The Raw Truth of Chocolate | E049
Ever wonder what exactly is raw chocolate?
Is it better?
In this week’s episode we are exploring the popular topic of chocolate even further by talking with founder and maker of Mythical Chocolate, Jeff Stratman. We cover the differences between raw chocolate & traditional tempered processes and how the sourcing differs when producing raw chocolates. We even dive into some of the technical aspects of making cacao from bean to bar. So if craft chocolate is something new, or you are a long-time connoisseur there’s a lot to learn from Jeff in this episode!
And if you enjoy this, be sure to tune in to Part 2 with Jeff Stratman talking about ceremonial cacao - only available on the Wildly Optimized Wellness Premium podcast, which is one of the many benefits you receive when you become an Optimized Wellness Community member! You can find the link to join in the show notes!
In This Episode
00:00 The raw truth of chocolate
01:27 Mythical Chocolate’s passion origins
04:12 How Mythical started sourcing cacao in the big world of chocolate
06:58 Ethics of growing cacao
11:24 Importance and intricacies of roasting
15:56 Grinding vs conching the beans
18:27 What kinds of chocolate Mythical Chocolate produces
26:28 What is tempering vs raw
Resources Mentioned
Want even more chocolate goodness? Catch up on Season 4, Episode 3: Choosing Better Chocolate https://www.torearodriguez.com/wowpodcast/s4e3
Connect with Mythical Chocolate
Website https://mythicalchocolate.com/ use code TOREA for -10% on your first order
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mythicalchocolate/
Connect with Toréa
Website: https://www.torearodriguez.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/torearodriguez/
Connect with Evie
Website: https://holisticallyrestored.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/holisticallyrestored/
Join the Optimized Wellness Community: https://torea.co/Premium
Submit a Question for the Show: https://www.torearodriguez.com/podcast-question
Transcript
Toréa Rodriguez 0:08
Welcome to the Wildly Optimized Wellness podcast. I am your host, Toréa Rodriguez. And I’m joined by the lovely co host, Evie Takacs. Both of us are Functional Diagnostic Nutrition practitioners and we love working with women from all over the world, through our virtual programs, helping women not only feel better, but actually achieve that vibrant, no holds barred version of themselves, they’ve been missing for a long time, and how we actually get there. Well, that is what this show is all about. Now, please keep in mind that this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. And if you like what you hear today, we would love for you to hit that follow button, leave a review in Apple podcast, share with your friends, and keep coming back for more. Let’s start today’s adventure shall we?
Toréa Rodriguez 1:07
Okay, welcome back, everybody, Wildly Optimized Wellness Podcast. We have so much feedback about the episode that we did about chocolate last year that we had to just do another episode and find another guest. So we are joined by Jeff Stratman of Mythical Chocolate. Welcome, Jeff to the podcast.
Jeff Stratman 1:27
Thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure to get to sit down and talk about a true passion of ours.
Toréa Rodriguez 1:34
Love it. Love it. So tell us a little bit about your company, Mythical Chocolate. I'd love to hear where it got the name. And really, where did you get your passion for cacao?
Jeff Stratman 1:44
Yeah, I mean, we could talk a long time, just those three things. So Mythical Chocolates, we are literally ma and pa, chocolate shop based in Bend, Oregon. And we are hyper focused on and we're kind of an A mythical comes from is bringing people back into alignment with the origins of cacao, oftentimes it is viewed as a commodity anymore. A lot of myself included, will turn up their noses that different chocolates and things like that because of the ingredients or the sugars or whatever it is. And so the idea is to recapture the essence of cacao as a superfood, and bring together a combination of pleasure and nourishment, which, you know, sometimes it's nice to just have your heart space kissed open rather than punched open by just raw cacao. So that's what we're focused on.
Toréa Rodriguez 2:41
That's really cool. And when did your obsession with cacao and chocolate start, because I know, I have always loved and appreciated chocolate even as a little kid. But for me personally, about 10 years ago, I discovered something called craft chocolate with that we talked about a bit in the last episode. And I really started to learn about ingredients and makers and where the stuff comes from and the actual farmers where it comes from. And that really kind of piqued my interest in a way that I nerd it out pretty hard on it. So where did this spark for you?
