is the best chocolate in the world, so Claudio Corallo, 35 plantations, exit the forest of a Prince extraordinary product
Sao Tome - The most amazing chocolate in the world has an Italian name and address exotic: it produces Claudio Corallo, a Florentine '51 class, the smallest of the African states: the tiny island of Principe - 128 square kilometers, 13 miles of dirt roads - in the Gulf of Guinea. A life Indiana Jones (left Zaire for 23 years, specializing in tropical agronomy in his pocket for a cooperation project which was soon found not to share the speculative logic) together with the meticulous care of what we grow, make him a special person. The adventure "business" began in 1979 with the purchase and renovation of two coffee plantations, abandoned, in Zaire, in the heart of the rainforest, hundreds of miles away from Kinshasa, where the first civil center may be considered sell something. He works hard and the fruits of his labor come: in the late eighties, Coral employs a thousand people and its coffee is served in the historic Florian in Venice. A few years later, civil war forced him to abandon the Country. Fighting, looting, escape from the plantation: 1,650 miles in canoe on rivers, together with the Portuguese wife, Bettina, and three children.
COCOA BRAZIL - moving into the smaller of the two volcanic islands that make up the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe, independent since 1975, after four centuries of Portuguese rule. A small chain of uninhabited until the arrival of settlers, in 1470, when it becomes the basis for the trafficking of slaves from different African countries. On the islands, the first crop is introduced by the Portuguese sugar cane. In 1800, coffee and come from Brazil, cocoa, which is a favorable ground so as to become in short, the primary source of income. But the "islands of chocolate" demanding the independence and freedom. When you get it, and passed just 35 years, not make it a driving force for growth. Political mismanagement and lack of initiative make this paradise still largely untapped potential at the equator, a country in a state of misery, full of the gifts of mother nature, but where fishing canoes carved into the trunks of wood, Women wash clothes in rivers and spread them on the road to dry. There's drainage system, most of the houses to piles of wood and corrugated iron, has no running water. Exempt public water fountains in the main roads, electrical power is insufficient. He, however, volcanoes and white sand beaches, turquoise waters and green palm trees, colorful birds, with species endemic to tens, fruits, flowers, perfumes.
family business - In this place, hard and idyllic Claudio Corallo start a family that does not fear competition from multinationals. At first built a wooden house on a beach in the area east of the island and began to work in the jungle that stretches to the water. It opens the way with machetes, is the old coffee plants that reproduce naturally in the vegetation that grows unchecked: a plantation stifled, where under his care back to blow the air of the ocean, that cleans and nourishes the trees thinned and properly selected. Given the progress and the ability of the stranger, the regional authority shall propose the purchase of an abandoned plantation on the hill above: Terreiro Velho, an ancient "husky" of the nineteenth century, with an elegant colonial-style covers from 'up the forest and the sea.
SELECTED FROM MONKEYS - Terreiro Velho turns in his masterpiece: Coral found, scattered in the forest that had covered all the cocoa trees of the same strain as those imported in 1822 and incredibly selected from monkeys usually choose the more mature capsules best to take the seeds, suck the mucilage that covers them and then spit on the ground where they sprout and give rise to new plants. The secret of its success lies in the nobility of that cocoa, but also in the care of the production process, which follows a meticulously from "bonsai". The key issues are the shortest distance between a plant and the other (five or six feet of space), the use of plants high security to avoid pesticides, the only manual work, the fermentation performed with continuous temperature monitoring. The roasting machine was built ad hoc. Sixty people work - by hand - only for the sorting and shelling of cocoa. 150 people are employed in various capacities in the process that turns cocoa beans in the purest form of chocolate, free of flavorings, vanilla sugar cane, used by other chocolate makers to refine the final product or to cover defects.
A HISTORY OF EXCELLENCE - The range that comes out of his small store located on the main island, Sao Tome, where cocoa is brought to the final stage of processing, is extensive. They range from a 100% cocoa chocolate to one that contains a rare specialty, the only distilled the world removed from the pulp of cacao. From 73% with cocoa nib, chocolate with delicate ginger and orange peel, all '80% sable, for coffee beans covered with chocolate, filled with tablets of dried apricots Vesuvius. Claudio Corallo today is that of a small Italian history of excellence, but in Italy has almost no echo.
And this is perhaps the only aspect of a bitter story which boils down to a turnover of € 300 thousand per year for a niche market, divided between Europe and the United States, where commercial relations to deal with small shops, rated organic products are always and only the father's family and children. Meanwhile, major magazines and the international press bestow the rave reviews and at fairs and presentations that follows the indefatigable Coral in the world, its product collects awards.
article from www.corriere.it
image taken from www.claudiocorallo.com
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