Looking for Cuba’s lost agriculture

It said that according to the National Livestock Control Center in the country “there is a deficit of over 59 000 animals” needed for animal traction in the fields. I felt infuriated.

They were not talking about tractors, or water systems, or even greenhouses, crop dusting planes or dairy machinery, but about oxen to plow the land and pull the wagons and carts. So where is agriculture in Cuba?

If the process of urbanization has increased dramatically worldwide in the last half century as a natural consequence of progress, it has intensified even more in Cuba due to the lack of economic stimulus engendered by socialist collectivism and the improper use of agricultural land and its harvests.

The fact that Granma should still be discussing these days how far a peasant can be considered to be the owner of his own cattle and crops, is downright embarrassing.

This country used to boast of being one of the biggest sugar cane producers in the world; at the end of the 80s sugar cane was actually Cuba’s main source of income.

In 2003-2004 the majority of Cuba’s sugar mills were dismantled, not having been modernized in decades, ushering in the final chapter in the history of the sugar cane industry on the island.

Now they want to breathe life back into the heroine so the saga can continue uninterrupted.

Tobacco lives off the prestige it acquired during the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. It has remained a cultural icon for the tourist magazines, and a luxury item that brings in juicy returns at the Feria del Habano Cigar auctions which brings in millions.

Coffee has had a less glorious fate: it is sold only in the hard currency stores, and mixed half with chicory in the local shops it hardly merits the name of coffee. Chocolate is a fiction encountered more often in ice cream.

Nobody talks about citrus exports any more. Tangerines for sale are on the street are conspicuous by their absence even though they are in season. Fruits and vegetables are eaten in season, since there are not refrigerated storage facilities they cannot be sold all year round.

And it’s easier to eat an imported apple than a guanabana.

With the marabou scrub brush sprouting in the fields and farmers migrating to the cities, some people in the urban centers cultivate their own little organic vegetable plots and there are the intensive “organoponico” urban farms.

But who said that by making a vegetable plot out of the garden or turning the terrace of the house into a pigsty (bath included) you were developing the national economy, or providing families with a sure fire way of feeding themselves?

Is it all being done in the name of ecology, to avoid petrol consumption in the transportation? Our cities need parks, not illusory gardens of Eden.

The land needs to be repopulated by its owners, and by workers interested in ecological, diversified production.

The State should provide incentives to help small producers run their farms properly and ensure they develop along ecologically sustainable lines.

That way we could reduce the food imports which account for over half the food we consume in this country. The effort being made in rice production is a good example we could multiply.

Marine chocolate shop earns coveted award at contest

The chocolate shop nestled in Marine On St. Croix recently competed in the 17th Annual Taste of Chocolate Competition and Benefit - and won one of the two coveted awards.

Eleven chocolatiers from around the state competed for "The Best Chocolate Dessert" and "The Best Chocolate Confection" during the competition. The winning dessert and confection were selected based on taste, texture, use of chocolate and creativity in presentation.

This was the first time St. Croix Chocolate Co. competed in any competition, but it won the award for "Best Chocolate Confection" for its array of five chocolates, including Raspberry, Sea Salt Caramel, Vanilla Bean, Cherry and Dark Chocolate and Lemon'Spresso. The chocolates were neatly arranged on a narrow plate, hinting at flower-like form.

"I was nervous when the judges came in, but several of my staff watched them taste our chocolates," said co-owner Robyn Dochterman. "I remember them saying they really liked the Lemon'Spresso and they thought the plate as a whole was very, very strong."

Still, Dochterman had no idea they were in the running to take home one of the two awards.

Dochterman and her co-owner Deidre Pope started St. Croix Chocolate Co. two years ago and have slowly been building momentum for the business. Pope manages the business while Dochterman handles the chocolates made from local ingredients, including organic cream and butter, maple syrup and honey from Dochterman's own backyard bee colonies.

The duo entered the contest late after a competition organizer contacted St. Croix Chocolate Co. about entering the competition. Dochterman, who makes the chocolates at St. Croix Chocolate, wasn't sure what the judges would be looking for so she decided to feature five of the shop's best chocolates. It turns out that did the trick.

Dochterman was making her way toward the podium to listen to the judges announce the two winners when one of her staff members informed her that St. Croix Chocolate had received the "Best Chocolate Confection" award.

"I was delighted," Dochterman said. "This is just a really nice shot in the arm to lift us up even more. It's always nice when someone acknowledges good work."

With the competition behind them, now St. Croix Chocolate is focusing on a new venture. Dochterman is working on introducing the shop's first chocolate bar made from free trade and organic chocolate. She teamed up with a local artist who created a clay tile that Dochterman used to mold the chocolate's form. From there she found a company to create chocolate boxes that could be reused to hold your jewelry or concert ticket stubs.

