few weeks ago, Seventy% was invited to Nicaragua to give two Slow Chocolate workshops to a group of farmers, producers and other representatives from the cacao world.  We had the great pleasure in meeting Carlos Mann, founder of Momotombo Chocolate and one of the most promising artisan chocolate makers in Central America.

Carlos Mann at the Momotombo factory store

“Our first recipe was a simple roasted peanut chocolate. And, the first one that made me proud was our cashew and aged rum variety,” says Carlos Mann passionately, admitting that making chocolate had not been his ambition in the first place. So, how did his journey begin?

Fresh mango

It started years ago, during his days in California. As a former illustrator, who spent some time in San Francisco working at a video game studio, he quickly became a foodie just by living in the Mission District, searching every corner of the neighbourhood for tasty bites.

The Mission is the old Mexican quarter of the city where almost every Latin American country has some culinary representation. Mexican, Brazilian, Cuban, Peruvian, Salvadorian, Argentinean food and even Nicaraguan food is available and that was something that strongly inspired Carlos. ‘I started cooking some of the food I tasted in the streets and restaurants all around the city. For the first time in my life, I also went to museums, taking in the so-called fine art of the world and getting tuned in to the underground art scene of San Francisco,” he explains.

Food and art. The perfect combination Carlos needed in order to evolve and found Momotombo Chocolates some years later.

The flavours of Nicaraguan food

Making traditional chocolate drinks

The food and smell of his childhood are still fresh in his mind. He recalls what a superb cook his grandmother was and what a sugar freak he was. “I had seven cavities by the time I was six. All from stealing and eating her cakes, pies and sweets.”

What was your favourite dish she prepared for you?

“Farmer’s lasagna (lasagna campesina) made with tortillas instead of pasta, cream infused with green chiles (instead of tomatoes) and shredded white wine chicken. She also cooked amazing soups, such as our speciality soup in Nicaragua, “sopa criolla.”

However, Carlos tells us a story that could be seen as a premonition of Momotombo Chocolate.

In the 1920’s, his great grandfather arrived from Italy to open the first candy and chocolate factory in Nicaragua. “In a typical Nicaraguan drama, he fathered my grandfather Octavio out of wedlock with a native woman.  He did not recognise him formally as his son. So our family did not carry on a relationship with him or his other children. I don’t know much about him, but it’s my understanding that none of his legitimate children had interest in the trade and that his candy business eventually shut down,” he says.

Momotombo fresh chocolates

After years living in California and spending a year in India, Carlos decided to go back to Nicaragua. Perhaps, the craving for his grandmother’s dishes and the link to his Italian ancestry were too intrinsically linked. Intuitively, he needed to continue his culinary journey back in his native country.

“I started having extremely vivid dreams of cacao”

Carlos with Martin Christy – two fellow cacao worshipers attached to a tree

“I think chocolate began to work its effect on me. In late 2004, I was bombarded by images of cacao. Every book I looked at seemed to have references of cacao. Traveling around Nicaragua I came across artisan chocolates that amazed me.  I started having extremely vivid dreams of cacao.

I went to the market, bought myself a Clay Comal (for toasting cacao) and ten pounds of unfermented market cacao. I roasted it and started eating cacao.”

Carlos started writing down many recipes that he wanted to try. With the help of his friend Sonia, he began in earnest.

Evolution from fresh to refined chocolate

His recipes were coming along nicely and he now had some guidelines for an original recipe. It required minimal processing and could be produced in any farm or home in Nicaragua with locally available technology. It had to be fresh and un-tempered. And finally, Carlos needed to use natural local ingredients for flavouring: fruits, nuts, spices, herbs, seeds and flowers.

He would go to the market and stand in line with all the ladies waiting to hire the corn mill to make dough for “tortillas”. When his turn came, he and Sonia washed the mill before running his cacao through it. “That is how we got our cacao liquor for the first 18 months we made chocolate,” he explains.

At that time, he stubbornly decided that if he couldn’t figure out how to make good chocolate with the unfermented cacao from the market, he wouldn’t even bother trying to get hold of -fermented cacao. So for the first year and half, he only made chocolate with unfermented cacao. “I just didn’t worry about it. All our recipes had to be designed to tame that wild flavour.”

After a couple months, he made a chocolate that fit the image of what he had in mind. They called it fresh chocolate. “It is essentially an un-tempered dark milk chocolate. It is full of moisture and so mixes well with fresh ingredients such as fruits,” he adds.