Jeff Stratman 3:15
Yeah, now about. For me personally, it's probably been a 10 to 15 year journey. I don't remember the exact date at this point. But especially in my early 20s, coming out of college, I was incredibly into different types of fitness and nutrition was a humongous passion of mine. And that's where the idea of eating really dark chocolate came about as a way for like recovery or being energized into going into these things. And then as that path continued, really slipping over the labels and reading what was in this stuff, rather than just grab up, oh, here's a 77% dark chocolate bar, you realize like all they're really telling you is 33% of this is sugar, and they're skipping over all the emulsifiers and the different things that keep it pretty and shelf stable for a year at a time, things like that. Especially as so, my wife, Ashley and I, we have two little girl and as we bring them into the world, we're trying to bring so much reverence into what we eat. And in doing that, that's when we really pay attention to what's going on in our bodies. And an opportunity came along through our friend Ryan to who's been doing chocolates for 15 years, approximately 15 to 20 years, Ryan's been crafting chocolate. So I'll partner up and take something that has been integral to our lives and make it in a way that feels in alignment with our own bodies so that we are willing to share with other people.
Toréa Rodriguez 4:53
Cool, very cool. And so when you started you started with Ryan and you partnered with Ryan I'm assuming that Ryan was already sourcing cacao in a ethical fashion and was sourcing really good beans and not buying them from Nestle or a big conglomeration. Right. So, you know, I, one of the questions I have is like, why is sourcing the cacao from particular farmers from particular places? Important in general, across all kinds of chocolate?
Jeff Stratman 5:26
Yeah, I mean, even just hearing the question makes my skin start tingling, because I think that was one of the quintessential aspects of all of this. So yeah, I mean, Ryan is doing the best he could, as far as sourcing. And having said that, there's always room for improvement. And that's really what having more minds come together and focus on this. We were able to do because we started to talking to other friends who also had ceremonial cacao companies. And where did they get their beans from? What do you recommend? How do you see this? Because when you're little, sometimes you feel beholden to the big guys whims, and we really didn't want to do that anymore. So at each step of this, it's been a constant unfolding of better understanding what it means. So yes, I like at this point, it's over a third of all chocolate comes from the Ivory Coast, or cacao. What goes into chocolate? Yeah, so at least our current understanding, as far as cacao, it all originated down in most likely Ecuador, and expanding up into the Amazon basin. So the Ivory Coast was not part of that picture. So asking the questions of okay, it's, you know, at one point, we were using cacao from Tanzania, to be honest, because we had really good recommendations for this, they're bringing a crop to one of the poorest parts of the world and allowing them the opportunity to make money. And that was beautiful. And they have very, very, very good ethics, so I have nothing against it. But what started unfolding for me is, okay, what does planting this stuff? What did that take away from that natural environment? So for example, in Peru right now, there is farmers who have been growing for somewhere between 11300 years, and that's one mountain valley, but because cacao is coming from all these different places now, and they can grow, it's so much cheaper in places like Africa, they're literally cutting down these 1000 year old groves in order to plant things like limes and mangoes. Because the locals can make money doing that in comparison to what they were traditionally getting from cacao. Which I don't blame them, I would do that. But how do we, as the ones providing this to the people start really examining the entire chain of events that happens by us demanding this? So we're creating demand? How do we do that in the best way, the most ethical way possible. And I'm always open to continuing to learn more and continuing develop how we do this. But right now, that's what we're trying to really focus on. So that's why not all but a lot of our beans are wild harvested, whereas some from that exact same region are cultivated.
Toréa Rodriguez 8:21
Interesting. And so let's let's step back for a minute and just kind of review what are all the steps that are required from growing the cacao to being able to taste and consume that gets kick out? Can you like, summarize all those different steps and what's involved? Because I think a lot of people don't really know that process, because we get it off of the store shelves, right? So what's in what's what leads up to the store shelves, and why is it so important that we are paying attention to each step?
