 Aloha and thanks for joining us at Think Tech Hawaii. We are doing the Hawaii Food and Farmer Series. I am your co-host, solo co-host today, Justine Espiritu. Matthew Johnson is slaving away working on our Baaba Empire right now. Sorry he can't join us. So every other week we bring on farmers and other folks that are involved in our local food community, whether they have a product or a restaurant, if they offer support services to farmers, of course the farmers themselves. We love to get the backstory of how people fell into the work that they're doing and kind of what they see happening in local food in our community here on Hawaii. So every week is exciting. Today we have a special guest, Nat Bleder, who is the co-founder and chocolate flavor meister with Madre Chocolate. And Nat, you have been here at Think Tech Studio a number of times. So thank you so much for coming to hang out with me. Of course, it's been a while, so get me back. Yeah, awesome. So yeah, I'm really excited to hear, of course your background, if we could hear a little bit about the studies you did and what led you to cacao and chocolate and that development and kind of the role you've played in creating a market for this product and what you guys kind of do in the community. Sure, I sort of stumbled into chocolate indirectly. I did my PhD in ethnobotany, which is related to chocolate, but I was studying medicinal plants in the proven Amazon and Guatemala and Mali. And cacao is definitely a very medicinal plant, but I wasn't looking at it as a medicine exactly. But a classmate who was a Mayan archaeologist asked me to write a book chapter about traditional uses of cacao in South America, and I tried to put her off for a year or two. And finally, my advisor was like, I'll help you. It'll be really fun, because we always talked about food. And he's a big foodie, a swazi. And so then decided to do it, and it was a three-year distraction from my PhD topic, because I got so into it. And then when the book came out in 2006, a bunch of my friends were like, I don't want to read your thick academic tone about cacao. Just make us some chocolate or something. You know, you like to cook, and you wanted to go to culinary schools. Like, yeah, it might be a way to bring together my interests in food and ethnobotany, so I just started experimenting actually in San Francisco and with a friend's coffee grinder was just some cacao nibs that I got at the health food store, and it turned out great. And I was like, make more, please. You just built up that demand among friends? Yeah, yeah. And it was very coarse at first, which is how chocolate is traditionally made for drinking chocolate, so it's not ground into the smooth thing that we know from European chocolate bars. But people kept asking for more and more of it, and I went back and made, like, about a thousand bars in my kitchen in New York, just with a coffee grinder and a food processor, and eventually got a stone grinder to do it more smooth European style, and then came out here into Hawaii in 2008. Sorry, 2009, I'm doing a postdoc at UH, and I was in the same building as the cava, cacao, and coffee lab, which, as you might imagine, is the most popular lab. Yeah, everyone's hanging out, like, what's everyone doing in here? Exactly, at 3 p.m. every day they have a cava circle, so you get to talk to people, and I was a big cava fan even before I moved to Hawaii. So I started to meet some of the farmers, cacao farmers that were here already, and I think there's only about, like, one or two chocolate makers at that time. I was like, I shouldn't be making chocolate in New York. That makes no sense. You should be making it where the plant grows, and we have contact with the farmers, and so I started doing it here and founded Madre in 2011, and we've been getting stronger since then. Awesome, and so you guys described us as artisanal chocolate. Can you kind of explain what's the difference between your product and, you know, like the $2 Hershey bar in the store? Not to discount them, they do some amazing stuff and, like, keeping chocolate incredibly consistent over very variable farming styles and ferment, but what we're doing is, you know, micro or even nano lots compared to what a company like that does, and the big thing that we do is work super closely with the farmers because we feel that is essential to get really good flavor, and a lot of people don't know this, but chocolate is a fermented food. So when you have the, this is a fresh cacao pod that I was showing earlier, when you open it up, there's this white pulp inside, and that tastes delicious. Nothing like chocolate. It's kind of like a mangosteen or guanabana or something like that or lychee, and have you had it before? Yeah, I have. It's pretty tasty, but it's related to