"It's a very neat project that brings together lots of different people," Dochterman said.

To help the project take flight, St. Croix Chocolate is working through KickStarter, a funding platform for creative projects. St. Croix Chocolate has until April 3 to raise $5,730 for the chocolate bar's production and packaging. If St. Croix Chocolate meets the funding goal by April 3, the project will move forward, but if it doesn't raise the full amount then St. Croix gets nothing. Plus, if people pledge a certain dollar amount they receive different chocolate rewards.

Bean crazy

An IT specialist who works full time in the public service, Marshall transforms in the evening to a kind of neighbourhood Willy Wonka whose infectious enthusiasm for all things ice cream has taken him to weird and wonderful gastronomic places. His ambition has long been nothing less than creating the best ice cream in the world, and his experiments in his suburban basement have resulted in ice-cream flavours like tzatziki, blue cheese, mandarin and carrot, and truffle. Now, his pursuit of the perfect ice cream has taken him one step further. Or two. Perhaps more. All the way back to raw cocoa beans.

Marshall has attended chocolate workshops at the Savour school in Melbourne for many years, where he learned to work with and temper fine chocolate. But he is no longer satisfied with working with other people's product.

''My mind got the better of me again, and I wanted to know more about chocolate,'' he says. ''I wanted to know what real chocolate tastes like, with minimal processing.''

Wanting to know more means different things to different people. And for Marshall, it means more than to most. When he was working on the perfect vanilla ice cream, he spent hours developing his own vanilla extract.


Internet searches turned up American websites filled with advice for micro-chocolatiers, including where to find smallscale equipment, on which he spent about $2000. He sourced cocoa beans grown by an organic and fair trade cocoa farm collective in the Dominican Republic called La Red from an American wholesaler he found online. He says they were cost-effective when compared to Australian stores, and importing the beans was just a matter of filling in a customs form.

His eyes light up as he runs his hands through the beans he has brought out to show me; he is clearly delighted with them.

First, he browns them in a roaster no bigger than a standard microwave. The process is not dissimilar to roasting a coffee bean - which Marshall also does,

for his own use - but it generally takes less time, as they only need to be cooked until the ''first crack''.

After the beans are roasted. Marshall removes their shells. Most chocolatiers and factories use a winnowing machine for this step, but no smallscale models are on the market. An American micro-chocolatier named Clay, whom Marshall met online, is drawing up a design for a small winnowing machine and he will share it with him in the next three or four months, free of charge. Marshall says fellow ''chocolate nut cases'', as he calls them, have formed a bit of an online community where they exchange information and advice.

''There are a lot of people who are really into chocolate who are really happy to share,'' he says.

Although he will have a design to work with, Marshall plans to build his winnowing machine himself. He is pretty handy and could confidently pull a computer apart and put it back together, but this still seems like a lot of work. Not so, according to Marshall, it's just a matter of picking up a few bits and pieces from Bunnings, plus an industrial vacuum. It should all only cost a few hundred dollars. Besides, it would be a worthy investment of his time, considering he currently peels all of his beans by hand.

''After the first two to three kilos, you do think, 'why am I doing this?'' he says. ''Then you taste the chocolate and you think, 'that's why.'''

Still, it is the winnowing process that has proved most difficult for Marshall and he rates it as the stage most likely to put others off trying their hand at chocolate making. He admits that sometimes his patience does fray, and muses that perhaps one day a collective could form to share winnowing machines. But this time-consuming step makes everything that comes after it look relatively straightforward.

Next is the conching stage, where the beans are crushed. After roasting, the beans have become delicate and give way between the fingers quite easily, and Marshall has a small grinding machine to do the job. He grinds and refines them into cocoa, and that is when it gets really exciting.

Sitting on a bench in the middle of the room is a swirling tub of warm chocolate. The recipe Marshall is using today requires 72 per cent cocoa, cocoa butter and sugar. He relishes letting me try some, before it goes to making his chocolate gelato and ice cream, or sometimes delicate handmade chocolates for clients.

Even Marshall admits this exhaustive bean-to-cocoa process may be a step beyond what's strictly necessary for ice cream. In fact, he goes so far as to say he may be the first outfit in the world to create chocolate from scratch simply for ice cream. Which surprises him.

He says chocolate making is often seen as a dark art, far too difficult for an amateur to attempt. But, ''It's one of those things that if you've got the time and a little bit of money to invest … it's worth giving it a crack.''

He explains that for connoisseurs, good chocolate is like fine wine. Flavour depends not just on the technique used in the chocolate's creation, but on the taste of the cocoa beans themselves, as each crop yields slightly different results, as climate, type of tree and where they are grown all makes a difference.

While Marshall is keen to pay respect to the skill required to create the standardised flavour favoured by mass-produced brands - ''people with PhDs oversee things'' - boutique producers like him prefer to embrace the natural flavour of the beans.

