Episode 3:The Real White Chocolate

written by Rowan Jacobsen

Meet Dionisia Garcia Juárez, a Chinantec woman who lives in the town of San Felipe de Léon, tucked deep into a fold of the Chinantla, a vertiginous corner of northeastern Oaxaca. She’s a spry 55, still climbing the steep paths of her farmstead in a traditional huipil, the woven tunic of the peoples of southern Mexico that captures the history and beliefs of her ancestors in embroidered symbols.
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The Chinantec people have lived here since forever, and they’ve cultivated cacao approximately that long. They self-governed for centuries until the Aztecs rolled into town around 1455, happily allied with the Spaniards in the 1520s to boot their oppressors, and then of course wound up rebelling against the Spanish a decade later.

The valleys and slopes of the Chinantla are so steep that the Chinantec developed a unique language that includes a variety of sharp whistles that can be used to convey complex information from one ridge to another. The language has been studied extensively by anthropologists, and there are still about 100,000 Chinantec speakers, but it’s mostly just the old people these days who know how to make and interpret the whistles. The kids use cell phones.

​San Felipe de Léon has just enough altitude to exist in that rare band where both coffee and cacao can thrive. Any lower and its too hot for good coffee; any higher is too cool for cacao. The people of San Felipe de Léon grow both in a delicate dance. The coffee is new, but the cacao is a constant. “When I was a kid,” says Dionisia, “these mountains were covered in cacao. We just treated it like any other fruit.” They used it in their drinks, especially atole and pozol, and sold anything extra to coyotes—middlemen who are like traveling pawn shops, rolling into town with a truck and a roll of cash and buying anything farmers are desperate to sell at extremely low prices. Coyotes are always a last resort, but if you’re a farmer without the means to haul your cacao to a distant city where you might get a better price, they can be better than nothing.

Thirty years ago, the Mexican government encouraged farmers in the Chinantla to plant new hybrid varieties of cacao with better disease resistance. Many did. Dionysia didn’t. Why not? “It’s my heritage,” she says. “And I prefer the flavor.”
But to make a living off those trees, she needs to get a better price than the coyotes are willing to pay. And that means stepping up her fermentation game. As in most places in Mexico, the cacao in the Chinantla traditionally wasn’t fermented at all. Mexican cacao is washed and dried immediately after harvest, which results in a strongly astringent cacao without rich chocolae flavor, and that’s what the domestic market has always consumed in drinks, which are so sweet that the flaws in the chocolate are barely noticeable.

But to earn the higher price paid by both domestic and international bean-to-bar customers, good fermentation is essential, and that’s the next step. Alejandro Zamorano, HCP’s lead on this project, is kick-starting the first fermentation fenter in San Felipe De Leon, with support from HCP. Soon quality Chinantla cacao will be finding its way into craft chocolate for the first time.

And craft it will be. Dionisia asked us if we wanted to see her “cacao antiquo”—the old cacao that was always here. You bet we did. She led us about a mile up a steep footpath through several hectares of hillside intercropped with food plants of all kinds. The land was her childhood home. Her parents are gone, but the house remains in the middle of the groves, surrounded by a few fruit trees.

Most of the cacao was a mix of varieties that go back to the 20th century—interesting, but not unusual. But the real prize was just below the old homestead: 14 “antiquo” trees, each more than 100 years old. There used to be 16, but Dionisia got into a big fight with her sister, and her sister cut down two of the trees in spite, because she knew it would really hurt. It did.

Alejandro surveyed the trees with barely contained fervor. “Look at the pale color of the new leaves!” he shouted, snapping photos. “You can tell it’s white-beaned.” The genetic mutation that drained the color from Criollo beans did the same to its leaves. These trees were the real deal, a living chunk of Oaxacan history.

And there was another important piece of Oaxacan history and culture growing all over those hillsides, mixed in with the cacao and coffee: pataxte, aka Theobroma bicolor, or white cacao. Pataxte is cacao’s less flashy sibling, and it has always played a supporting role in Oaxaca’s traditional beverage culture. Its white beans have less fat than cacao, a milder taste, and they are exceptionally good at producing a froth

Dionysia says pataxte has always grown “wild” in the hills of the Chinantla, and she remembers her grandfather cultivating it in his garden. The trees are clear cousins to cacao, with similar leaves and shapes, but they are much taller, and their pods hang from the branch ends, not the trunks. The pods themselves are shaped like cacao, but light in color and much harder. They have strange lace patterns etched into the husks that makes them feel like they are carved in ancient runes.

Pataxte was a big deal in prehistoric times, an essential part of the mix. Somehow Europeans never understood this. Even today, there seems to be some confusion among chocolate connoisseurs. Early references to “white cacao” are almost certainly referring to pataxte, not white-beaned Criollo. And that’s what Oaxacans mean when they use the term today. Oaxaca grows just 30 tons of cacao and 10 tons of bicolor a year, and consumes virtually all of it.

Now pataxte is having a moment. Next-gen Oaxacan eateries are featuring it more prominently. Leading the way is Olga Cabrera’s remarkable Tierra del Sol, which uses it in a sublime white mole, as well as in a veriety of mixed-cacao drinks and pastries.

A trickle of pataxte is even making its way to the wider world through exporters like Alejandro, who pays Dionisia $16 a kilo for all the pataxte she can get her hands on. (He buys her cacao and coffee, too.) That makes it more expensive than virtually any cacao in the world, but it’s necessary to cover the meager yields and difficulty separating the beans from the pods. Alejandro had never seen a whole hillside of his newest obsession before, and he gaxed around in astonishment. Most of the pataxte in the world is coming from this one valley.
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Dionisia handed us small white disks of pure pataxte chocolate to try, containing nothing but pataxte and sugar. It was rich, creamy, mild, and nutty, like peanut-butter fudge. It didn’t taste remotely like chocolate, but we could immediately comprehend why people have been mixing the two together for centuries. They are natural partners. Dionisia likes to mix 1/4 pataxte into her drinking chocolate, along with sugar and a touch of cinnamon.

As we left the lovely valley, crossing mutliple bridges as the red dirt road zigzagged back and forth across the small creek, heading back to the paved road that would lead us to Tabasco, Mexico’s commercial cacao powerhouse, we felt we’d been reminded of the need for this journey of discovery. The cacao of the Chinantla is a unique mix that, if it tastes good enough, may have a shot at heirloom status. But what to do with the pataxte? It isn’t cacao, so it doesn’t qualify. But it checks every other box. Delicious, fascinating, culturally vital. And the world’s commercial supply was coming almost entirely from one hardscrabble valley.

And who knows what else is out there? 

There’s work to be done. Flavors to be saved. And they aren’t getting any younger.