okra, so. Yeah, yeah. It shows that kind of funky texture, but all the sugars from that gets, fuels the ferment, and it goes into a big wooden box and gets stirred every day for about five to 10 days, and that removes all the bitterness and develops all the nice acidic flavor. And I brought some beans from a local windward side farm. So these are fermented, and you can see they have no fruit left, fermented and dried. This is from 21 Degrees Farm. And this is, I think, only their second harvest, and it has this incredible fruity, lively taste, if you want to give it a try. It's very not bitter because it's been fermented well, and it has some umami and nice floral flavors and all of that. And it's totally different from, say, these Guatemalan beans. So a lot of it is focusing on the terroir or the flavor differences that come from where the cacao was grown and fermented. So how many different varieties do you work with? Varieties of cacao, probably four or five. Not that one. Yeah? Those are also roasted, so that'll add some other differences to it. In Hawaii, we mainly have kuyoyo, which are usually smaller, more difficult to grow pods, but they're really valued because they have a really mellow flavor. Sorry, that's it's prevalent here in Hawaii? It's not prevalent, but a lot of farmers, especially when they're first starting out, really want to grow that because it's higher price per pound of finished cacao. But it is harder to grow and more disease prone. So if you, after a while, people realize, like, oh, yeah, it's not financially worth growing kuyoyo as much with the high cost of labor in Hawaii because you'll get the same revenue per acre or per effort. So an easier one is Trinitario, which is probably like these giant guys. And they're a hybrid of the wild type in the kuyoyo. So they're pretty tasty, and they combine a lot of the sweet flavor of the kuyoyo with the vigor of the wild forest stereotype. So that's the main one that grows here. But then we work and get cacao from other places, like Solomon Islands and Vanuatu and Guatemala and Dominican Republic and Brazil. And altogether, there's about 12 different varieties that have been named of cacao. And people don't always know what we have. So we've probably worked with all of them. Just wasn't clearly. So what varieties you work with, is that always changing? Or do you have like a, it's not consistent in that sense. You're always kind of experimenting. Yeah, OK. Yeah. And this photo now is from the Rupund Farm in Waiahole. It's another great local farmer. They're one of the few organic cacao farmers. And they probably mainly have the Trinitario type there, too. And I tell farmers, they're like, oh, what variety should I plant? I'm like, it doesn't really matter. We can make good chocolate out of any of them. You just have to work on the ferment. And that is the most essential part. But it's also the ugliest and most unappetizing part. It's a bunch of rotting food. So if there's any Instagram geniuses out there, we need to help us figure out how to make that look beautiful. Because we feel like three quarters of the flavor gets added during the ferment over all the other stages, like roasting and grinding. Yeah, so we play with different inoculants in the ferment, like kombucha or sour poi, sort of send it off in different directions. So you have a pretty active relationship with the farmers? Yeah. Both on Big Island, Maui, Kauai. And it's a very strong relationship, especially on Oahu, because we do fermenting for a lot of the Oahu farmers, partly because so many farmers in Oahu are diversified. So they have to process their kalo and their cacao and their vanilla and their papaya. And if it takes six months or a year to learn how to process each of those, they might not always have time to figure out the cacao ferment, which is pretty complicated. OK, so that's something you guys just take on. Yeah. And the other issue is that so many farmers here have 10 cacao trees, and you need about 500 to get enough critical mass to get it to really heat up well. Kind of like a compost, if you have a tiny compost. OK, so then you kind of aggregate it. Yes. And then so if you're aggregating from multiple farms, where does that take place? You're bringing it all to? Into our Chinatown shop. Oh, OK. We do all the fermenting there and then control conditions. And we mass them all together, but we keep them in netted bags or pots. So we can still at the end say, OK, these are yours from Kahlua, and these are yours from Mayahole, and these are yours from Kupakea, so that we know when we're making the chocolate, it's only one farms cacao, but we can still get the benefit of the critical mass. OK, but you also said you work with a lot of farmers all over the world, which kind of keeps it interesting. So