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Madre co-founder Nat Bletter calls making chocolate “applied ethnobotany.” What the heck does the professor mean by that?
“If you start talking to someone in tongues in Latin, throwing the scientific names of plants at them, their eyes are going to glaze over,” he explained. “But if you give them a bar of chocolate, maybe they’ll remember it more.”
That’s especially true for Hawaiian cocoa, which will surprise anyone who thinks they know what chocolate tastes like. Think pineapple, watermelon, raisin, all of which come in clear to amateurs as well as experts. Hawaii is the only state in the U.S. where cacao can grow, and because it’s an island ecosystem, “you have all these pockets of different flavors,” Nat explained, because of the varying weather systems. “They say if you don’t like the weather in Hawaii you can just go to the next valley and it’ll be different. The same is true of the flavor of the cacao.”
Of course, cacao isn’t native to Hawaii. Back in the 1850s German physician William Hillebrand brought it to the island and planted it in what’s now the Foster Botanical Garden in Honolulu to see how it grew. However, no one attempted to make chocolate from the plant in Hawaii for almost 100 years. Now it’s a different story. Bean-to-bar makers have cropped up all over the islands, mostly calling their chocolate “tree to bar.” That means they take “bean to bar” one step further: They grow the cacao themselves as well as ferment, dry, roast, grind, and smoothen it into chocolate.
Madre started out on a different path, though. After getting his PhD in ethnobotany, teaching at the University of Hawaii, and making chocolate at home, Nat decided to take the plunge.
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