Jeff Stratman 8:56
Yeah. Well, I guess there's going to be different approaches. So I am happy to speak to ours. But kind of the store bought way, a lot of times what you're doing is they're buying cacao from all sorts of different sources and throwing it together into a giant pot before it gets there, how they're doing it as they're harvesting the pods. And in order to do it and mass. A lot of times these are just sitting on the ground in order to ripen. That way they can get the trees to continue to bear fruit because it takes an average tree is producing about 20 pods. And it takes about 40 pods to produce one kilogram of chocolate. So it's quite demanding on these natural resources. So after that, they take them and they the pod is smaller than a football but it thinks big old football shape and they crack that open and they pull out all those seeds inside which is the fruit and you can eat it and it's very, very, very sweet and much different than what you would find in a Chocolate Bar. It's almost like a Jolly Rancher or something like that in comparison. And that goes into a fermentation process. I think that's really beautiful. A lot of the stuff that we focus on is fermented food, chocolate is a fermented food. After that, they dry it and once it's dried, that's typically what's put into big burlap sacks or whatever they're using, and it's shipped wherever it's going. And again, that aspect is one where you have to know your sourcing a lot of times, how long has this been laying on the ground before I went into fermentation, after it's packed, we've run into a two were depending on who you got it from, they're putting things like rocks and straws into those bags. In order to increase weight and ship it out, you need to know you have an ethical source that you're getting this from. So when it comes to whomever, and it goes into this is kind of where the big branch happens between how we're trying to do it, and how you might find commercial chocolate. So a lot of them will use these giant steam ovens to superheat the beans and basically cook out any sort of impurities or flavor variances that they wouldn't want. And this stuff gets very, very hot. And from there, it might go, some might keep it as a whole bean processed, a lot of them, they're going to go into a press. So the press is heating this up to about 400 degrees or so depending on their machine. And it's pushing all the fat, or what we call cacao butter out of the cacao. And then you have the rest of it and it's getting turned into powder. This is done because it makes it easier to have consistent flavor across everything you do. And then, depending on who it is, they might do what's called a Dutch processing. So it's a literal chemical, well, that actually would have happened first. But it's a literal chemical processing of the beans. In order to again, think of it as putting it in a simple way it'd be like think of an acid bath in order to cook out all the stuff that you don't want it to taste like. In order to have a very, very smooth, consistent, very, very dark being most of your cacao is actually pretty red. If you look at it.
Toréa Rodriguez 12:20
Yeah. And so what you're describing is the typical process with what I would consider highly processed cooking, right? So we we teach our clients and from the other podcast episode, that if they look at the back and the ingredients, and they see cocoa butter, cocoa mass, this is what you're talking about, you're talking that pressed out resulting powder and the pressed out cacao.
Jeff Stratman 12:44
Because a cacao bean is nearly 50% fat. So when you go by cacao powder, most of them report out on there, how much fat is left, and you'll see that it's somewhere between 10 to 12%. That is all that's left in it, you might find a higher fat one that's in the 20s. My congratulations, you found a better, better powder. But the fat is one of the biggest drivers between behind you receiving the nutritional density of cacao, especially because in order to get it to that point, they have superheated and pressed this bean. So some would say that you probably lost somewhere between 60 to 90% of the nutritional value of cacao
Toréa Rodriguez 13:32
Bye bye superfood.
Jeff Stratman 13:33
So yeah, you've got a very consistent, very flavorful, easy to use mass. But you lost the vast majority of the benefits. So yeah, now it goes on how they reconstitute it and do all the things. That right there is one of the biggest branches between what we're trying to do and that process. So there still is a roasting process with cacao. And so now we're backing out our back, back and back and back and back to the beans or you've got a sack of beans. And those beans are put into a roaster. There's many different ways people roast. And this is a lot like coffee, where the artistry really starts to come into play. So it's incredibly nerdy people with huge spreadsheets on you know, cook it to this temperature and then rotate it and cook it to this temperature and rotating this stuff out. And it's absolutely beautiful. And roasting profiles are completely different depending on the beam. So the way you roast a Peruvian bean is different than a Bolivian bean, which is different than a Belize bean. And so by doing this, that's where you start to create your spider charts of flavor profiles. So basically, how chocolaty is this? How sweet is this message before you're adding sugar how acidic, how bitter, how nutty, how fruity those kinds of things. And you're examining all of this in order to craft your final product. So we personally are not at the point where we can have a ton of different beans to create the different things like in an ideal situation like on a truffle, you'd have a different beans for the ganache on the inside versus the covered shell, that's the shell on the outside. But after they go through their very nerdy process, the beautiful nerdy process, they crack and went away, which means that basically the husk on the outside of the actual inside, which is where they break those, and that's where your nibs come from. And the nibs like I heard you were talking about your bulletproof cacao, where you're throwing them in a blender, and you're blending those up. That's a great way to make the cacao powder, now you've got a full density for fat powder.
Toréa Rodriguez 15:56
That's right.
Jeff Stratman 15:57
So once we have nibs, we personally are putting these into a stone grinder, and it is sitting there spinning around for approximately an hour situation three days. So we're trying to break this down to the absolute micron level. Because we are focused on that very velvety texture without having to apply a bunch of heat. That's why as illustrating other processes, once you start adding heat, you lose all your nutritional density. I tell everyone, we're doing it the hard way. But there's a reason. So by putting it into the stone grinder, we can regulate the heat of the grinder. So sometimes like when it's in the middle of winter in Bend, we're actually insulating around this in order to make sure it doesn't go too low. Because if you've ever seen 20 plus pounds of chocolate get too low and temperature turns into a giant rock. And that is not a fun day. And again, same thing we're trying to keep it to where it's not going to hire. So how do we ventilate this? How do we keep it just turning out those right? Temperatures at least what we view to be the right temperatures. And then after this is stone ground, it is then poured and we have our base recipes. So we are also trying to focus on softening and sweetening our chocolates with cashews and coconut flakes so that we do not have to rely on sugar. When we do use sugar, which there's plenty of applications where we do we are using coconut sugar, so it's less refined or glycemic index. Coconut itself is very good at helping regulate blood sugar out as it is and cashews have you know if the FDA comes after me for saying all this, believe it or not, there's a lot of health benefits for chocolate, cashews and coconut.