what's that ratio of working with the local farmers versus the other farmers you're working with, and how involved are you with those farmers in other places of the world? Yeah, it's that we wish there was more cacao in Hawaii. There's always more demand than there is supply, because it's a relatively new crop that's only been growing in earnest in the last 20 years. So it's increasing. I just came this weekend from the Hawaii Chocolate and Cacao Association meeting, and they're saying there's like 120 some of that's producing in Hawaii now. And I was on one farm in the Dominican Republic a few years ago that was twice as large of all of Hawaii's. Just the one farm? Yes, a single farm. OK, then to skip to that really fast, and what would be like the ideal? What would you like to see of how much, what's the potential that you would want to see of probably the cacao, so then you could source it locally? I think we're never going to be able to compete on quantity in Hawaii, just because of the high cost of labor. So what's considered the best cacao in the world from Venezuela or Ecuador is max like $4 or $5 a pound. Hawaiian cacao is a minimum of $8 a pound, up to $10, even if it's not good quality. So it's understandable why if you have to bring in inputs and energy and sometimes fertilizer and labor, it's pretty labor intensive. You have to hand harvest all the pods and crack them open by hand. And ferment is a lot of hands-on stuff. So the price is never going to go down, and we don't have the landmass in Hawaii where you can grow it. You can only really grow it below about 1,500, 2,000 feet, so that's a ring around the edge of all the islands. OK, so that potential is kind of small. Yeah, exactly. So it's going to be quality is the only way to compete. And that's why we focus on the ferment so much, because we can say, yeah, it's worth it at $10 a pound because it's so carefully fermented and so much attention is paid to it. Awesome. OK, we're already through our first segment. We're going to take a quick break, and then I want to hear a little more about how you work with the farmers elsewhere, and then a little more about your role in the community. Wonderful. I'm Ethan Allen, host of likable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 PM, you'll have a chance to come and listen and learn from scientists around the world, scientists who talk about their work in meaningful, easy to understand ways. And you'll come to appreciate science as a wonderful way of thinking, a way of knowing about the world. You'll learn interesting facts, interesting ideas. You'll be stimulated to think more. Please come join us every Friday afternoon at 2 PM here on Think Tech Hawaii for likable science with me, your host, Ethan Allen. Hi, I'm Cheryl Crozier Garcia. I'm the host of Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii. It's a program where we discuss the impact of change on workers, employers, and the economy. So join us every other Tuesday from 4 o'clock to 4.30. We're live in the studio on Working Together in Think Tech Hawaii. Take care. See you soon. Bye. That's all of it. Welcome back. This is the Hawaii Food and Farmer series. I'm your co-host, Justine Espiritu. Matthew ditched me today. But it's OK, because I'm hanging out with Nat Blutter, the co-founder and chocolate flavor meister of Monterey Chocolate. And now we're getting to dive into a little bit of sampling. Can I try that one that you gave me? That's one I just tasted. Tastes like Christmas in my mouth. So I want to try that again. Ancient Aztec recipe, first published in the 1500s with chipotle and allspice in it. So the Mesoamericans, the Aztec, Maya, and Olmec are the ones who invented chocolate. So they've been doing it for thousands of years. And I feel like they should know what they're doing when they're combined in the flavors. Yeah. So all these other flavors and stuff that you're infusing, which of those are made up, and which of those have a historical part of chocolate? The chipotle allspice is one of our. I love it. A lot of people are first like, chili is in chocolate. That doesn't make any sense. Like, no, it's made sense for thousands of years. Right, OK, so that's not a new thing. No. OK, what's one when I originally would see that in the store? It's like, yeah, it doesn't make sense, but. This is our Mexican drinking chocolate, which is chocolate de meso. It just means table chocolate. And it has cinnamon and allspice in it. So that is post-Columbian, but this is what you commonly find in Mexico now for making drinking chocolate, just melt it down. And that one, a gold medal for one of the best drinking chocolates in the world. In terms of other flavors, we do some really rare Mexican spices like rosita de cacao, which is a flour that smells like maple