The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Heaven scent in Aztec country
From Mexico City to Oaxaca, Sue Quinn indulges in the flavours and aromas of chocolate
If a nation’s cuisine is the key to its heart, then chocolate is the portal to Mexico’s soul. Almost 4,000 years ago its indigenous tribes were among the first in the world to cultivate cacao and turn the bitter beans into delicious things to eat and drink. There’s good reason why a chocolate bar in the 1970s was named Aztec.
Others of course followed suit, and rival cacao-producing countries in Central and South America have taken the limelight over the past 20 years, supplying quality beans for the world’s booming artisan chocolate market.
Now, Mexico is seeking to reclaim its gastronomical gift to the world, with its cacao producers striving to prove their beans are up there with the best, and a new generation of chocolatiers joining the craft/gourmet chocolate revolution (a bar of Montezuma’s Sea Dog with dark chocolate sea salt and lime anyone?)
Today, there’s no better way to explore the country than to follow the scent of chocolate. My own sweet voyage of discovery leads me to Hacienda Cacaotera Jesús María, a lush cacao plantation and chocolate factory in Tabasco, in Mexico’s south-east.
The charming “cacao ambassador”, Florencio Sánchez Rodriguez, who guides visitors around the plantation, explains the process of making chocolate from “tree to bar”. He urges me to taste the tangy white pulp that envelops the beans nestling inside the pods, then escorts me deep into the jungle where shade-loving cacao flourishes under a canopy of banana, mango and rubber trees. Like most chocoholics, I’ve never seen the raw ingredients before, and the alien-like pods that grow directly out of the tree trunks are a revelation. “The trees are like humans, they need love,” Florencio says, cradling a burnished cacao pod in his hands.
Jesús María is one of a cluster of beautiful, colonial-style cacao plantations, or haciendas, near Comalcalco (a town about 35 miles from Tabasco’s capital Villahermosa) that are proudly opening their doors to the public to boost domestic and international interest in Mexican chocolate. Over the past decade, Mexican cacao production has fallen by 50 per cent, in part due to old and diseased cacao trees and farmers clearing their plantations to make way for palm oil, maize and livestock. As a result, the cradle of chocolate has been importing much of its cacao from Africa and mostly processing it to make drinks.
But there are signs of a chocolate renaissance in Mexico. Jesús María is working hard to preserve and rescue ancient strains of the prized criollo variety of bean, and turning them into bars of eating chocolate. And nearby Hacienda La Luz, an exquisite plantation with fragrant gardens and a beautifully tiled courtyard in the main building, is winning international awards for its highquality chocolate bars and bombóns.
Tour operators and hotels in Villahermosa organise visits to the plantations, but roads are now signposted to make Tabasco’s “cacao trail” easy to explore independently by car. It’s a lovely option. The journey might be a little bumpy but the landscape is a picture; the roads are flanked by trees flowering scarlet, pink and yellow, and dotted with stalls selling tropical fruit and pozol, the state’s ubiquitous cacao drink.
Tabasco is heaven for food lovers. Cocina Chontal is a delightful wooden cabin in the jungle serving authentic dishes cooked over fire in an open Calle Milán 45, Juárez, 06600 Ciudad de México,
Mexico City kitchen. Founder Nelly Cordova Morillo is determined to preserve authentic Tabasco cuisine, and makes chocolate from scratch – grinding the beans herself – to enrich her excellent mole sauces. In Comalcalco, a town untroubled by tourism, Restaurant de Yuli also serves tasty local specialities, including chocolate-spiked mole sauces and desserts. And with a car you can include the ancient Mayan archaeological site, located a mile or so from Comalcalco, in your itinerary.
Next stop on my chocolate mission is the city of Oaxaca, capital of the state of the same name. Cacao isn’t grown here, but its location on an ancient