About three years ago, the Nicaragua government recognized it as a new form of chocolate by including it in the national food codex as “Fresh Chocolate” (Chocolate Fresco).

Momotombo fresh chocolate selection

Nowadays, Momotombo produces eight varieties of refined bars, from dark milk to 70% dark chocolate. Some of them contain hand peeled cacao beans, others contain cashew nuts, coconut, sesame seeds, peanuts or dried banana (all endemic products of Nicaragua). The company also produces 70% baking chocolate blocks.

“The flavour of our chocolate bars really change constantly all year round. We produce micro batches and we produce varieties on a whim or according to the seasons. We simply buy what’s interesting or seems appropriate at the time. Sometimes we make bars that are fruity, sometimes nutty, sometimes something else. It’s just like buying good ingredients for a great meal,” explains Carlos.

Nicaraguan cacao has delicate hazelnut, tobacco, rum and coffee notes. Carlos buys directly from farms that have a high overall level of criollo flavours in their cacao as well as from some than have more acidic fruity flavours derived from wilder varietals.

In 2006, he founded Momotombo Chocolate. Its name comes from the volcano that stands on the shore of Lake Managua. Thirteen women work at the chocolate factory that has become an icon of artisan chocolatiers in Nicaragua. Momotombo has three shops in Managua and periodically ships its truffles to Palo Alto and Brooklyn.

Most of Momotombo's team are women

Carlos explains that even though it is a challenge making chocolate in Managua, due to the tropical heat, a limited supply of chocolate equipment and petty corruption, it is still incredibly interesting and exciting making chocolate in Nicaragua. “The ingredients available here are any chef’s dream!”

And what is your dream?

I want to bring back the old, almost-forgotten recipes and techniques of cacao transformation and production used in Nicaragua.

And I want to see my country harness the power of cacao to transform itself into a nation of chocolate makers and expert cacao cultivators. Chocolate is a fitting, proper means of reversing poverty.

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Maricel Presilla shows her James Beard award at her Zafra restaurant

aricel Presilla (born Santiago de Cuba) is truly versatile. As a chef, she has cooked for President Obama at the White House. Her two restaurants, Cucharamama and Zafra, and food store and bakery Ultramarinos, embody the spirit of Latin America in the New York area as a result of her constant exploration for the best Latin American food in its country of origin. (For Maricel, a tapado soup in Rio Blanco, Guatemala, could be as inspiring as a rabbit terrine served near Notre Dame in Paris.)

As a cacao expert, she likes to get her hands dirty by visiting cacao plantations in Central and South America, not only to speak to the farmers, but to examine the pod colours and shape, open them up, bite into the seeds and taste them,  in order to determine the best cacao varietal.

As a writer and medievalist, she has written the ‘New Taste of Chocolate: A Cultural and Natural History of Cacao with Recipes’ and is about to publish a bible on ‘Gran Cocina Latina’, (WW Norton), where every little region has an extraordinary secret to share.

And if that is not enough, last week, the James Beard Foundation awarded her the Best Chef Mid-Atlantic prize – an Oscar in terms of food – at the Lincoln Center in New York City.

Seventy% had the pleasure and honour of speaking to her.

What was your earliest dream?

To explore the world.

What was your very first job?

Selling lemonade at a Cuban political rally when I was a child, but that lasted only one hour until I was told by a soldier to close shop because private vendors should not be making a profit in a socialist country.

Who was your mentor?

For cooking, I trained with the late Peruvian chef Felipe Rojas-Lombardi, the first to introduce the concept of tapas to the Unites States. He was the long-time assistant of James Beard.

As a graduate student of medieval history, my mentor was the famous medievalist and prolific author Norman F. Cantor. He had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford.

For cacao, I learned a lot with Venezuelan cacao agronomist the late Humberto Reyes and his wife Lilian, a cacao pathologist.

Did you ever consider another career apart from being a chef or food writer?

I had been programmed (genetically, I believe) to be a history or literature professor, or an anthropologist. But I would have loved to have been a geographer or an archaeologist.

You have travelled throughout Latin America in search of the best food. Where did you find it?

I always find good food, even in the most improbable places. Mexico has an embarrassment of culinary riches, but Peru and Ecuador, in South America, have wonderful regional cuisines. I am currently smitten with Ecuadorian food and obsessed with Nacional cacao.

As a chocolate expert, what are the main signs of good chocolate?

Maricel Presilla doing research at the San Joaquin farm in the plains of Venezuela in the late 1990′s. Once owned by Chocolates El Rey, the farm no longer exists as it was occupied by squatters with the support of the current government of President Hugo Chávez.