syrup. We've done one with jaguar cacao, which is considered the female form of cacao in Mayan mythology, whereas cacao is the male. That's kind of like the original white chocolate has these very non-bitter almond-like seeds. And it turns out it was like almost white chocolate, so we swirled the two together to get this yin and yang effect, and do lots of stuff. We love chilies, so we do a lot of stuff with that. But then stuff like lilikoi or coconut ginger, those are more Hawaiian-inspired flavors. OK, and that's where you kind of use your knowledge and make some of that. What's been the most successful one that you've had margarit chocolate has kind of been credited with? Coconut gingers are most popular. The one that's won the most awards is the triple cacao, because it's the only chocolate bar we know of in the world that has that cacao fruit in it. So when we're here in Hawaii and we get to enjoy that delicious pulp, everyone should enjoy this in the world. This is such a delicious fruit, not just people living where a cacao grows. So we put that fruit in a bar with the cacao nibs. So it has the crunchy, the chewy, the smooth, rich chocolate. And that's one of seven awards now. Whoa. It's pretty hard to make because it's hard to get the fruit. So then back to some of the other farms you're working with. Oh, yeah, I wanted to give you some of the Oahu chocolate. So this is grown by a great local astronomer, Megan Ann Stale. And so we call this the Megaparsec Bar. So we did the ferment and drying and roasting and grinding the whole nine yards on this one. She did the growing. Smoky. Yeah, a little bit. So that's all locally grown and made on Oahu. She has a farm in Kanyohi. And then you're asking about other farmers we worked with for the last two years. We've been going to Melanesia to Sullivan Islands and Manuatu. This year, I'm going to Papua New Guinea. And we've been doing what we call our cacao blue camp there, where we teach the farmers for five to eight days about fermenting and teaching them how to make chocolate. Aloha, how are you doing? It's me, Angus McTach, wishing you a welcome and join us to see us on Hibachi Talk on Think Tech Hawaii. To all my co-hosts, go to the tech side and enter the security guy every Friday from 1,300 to 1,345. We look forward to see you. We'll talk tech, and we'll have some wee bit of fun. And remember, let your wing gang free wherever you be. Aloha. Welcome back. Sorry I had to take a quick sample break. Can you get back to the boot camp you mentioned? Yes, the cacao boot camp. So for about five to eight days, we work with the farmers to teach them not only planting and pruning and fertilizing and grafting, but then everything that comes after that that they might not traditionally do. So the fermenting, drying, roasting, grinding, and tempering so that we feel if the farmers can make their own chocolate and taste it on a daily basis, they're going to make amazingly better cacao. Wow, that's interesting. I'm going to say, you're doing this workshop for farmers? Yeah. OK. Yeah, because what happens traditionally is farmer grows the cacao, ferments it, and dries it, and then they send the beans off to the US or Europe or Australia to be made into chocolate, and they never taste it. And they never get to see the end product. So it's kind of like asking a painter to paint this beautiful painting with their eyes blindfolded and their hands tied behind their back. It's like they never know what changes they make, what effect they have. So we really feel like the cacao farmer, even if they don't make it on a regular basis, they should be doing test batches of it at least so they can see, oh, yeah, when I gave it this other fertilizer, it was so much happier, and the chocolate tasted so much better. When I planted this variety or fermented it this way, it was so much more awesome. And that's a nice thing about doing it in Hawaii is that we can close that design loop. And within a month or two of getting the cacao from the farmer, we can give them back the finished chocolate and say, what you did on that batch, that was killer. Keep doing that. Or like, hey, why don't you try boosting the temperature a little bit or adding some poi into the ferment and see how it tastes different. So it's really closing that design loop. And we're really excited because last year we put on the first annual Solomon's Cacao Awards. And we had 83 entries from around Solomon Islands. You were part of the organizing community? Yeah, and the judge. And the judge. One of the five judges, yeah. And it was a little daunting because we came into this room where they'd be receiving it at the Department of Agriculture. And there was 83 entries and about 800 pounds of cacao that we had to figure out the top three of in only five days. We're