What Makes Cacao Raw:

48 Hours, and Never Above 109°F

The world we live in moves quickly, and it rewards moving quickly. Almost everything we eat has been shaped by that speed — shortened, accelerated, made in less time than it once took.

Cacao Magic is an invitation in the other direction.

Our cacao is ground slowly for forty-eight hours, and its temperature never rises above 109°F. That single choice shapes everything else about it, and it is worth explaining properly

What raw actually means

Most chocolate in the world is made from roasted beans. Roasting is quick, it makes cacao uniform, and it makes large-scale production possible. It is the ordinary path and there is nothing mysterious about it.

We take the other one. Our beans are naturally fermented, sun-dried and dehydrated extra time, peeled, and then ground — and never taken up to roasting process.

109°F is roughly the temperature of a hot afternoon in Talamanca. Cacao that never goes above it keeps its reachness in tact.

That is what raw means, and it is the whole reason our cacao tastes and feels the way it does.

Forty-eight hours of grinding

Grinding cacao is where the heat comes from. Stone against stone, friction, hour after hour. Push it hard and the cacao is smooth in a fraction of the time — and warm enough to have changed.

So it is done slowly. Two full days of turning, watched and kept cool, until the cacao is silk and still raw.

Forty-eight hours to make something a machine could rush in an afternoon. That is the essence of our purity.

One ingredient

Turn over a block of our ceremonial cacao and the ingredient list says one word:

Cacao.

It is tempered and set in moulds that look like chocolate bars, and it is one hundred percent cacao, — the whole bean, nothing separated out and nothing added back.

That is what arrives in your kitchen: a solid block of a single thing, made slowly by people we know.

Slowness is the point

Hippocrates is remembered for saying that food should be our medicine. That was twenty-five centuries ago, and the world has moved a long way since. But the instinct behind it is still available to anyone who slows down enough to listen to it.

Choosing food made close to the way it grew is a way of stepping out of the hurry. Not because of anything it promises, but because of what it asks of you: a little patience, a little attention, a willingness to wait forty-eight hours for something that could have been rushed.

Cacao rewards that. Chop off a piece, melt it into hot water, and sit with it. The cacao is not going anywhere and neither, for a moment, are you.

What a luxury. What a birthright.