''What the small guys try to do is make a chocolate that reflects what those cocoa beans were, they don't try to make them into a common flavour,'' he says.

So far, he's experimented only with the Dominican Republic batch, but Marshall has asked his American wholesaler to send him a different type of cocoa beans every eight weeks, so he can demonstrate to his clients the great variety of flavour that is available.

His favourite chocolate is from multi-award-winning Italian company Amedei, a grungy dark chocolate that is 75 per cent cocoa.

''It's just gorgeous,'' he says. ''I like dark chocolate that's not just bitter, but has lots of notes to it.''

Marshall hopes to emulate Amedei's respect for the true flavours of the beans and to create beautiful, intricate dark chocolate.

Words like ''creamy'' or ''delicious'' really no longer cut it when good chocolate can have notes of blackberry or coffee. As with anything, it would probably take some time to develop the palate and language to identify these intricacies, but when Marshall lets me try several batches of chocolate from a high end brand, I can certainly taste that each one is quite different. Marshall says it is important to match the notes in chocolate to the dessert when cooking, and when he makes French-style pastries and ice-cream cakes on request, he makes sure to use the chocolate most appropriate to his creation.

''But there are some people around who don't care about the notes, it's chocolate and that's good, and that's fine as well,'' he laughs.

Marshall says he has always liked chocolate, but is rarely tempted to gorge on the stash in his basement. I get the feeling his love is far more all-encompassing than your average sweet tooth. He is positively reverential towards those producers who are considered the best in the world, but is equally enthusiastic about chocolate in all its forms. He knows that chocolate makes people happy.

His own chocolate is rich and full of warm flavour, it bears a resemblance to standard supermarket brands, but it is bigger somehow, and more complex. It tastes earthy and close to the cocoa bean.

Marshall thinks he has made a good start, but the perfectionist in him means there is still plenty more to be done. He will keep working on his chocolate, but he's also already turning his mind to the next challenge.

He wants to apply the same extreme approach to perfecting his fruit-flavoured ice creams and sorbets. He is concerned that some of the intense flavours of his market bought berries and fruit are being lost as he turns them into ice cream.

''What I need to do is look more into making the ultimate puree paste,'' he says.

This will involve buying a rotary evaporator and that will cost several thousand dollars, so it is on hold for the moment while Marshall saves some money.

I suspect this is a journey without an end, as Marshall seems to be having far too much fun with the process. He will keep experimenting with chocolate and once he puts his winnowing machine together, it will all be a little less labourious. He says that while he loves his day job, he dreams of opening a small ice-cream, cake and chocolate cafe after he retires.

The Prodigal Daughter Returns (Or How Candy Bars Came Back Into My Life)

Collage of Chocolate BarkI had a strict ritual while living in Washington, DC. At 2 pm every day, I used my lunch break to work out in the gym in my office building. After a good run on the treadmill and some strength training, I’d head into the small convenience store on the first floor of the building and treat myself to either a bag of M & Ms or a Twix or a Kit Kat. I figured I had earned it because of the calories I’d torched at the gym.

Then I swore off of refined sugar. And other funky ingredients. It took a while to retrain my brain, but I did it by packing a healthy post-workout snack. Eventually the sight of rows and rows of colorfully-wrapped candy bars completely lost their allure. I was immune to the check-out lane assault on my sweet senses.

It seemed that chocolate bars were a thing of my past until I ran across a recipe for making my own – not in the complicated confectioner’s kind of making chocolate candies (tempering? no thanks!), but in the simple melt-some-good-chocolate and stir-in-delicious-fruits-and-nuts way. I justified my return to chocolate bars by using grain-sweetened, vegan chocolate. I don’t eat this every day (besides, my workouts are at 6 am now – too early even for me to indulge in chocolate), but when I do partake, I don’t feel guilty at all.

The beauty of this recipe is that you can stir in whatever you love: puffed rice cereal, chopped peanuts, pecans or walnuts or hazelnuts, pretzels, raisins…I make two varieties at once – so the total amount of chocolate (12 oz.) goes into the double boiler together and then I divide the melted chocolate.

How to Make Basic Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate chip cookies are easy to make, even for beginner bakers. This basic recipe breaks down how to make chocolate chip cookies into eleven easy to follow steps. Required ingredients and equipment are listed as well as the steps of preparation and baking. Follow this recipe to make tender, delicious chocolate chip cookies.

Chocolate chip cookies are a classic treat that put smiles on faces of adults and children alike. This delicious baked good is a basic recipe that even the most inexperienced baker can produce easily. Beginner bakers can use simple recipes like this to help grow confidence in their baking ability.

The addition of cinnamon and nutmeg to this recipe help to maginify the flavor of the chocolate. These flavor boosting ingredients are optional but highly reccomended.