A chocolate book

Jordi Roca, the much cel­e­brated young dessert chef from the Celler de Can Roca restau­rant and con­sid­ered the best pas­try chef in the world in 2014, has had some­thing on his mind for a long while. After open­ing the Ro­cam­bo­lesc ice cream shop and es­tab­lish­ing it – a cre­ative pro­ject with his part­ner, Ale­jan­dra Rivas – he set him­self a new chal­lenge: to make a jour­ney to South Amer­ica to dis­cover the ori­gins of choco­late and then use the knowl­edge he gleaned to try to make the best cacao in the world. An am­bi­tious pro­ject, which will be turned into a doc­u­men­tary by Na­tional Ge­o­graphic, and a book, which will co­in­cide with the open­ing of the much-an­tic­i­pated Casa Cacao (Cocoa House), a choco­late work­shop, tast­ing space and bou­tique hotel, with Damian All­sop on the team – an­other key name in the craft of choco­late mak­ing – and which will be man­aged by Anna Payet, Joan Roca’s wife.

As Jordi Roca ex­plained not long ago in an in­ter­view in El Punt Avui news­pa­per, every­thing started with a ques­tion: “Can we be choco­late man­u­fac­tur­ers?” as well as oth­ers, such as “How do you tech­ni­cally make choco­late be­fore con­sum­ing it?” and “Where is it grown?” The chef had to find the an­swers by going into the deep­est parts of the Ama­zon and Colom­bian jun­gles. As he con­fesses in his book, he had never set foot on a cocoa plan­ta­tion, nor seen cacao pro­duced in a fac­tory, nor seen a fer­men­ta­tion plant, or put his whole arm up to his elbow into a vat to have it im­preg­nated by the acid and rough aroma of the beans in full process of trans­for­ma­tion.

He had never seen the face a of a pro­ducer ei­ther, the per­son who would har­vest the beans that he would re­ceive in this work­shop in Girona, nor did he know any­thing about the tiny amount of money they get from in­ter­me­di­aries. This jour­ney is also a meet­ing point be­tween the choco­late maker and the real life of cocoa pro­duc­ers.

All this and much more is in the book, Casa Cacao, by Jordi Roca, writ­ten with the food jour­nal­ist Igna­cio Med­ina.

Casa Cacao, a jour­ney back to the ori­gin of choco­late, pub­lished by Plan­eta Gas­tro, is a large, lux­u­ri­ous vol­ume that trans­mits the pas­sion and en­thu­si­asm Roca puts into his pro­ject, plus recipes. “There is no such thing as the best cacao in the world, in the same way there is no such thing as the best dish in the world. But what does exist is au­then­tic peo­ple, and the fact that the cocoa plan­ta­tions can gen­er­ate more value,” said Roca at the pre­sen­ta­tion of the book in Madrid, adding that he de­cided to ded­i­cate the au­thor’s rights of the book to de­vel­op­ment pro­grammes in these com­mu­ni­ties that pro­duce the cocoa. Roca added that he plans to build a col­lect­ing and fer­men­ta­tion cen­tre, to “im­prove the qual­ity of cocoa”.

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