Est. 2016, Lisbon workshop
Bean to bar, single origin
We buy whole cacao pods from four growing regions, crack and winnow them ourselves, and conch every batch for seventy two hours before it ever touches a mould. Nothing pre made arrives at our door.
4origins in rotation
72hminimum conche time
38kglargest single batch
0soy lecithin, ever
The process
From pod to bar
in five true steps
Most chocolate on a shelf started life as an anonymous industrial couverture. Ours starts as a pod we can trace to a single farm gate. Here is what actually happens between the two.
01
Origin
Pods arrive from three farms we visit every season: a wet leaf forest plot in Chuao, Venezuela, a hillside block in the Sambirano Valley, Madagascar, and a smallholder cooperative in the Toledo District of Belize. We buy the whole pod, not sorted beans, so we control fermentation from hour one.
02
Roast
Beans ferment under banana leaves for six days, sun dry for ten, then roast in small twelve kilogram drums at a temperature we tune per origin. Chuao takes a lighter hand, Toledo can take more heat before the fruit notes flatten out.
03
Conch
Winnowed nibs go into a granite melangeur for forty eight hours, then a longitudinal conche for another twenty four. This is where the bitterness rounds off and the texture drops from gritty to something closer to warm silk on the tongue.
04
Temper
We heat to 45 degrees, cool to 27 on a marble slab, then bring it back to 31 for the final pour. Get any of those three numbers wrong and the bar blooms grey within a week. Every batch is tempered by hand, never by machine.
05
Bar
Poured into steel moulds, snapped once set, wrapped in wax paper by hand at the bench, and boxed the same afternoon. From pod to wrapped bar the whole cycle runs eighteen to twenty two days, depending on the origin.
How to taste
Snap, smell,
let it melt
-
1
Snap
A good tempered bar breaks with a clean, sharp sound, not a dull crumble. Listen for it before you taste anything.
-
2
Smell
Hold a piece two centimetres from your nose for ten seconds. Origin comes through here first, fruit, wood, or spice, long before it hits your tongue.
-
3
Melt
Place it on your tongue and let it warm to body temperature without chewing. The flavour unfolds in three stages: opening, mid palate, finish.
-
4
Pair
Chuao 72 with an aged rum. Sambirano 64 with a dry cider. Toledo 80 with black coffee, nothing else, it does not need help.
The maker
Started in a rented
kitchen, 2016
Cacao Noir began as two people, a secondhand melangeur, and a rented commercial kitchen in the Alfama district of Lisbon. Ines Roldao had spent four years buying green coffee for a roastery and kept asking why nobody treated cacao the same way. Tomas Bekker had trained as a pastry chef in Antwerp and was tired of unwrapping industrial couverture from a box.
The first batch, a rough seventy percent from beans bought off a market stall in Chuao, sold out at a Saturday market in nine minutes. Nine years later we work with the same three growers, plus one new cooperative in Belize, and we still crack every pod by hand at the bench in the back of the shop.
Ines Roldao and Tomas Bekker
Founders, Cacao Noir
Visit the atelier
Rua de Sao
Miguel, 24
The workshop and shop front sit in the same room. You can watch the conche running most weekday afternoons and buy directly from the counter.
- Address
- Rua de Sao Miguel 24, 1100 Lisbon
- Hours
- Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00 to 19:00
- Tastings
- Saturdays at 11:00, walk in, no booking needed
- Tours
- Wednesdays at 15:00, groups of six or fewer
Also carried at
- Mercado da RibeiraLisbon
- Comptoir CacaoParis, 11th
- Nordisk ChokladCopenhagen
- The Cocoa RoomLondon, Borough Market
- Casa do CacauPorto
