Deep in the cocoa bean plantations of Brazil and beyond, there’s a chocolate revolution underway. Deep, dark, intense, pure chocolate — extreme chocolate — is rising up as the chocolate of choice like never before among chocolate connoisseurs and beyond.
Chocolate that lives very close to the bean. Forget milk chocolate. This is 70 percent pure cacao. 80 percent. 90 percent. 100 percent. Intense.
Food and drink super-guru Bill Buford is up to his neck in it. Literally naked in a vat of beans.
This hour, On Point: New Yorker gourmand Bill Buford takes us deep into rain forest, dark beans, and extreme chocolate.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests:
Bill Buford, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, his article “Extreme Chocolate” appears in the current issue. He is the author of “Heat : An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany.”
Diego Badaro, a cacao farmer, his family plantation lies on the banks of the Rio de Contas in the Bahia rain forest of Brazil. His ancestors, also cacao plantation owners, figure largely in the writing of famed Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado.
