on top or on the sides. And um there are 25 villages belonging to the four C's. My hope is to get the locals interested in how we can transition the cocoa business from one of neocolonialism associated with large corporations to one where the producer uh transforms the agricultural product into a ready-to-sell chocolate, thereby making the farmer an active participant in a lucrative industry. Well, that's it for today's podcast. Um we finish with Chopin's prelude in um um in F major. It's in the same key as the Bach prelude, and you'll see it's it's different because Chopin's more of a romantic writer. Okay, well, uh thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoyed it. Bye.