Toréa Rodriguez 17:51
It's all good. I doubt anybody from the FDA listening to this podcast.
Evie Takacs 17:56
Yeah.
Jeff Stratman 17:56
I hope not. It's a really fun process to sit here and mix and match all these things and find ways to provide a delicious treat that doesn't rely on cane sugars, which is the industry standard. And what if you go read a lot of blogs, they will tell you you're supposed to use because cane sugar is what's going to bring forth the right chocolate flavor. And that's the thing that we don't believe in the right chocolate flavor. We believe in an ethical well source pleasure and nourishment flavor. And then from there, it just depends on what we're making. So okay.
Evie Takacs 18:31
That was one of my questions is what are your products that you have? Because I know we're gonna talk a little bit about the ceremonial grade cacao. So I'm curious, what are the products that what can people buy from mythical chocolate?
Jeff Stratman 18:42
Yeah.
Evie Takacs 18:43
Fr1om mythical cacao.
Jeff Stratman 18:44
Yeah, so we're pretty unique. Because we mix more of your dessert chocolates. And we do your ceremonial chocolates, which in my mind are two different things totally. So we do five different bars, which are untempered bars, meaning that you keep them in the refrigerator. We do at this point nine different flavors of truffles. So that's where I was talking about earlier, you have the ganache on the inside that delicious, creamy goodness without hard shell on the outside. And then we also do the ceremonial cookouts, which is a whole different process. We actually do temper those in order to keep them consistent and shelf stable and able to be shipped to people and say in ceremony space without melting and making a huge mess everywhere, which yeah, we'll get tempering and I feel like later but a lot of interesting questions around that.
Toréa Rodriguez 19:38
Actually, I was gonna ask you about tempering because you mentioned it in a ceremonial cacao and I kind of wanted to go back to the Stone grinder. So a lot of the cacao makers I know don't use a stone grinder they use a conching machine. What's the difference between a conching machine and the stone grinder? I mean obviously when it's stone but What's the difference between those two? And then we can get into tempering? Because I don't think we use that term in the first episode and so we can talk about what that is and how that's different from.
Jeff Stratman 20:09
Yeah. So a lot of times when they're conching, that's when you start getting back into that cacao butter, cacao powder conversation, basically, how are you piecing these things back together in such a way where you can form that ideal level of flavor and consistency. So it can be done quicker, because these things are already broken down to a much smaller level, I mean butter, it's It's fat, you can just melt it on your stovetop and dump it into these machines. And then powder is powder. So we're taking actual nibs. So you've got really hard little pieces, and you're putting into this machine. And it's spinning granite stones on top of the granite plate in order to slowly but surely, separate out the different particles that make up a nib so that your fat start releasing. And by doing that it starts turning into a liquid is the best way to put it. So that's where you get this very wet, very thick chocolate paste. Okay, so that's kind of a quick overview of the difference.
Toréa Rodriguez 21:14
And the contour. It's like a spiral right machine, right? It's still grinding the nib. It's just using this mechanical spiral. And usually they're metal. Am I right about that?
Jeff Stratman 21:27
Right? Yeah, nothing against them at all. It's just different processes and different belief systems and.
Toréa Rodriguez 21:33
They also cost like an arm and a leg.
Jeff Stratman 21:36
For the different financial points.
Jeff Stratman 21:38
Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it's not. Once you get into commercial stuff, it's all expensive. But yeah, very different price points.
Toréa Rodriguez 21:49
Yeah. I mean, I've seen some of my friends who are makers, you know, like Steven, who has white label chocolate and his equipment, and when it malfunctions, and, you know, he's got this big ol vat of chocolate cure that he's trying to do something with. And now he can't because, you know, either his broker doesn't work or the contour broke down or something happened. So, yes, because there's not so many craft makers, the equipment is specialized. It's expensive. And so it makes it difficult and challenging as a craft maker to deal with these kinds of things.
Jeff Stratman 22:28
Yeah, like,
Toréa Rodriguez 22:28
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Stratman 22:30
That's why you start building in redundancy when you can, because it's not something you just like, we're fortunate enough with our stone grinder. And I'm handy enough to where truthfully, a lot of this stuff, I am running down to the hardware store and finding new pieces, and you're essentially rebuilding your equipment on your own. Otherwise, you're waiting a long time for somebody to manufacture a brand new one.
