2019 D.C. Chocolate Festival
Zygote Nation was there! … At the 2019 D.C. Chocolate Festival on May 4, 2019, at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Nearly 30 chocolate makers participated in the well-attended, pleasant event. They represented a nice mix of local artisanal chocolatiers and businesses from across the United States, Europe, and South America.
Here is my list of the festival’s notable vendors and products:
Villakuyaya
Photo by Michael Sirak
Villakuyaya of Bardonia, New York, offers USDA-certified organic chocolate bars that use Arriba Nacional cacao from Ecuador. Over the years, some of my favorite artisanal chocolate brands have used Arriba Nacional cacao. I have always liked the taste of this cacao, and I found Villakuyaya’s bars similarly delicious. I really liked its Himalaya Pink Salt bar and its Coconut Vanilla Dessert bar; both bars have 80 percent cacao content, as do many of its other bars. They include: Cherry Vanilla, Coffee, Earl Grey Lavender, Herbal Cranberry Orange, Masala Chai, Matcha Green Tea, and Tulsi Ginger & Honey. The company also sells bars with 100 percent cacao content, including a Tulsi Rose Petals variety, and Pure bars that range in cacao content from 73 percent to 95 percent. It also offers a milk chocolate bar (39 percent cacao content) and sells cacao nibs, chocolate-covered cacao beans, and Earl Grey Cacao Tea. Villakuyaya sources its cacao from small-farms in northwestern Ecuador around Esmeraldas, on that country’s Pacific coast, according to the company’s website.
Magia Piura
Photo by Michael Sirak
Magia Piura of Piura, in northwestern Peru, sells chocolate bars that feature white cacao from the mountains surrounding the Morropón and Huancabamba regions of Peru, east of Piura. I am not exactly sure how to describe the taste of the bars I tried—which had 72 percent cacao content—but I really liked them. In its marketing materials, Magia Piura speaks of these bars having citrus notes and a citrus aftertaste. Magia Piura also caught my eye for offering a bar, the Mucilago de Cacao variety, that contains crystalized mucilage (a.k.a. pulp) from the cacao pod. Mucilage is the white fleshy substance that surrounds the seeds (i.e., the cacao beans) in the pod. I know some people squeeze the pulp and drink the sweet juice from it, but I had never before seen a chocolate bar with mucilage. I really enjoyed this leaf-shaped bar. The crystalized pulp gives it a subtle bit of crunchiness. Among the other products in Magia Piura’s line are a bar with crystalized java plum and milk chocolate bars with nibs or sweetened with lucuma. The Magia Piura website is extremely limited, so for more information (in English and Spanish), it’s best to visit the company’s Facebook page (linked above) or view its Instagram page (@magiapiura).
Mademoiselle Miel
Photo by Michael Sirak
Mademoiselle Miel of St. Paul, Minnesota, grabbed my attention for offering small-batch chocolate bars with appealing ingredients. This chocolatier builds its bars around a base of organic single-origin cacao beans and organic maple sugar. The bar include these varieties: Dark Chocolate (70 percent cacao content) and White Chocolate, available in both a regular 2.2 ounce size and a small 0.5 ounce size, as well as regular-sized: Coffee & Cream, Dream (with hemp seeds and tahini), Extra Dark & Smoky (with solar salt infused with mesquite oil), and Tahini Star. (Solar salt is salt from seawater or other brine evaporated in the sun.) I don’t recall seeing tahini in chocolate bars before. I really enjoyed the taste of that combination. Mademoiselle Miel also sells honey bon-bons that feature raw honey encased in a chocolate shell. There is the Classic bon-bon variety as well as a Smoked with Scotch Honey variety with smoked honey paired with Laphroaig single-malt Scotch whiskey, according to the company’s website. Mademoiselle Miel also offers a Honey Hot Cacao Bomb that you drop into eight ounces of milk to create a hot cacao drink.
Raaka Chocolate
Photo by Michael Sirak
Raaka Chocolate of Brooklyn, New York, markets a line of USDA-certified organic chocolate bars that use unroasted chocolate. Utilizing unroasted cacao beans reflects the company's focus on capturing "the brighter, bolder, and fruitier side of cacao," states the company's website. Unroasted cacao is not the same as raw cacao since unroasted cacao beans undergo a fermentation process to bring out their flavor, according to the website. I found Raaka Chocolate to have a nice variety of bars and those I tried (e.g., Cacao & Coconut Swirl, Coconut Milk, Pink Sea Salt) were quite tasty. Among the other varieties are: Bananas Foster, Bourbon Cask Aged, Cabernet Sauvignon, Churro, Green Tea Crunch, Maple & Nibs, and Yacon Root. The cacao content of the bars I saw ranges from 60 percent to 74 percent. Raaka Chocolate's website has articulate discriptions of the cacao types it uses and the cacao growers from whom it sources them. The company is committed to such transparency, states the website. I appreciate that the company goes to those lengths to provide this information. The chocolate bars’ packaging shows the origin of the cacao in each respective bar. Raaka Chocolate also color-codes the packaging based on the region of the cacao, the company’s representative at the festival told me.