like, oh my god, how are we going to do this? You would determine that just from eating the? Yeah, so we narrowed it down first. I just like crawled around on the floor smelling them. I'm like, this one smoked. We can't include this because we're not, you know, we said it can't be smoked dried. That's one of the things they'd done traditionally there. It's OK for commodity cacao, but it's not good if you want to make a chocolate bar out of it. And then so we got it down to like 50. And then we did like a quick roast and just tasted the nibs from those 50. And then we got it down to 10. And then we made chocolate out of all 10 of those. Oh, cool. With like all night tempering session, grinding sessions with five other chocolate makers were there. And then we got it down to the top three. And this guy Blaise Sekkivai from Guadalcanal, he was, he had been in our boot camp the year before. And he got third place in the awards. They were like, oh, this is awesome. Like in only a year, he put into place all the things he'd learned, and he was getting awards already. And now here he's going to be on like TV and Solomon Islands for all of his efforts. That's awesome. That's so cool to come into this, be creating this product, but be a part of that design process like you talk about. So this is the product of that. We just got, we brought one bag on the plane back with us from Solomon Islands. We're trying to figure out how to get more. That's so good. So that's his bar there. Maddie, your missed note. If you can call in. That's Blaise's 73% Solomon bar there. Oh my god. So OK, this is limited edition. Yes, only one sack, only about 50 pounds that we were able to bring back as luggage. So good. If anybody knows anyone sailing to Solomon Islands, let us know. We've got some cargo to stash on. Awesome, so cool. And then I want to talk a little bit about, so in addition to having these products, you also guys take the, I mean, it's interesting that you take the chocolate making process to the farmers themselves, but also for consumers and the community. Can you talk a little bit about those classes you offer and what that has been like for people to come into your shop and be a part of that? Yeah, I mean, I guess you can't get the teacher out of me since I was teaching at UH and while I was in grad school. So even from the first year I was making chocolate in New York, I was trying to teach other people how to do it. Yeah, that's cool. Because I feel like everyone should know how to make chocolate. It should be open sourced. And people will understand why does this bar cost $10? Yeah, yeah, totally. And a lot of people come to our classes like, I'm going to make my own chocolate. And then after they take the class, they're like, oh, I'm going to let you keep making the chocolate. I understand now. Yeah, which is funny. That's like the similar thing we see with farming. People want just cheap food. We want everything. The vegetables will be cheap. And then they come to the farm and then they understand. Like, oh, this takes a lot of work. This takes a lot of heart and energy. And they can appreciate why the value of that. Oh, the effort that goes in. And you guys do some other cool workshops, too. What's the whiskey one? Oh, that's a really fun one. Yeah, it took a while to get going. But they had a guy on our staff who was Scottish. And he's like, oh, we've got to do this. And so he helped me pick out a really good set of whiskeys, both from America and Ireland and Scotland. And I think it actually goes better to me with chocolate than wine does. Because the wine has its own tannins and astringency that can kind of compete with the chocolate, whereas whiskey complements it more. I mean, it might not be for everybody, especially like the super PD scotches. But we try to represent the whole range of flavors that you find in whiskey, from bourbons to rice to highland and lowland scotches. And the flavor range of chocolates, too. So you can kind of mix and match them. That's really fun. Well, we have 40 seconds left. I know we want to talk really fast about some new developments. You wanted to mention Jamola, what he's doing. And then, yeah, if you want to do that quickly. We're really excited. Jamola Lajiani is a former chef from 39 Hotel in Bevy, where some of you may know him from. And he's just joined us as head chocolatier. And he's going to be running our cafe and probably eventually restaurant program. So we're going to integrate chocolate into savory food and bring in some of the mole's that you find in Mexico. So it'll be pretty exciting. That sounds awesome. And where can we find you really fast? What's your website and more info about that? MadreChocolate.com. And we have a shop both in Chinatown on Pauahi Street and in Kailua on Kinehe Street.