Toréa Rodriguez 22:51
I don't know, a craft maker who isn't running to the hardware store and dealing with this kind of
Jeff Stratman 22:55
Oh, yeah, you get it. The chocolate is one thing, but the machinery is a whole nother thing of how you get crafty,
Evie Takacs 23:03
I'm sure.
Jeff Stratman 23:04
And it at first, it's very stressful. But then you realize, like, this is all just part of the fun. Like, sometimes I joke that chocolates, a brat and this is why like, between the chocolate itself and the machines, like there's just so many different finicky things. And it's it's a fun little dance you get to walk into every day.
Evie Takacs 23:23
Nice. I'm curious if we could go into a little bit of what is because I've heard about ceremonial cacao. What does that mean? What does that encompass? And I know you said it's different than the products like the bars that you're selling. So if we could get into that, I think that'd be really great.
Jeff Stratman 23:39
Yeah, so this is a highly contested question. A lot of people will tell you that there is no such thing as ceremonial cacao. And that people are just using fancy buzzwords to sell you something. And I understand where that sentiment comes from. And I'm not going to disagree with the root issue. What I disagree with is that for us, it's all about creating ritual. And then once you create ritual, beginning to develop reverence, and then once you have reverence, being able to share this with others. So traditionally, in Mesoamerican cultures, there was deities associated with cacao typically viewed as feminine, but there was also a masculine as well. So when you sit down and really develop some reverence for this, you can I should say, I'll stay in high statements. I have felt the spirit of cacao and I'm luckily enough to know enough people who have touched the spirit of cacao and had some truly prolific experiences. So ceremonial cacao in our world is made totally different. So we're not putting all the other things in. We're staying with just cacao primarily. We do use a little bit of cacao butter, I put it on our labels because that's how we keep The stones, lovers, Alexa is one of them.
Toréa Rodriguez 25:03
Yeah. For anybody who's watching the video right now I've got a box of their ceremonial cacao. And I love this one because it's, it's very, very simple. So if I look at the ingredients, gonna put you on the spot, Jeff, direct trade cacao nibs, cacao butter, cocoa butter, however you want to pronounce it and coconut sugar. That's it. That's all that's in here. And these are amazing.
Jeff Stratman 25:27
Yeah, I mean, the butter is to keep the stones from just grinding dry stones on dry stones. So it's not meant to do anything more than that, we can just dump nibs in there. But like I said, it's an old cantankerous machine. So we're trying to keep it healthy. So we do use tiny amount of that. But everything is put into that machine from absolute reverence and appreciation. And we're literally praying over I have two little girls, a four and a two year old who come in and before the nibs are dumped into the stone grinder, they literally giving them well wishes, telling them to enjoy their journey. And we'll see you on the other side. And then as we pour it out of the machine, same thing, we're talking to them and thanking them before the taken over and we temper our ceremonial cacao so that you can just have a sit in there, wherever you are. So.
Toréa Rodriguez 26:28
What is what does that mean to temper
Jeff Stratman 26:31
So tempering is another one that's debated in the ceremonial realm has some say that you should not we do it. So tempering is a process where you warm the cacao, the core up to a point, and then you cool it down, and you bring it to what's known as a delta. And when you're doing this, where you're doing as you're realigning the molecular structure of the cacao butter, so the fats in there. So you're aligning all of these fats in such a way that they create crystals so that they interlock with one another and they're able to hold themselves in place. So untampered chocolate doesn't have these Crystaline locks inside of them. So that's why it's 70 degrees or so you'll start to notice that if you just have a piece of chocolate sitting there, and it's untempered if it hasn't gone through this process, it wants us to turn into a puddle, but it just gets droopy and soft, and eventually, as you start inching up in temperatures above that it is going to turn into a puddle.
Toréa Rodriguez 27:37
Hey, thanks for joining us for this episode of the Wildly Optimized Wellness podcast. If you’re ready to dig deeper into your health, stop playing the Whack-a-Symptom game, start testing to get better guidance, you can find more about Toréa at torearodriguez.com and you can find Evie at holisticallyrestored.com. Want a peek into what it’s like to work with us? Come join us at our Optimized Wellness Community. You can find the invitation link in the show notes below. And if you have a question for the show, you can submit your question under the podcast section of torearodriguez.com. Finally, if you found something helpful in this episode, don’t forget to leave a review, hit that follow button or share it with a friend. They’re gonna love that you thought of them. Until next time, see you outside!
