Life, Liberty, and Fine Chocolate

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The trees give him a small, high-quality crop that is sold only in Portugal. Cocoa is what makes the money.

On the plantation on neighboring Príncipe, Corallo’s workers cut the ripe, melon-shaped cocoa pods from the trees using machetes and crack them open with sticks to extract the beans. Nearby small-scale farmers who share his farming philosophy sell him their cocoa, as he pays much more than brokers in São Tomé.

Convention suggests that forastero beans should be fermented—a process that gives them their chocolate taste—for about six days. Corallo’s own trials suggested that six days was not enough; instead, he ferments his beans for well over two weeks.

The traditional way to dry the beans after fermentation is to lay them in the sun. Corallo spreads the beans over a platform of heated clay tiles or places them in a huge aerated cylinder that a friend built for him in Italy.

Once the beans are dried, they are packed aboard an old fishing trawler for the six-hour journey to São Tomé. They are then transported to Nova Moca for cleaning and sorting, roasted in Corallo’s factory at his beachfront house, and returned to the coffee plantation.

Under a covered platform, with the ocean shimmering in the distance, stood several long wooden tables. Thirty men and women, all wearing white overcoats, hairnets, and face masks, sat with a pile of cocoa beans in front of each of them.

Carefully they stripped each bean of its outer shell and discarded the tiny, acrid germ, leaving just the cocoa nibs. This process, winnowing, is usually done by machine, but Corallo believes that the quality of the chocolate suffers as a result. At peak times there are 60 people on shelling duty, each earning what is, by local standards, a decent wage.

From Nova Moca, the nibs are returned to the four-room factory in Corallo’s backyard, where workers use fans to blow away any residual dust clinging to the nibs. The nibs are then ground by machine into cocoa liquor. After a few other refinements—some of them secret—the cocoa is ready to be turned into chocolate.

Later the same day, I visited the factory, following the aroma of dark chocolate from the driveway. Workers were scurrying around with trays of chocolate ready for cutting and packaging. Corallo, meanwhile, was eating—and drinking—into his profits. He had already guzzled “about 30” samples of his newest creation: chocolate balls featuring a core of two grams of ginger inside a layer of 100 percent cocoa.

He had also taken several sips of his prized alcohol, a chest-warming drink with a rich, fruity aftertaste. It is made from the sticky white pulp that surrounds the cocoa beans inside the pod and that is discarded by most farmers. As with his coffee, the yield is tiny—one liter for every ton of beans—making commercial production impossible. Instead, he soaks raisins in the alcohol before hiding them inside fat, 50-gram chunks of dark chocolate. It is easily his best-selling product.

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