I have always looked for round chocolates that tickle my palate with a variety of sensory experiences, that linger in my mouth for a long time. I appreciate the combination of complementary flavour notes: the lush acidity of dark fruit, the soothing calm of nuts, the complex sweetness of brown loaf sugar, and the subtle jolt of spice.

But I am learning to appreciate more dominant single notes of wood and herbs, or the assertive floral aromas that are characteristic of some rare Ecuadorian cacaos with strong Nacional blood.

What varietal flavours make a perfect chocolate?

I have always been partial to nutty Venezuelan criollos like Porcelana or Guasare or more complex trinitarios with a strong criollo blood and round dark fruit from places like Barlovento, Cuyagua or Chuao, but now my palate is more refined and I appreciate the inherent quality of other Latin American cacaos.

I now enjoy the black olive notes of a Nicaraguan cacao (as in Duffy’s  Nicaragua Nicaliso) or the deeply herbal nature of a Pacari Raw Ecuadorian cacao from Los Ríos.

Who would you invite to your ideal dinner party?

Twelve is the magic number of guests for me because they will fit snugly around my 18^th century Filipino table.

I would invite people of all ages (dead or alive) and from different walks of life to keep the conversation lively. I would invite James Beard for obvious reasons. Anton Mosimann, a refined Swiss chef with a restaurant in London (a true gourmand who enjoys my food and my restaurants), Prince Charles (because I like the way he thinks and writes about organic food and sustainability), and Oliver Sacks, a famous neuroscientist who adores Latin American food. Hoping that he would play the saxophone after dinner, I would ask my Cuban friend, Paquito de Rivera, a fantastic jazz musician, to join us.

Of course, I would include some of my chocolate friends. Santiago Peralta of Pacari Chocolate is one of the best dining companions I know.

Art Pollard of Amano Chocolate would fly from Utah to New Jersey to eat anything I cook for him and would bring his delicious chocolates.

Paul A Young would sit by my side and keep me entertained telling me about his latest flavour experiments, and Martin Christy, who has a discriminating palate, would be at the head of the table talking about his latest chocolate and cacao adventures. He would be pleased with the certainty that I would go out of my way to prepare special vegetarian Latin American dishes just for him.

Susana Cárdenas Overstall and Monica Meschini would also be at the table. Susana will cheer when I serve roasted ripe plantain with a peanut condiment from her home region, and Monica, who is very choosy and opinionated, will test my culinary abilities and keep my use of cilantro to a discreet minimum.

What would you serve?

I would start with my Caribbean squash soup laced with cacao and a small torchon of foie gras (for the non-vegetarians) and a spoonful of Ecuadorian mantequilla blanca (a type of crème fraîche) from Manabí.

I will follow with my Cuban-style fresh corn polenta topped with shrimp in vanilla and chipotle sauce and a touch of chocolate and cacao.

As a main course, it would be a contest. My Cuban-style roast pork with a side of mote (Ecuadorian hominy) and roasted oca, an Andean tuber, and rice and vegetarian Cuban black beans. This is always a hit. But I also enjoy a pan-roasted breast of duck with crispy skin, thinly sliced and served over a tamarillo (tree tomato) mole sauce laced with chocolate flavored with Andean mortiño and a side of Manabí-style roasted ripe plantain with the peanut condiment called salprieta.

For dessert, expect something creamy and delicious made with chocolate, but also a tasting of at least a dozen chocolates made with Latin American cacaos paired with special after dinner drinks.

What is your biggest extravagance?

Buying a very expensive and huge Spanish Renaissance wooden door (from a palace no less) in New York and shipping it to my house in Spain and paying a special import sales tax for it.

What is your greatest disappointment?

Not to be able to help the cacao farmers of Cuba’s Jauco region, including my own family. While I have been able to commercialise the cacao of small farms in countries like Venezuela, the state-controlled cacao industry of Cuba does not allow anyone to deal directly with Cuban farmers.

And your greatest achievement?

Three milestones come to mind. My cacao and chocolate books The New Taste of Chocolate for Ten Speed Press (2001 and 2009), the chocolate bars I was able to create with the late Robert Steinberg with cacao from my favorite farm in Venezuela, and my most recent award for Outstanding Best-Chef Mid-Atlantic given to me by the prestigious James Beard Foundation on May 7, 2012.

Maricel Presilla is the first Latin American woman and the third woman in history to win this award. She is a member of the Grand Jury for the International Chocolate Awards taking place in London from 28 May – 3 June.

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