The Terra Madre Festival in Turin, Italy

We are in it for the journey (both inner and outer) and cacao has inspired all kind sof adventures for us as chocolate makers and as a family. I was six months pregnant when on eof our adventures led us to Turin, Italy. We ate everything we came across and A LOT of it was chocolate and some of that chocolate was made with cacao grown in Mexico.

As an art student living in Italy, I ate a lot of gelato. It surprised me how much like food it tasted. It sounds strange but gelato taught me how distorted my understanding of sweetness had been by the highly processed suburban desserts I had grown up eating. Gelato was sweet, but it was also made with whole food ingredients and there was a difference I could taste. While we were in Turin we ate a lot of gelato, in the streets cruising around managing the drips. The Piedmont region has an affinity for hazelnuts and they are incorporated in many of the traditional sweets, including gelato (pictured)

In 1559 Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, was the first to introduce chocolate to Italy and is said to have 'served the city a cup of hot chocolate'. The Duke of Savoy had been serving as a general in the Spanish army where he first tasted chocolate. Spain was extracting all kinds of raw materials and ingredients via their colonial invasion of the territories we now call the Americas and cacao was one of them. The first official business license issued to produce chocolate in Italy was in 1678, in Turin.

The organizing factor for our trip to Turin, Italy - besides eating and eating and eating while six months pregnant - was to attend a variety of seminars and workshops. Slow Foods is an organization that began more than 30 years ago in Italy in response to a fast food restaurant's proposal to open near the iconic 'Spanish Steps' in Rome. One of the events we attended was a tasting of artesanal prosciutti paired with regional sparkling wines. The producers spoke about their process, their craft and vision for their products in a world dominated by industrial ag and production methods taking more and more shortcuts on their way to profit. As chocolate makers as well as eaters it was inspiring to listen as makers from across the planet found commonality in the pleasure of both making and eating food with care and intention.

Terra Madre, the event organized by Slow Food over the course of several days, took over the downtown area of Turin Italy. There were workshops in historical buildings and seminars al aire libre, there were musical events and educational tours. There was also street food, in cleverly designed food trucks of all kinds. As a family of chocolate makers with a truck ourselves ( check out highlights above for the build...) it was so fun to taste food coming out of other trucks.

While in Turin, Italy for Terra Madre workshops we had the opportunity to tour a chocolate manufacture working with cacao from what is now Chontalpa, Mexico. It was all the way across the Atlantic Ocean that we began our sourcing journey with cacao from this special region of our Motherland. To drink chocolate is the original format of enjoying cacao. Italians in Turin have developed a taste for chocolate with a thick cream or with freshly brewed coffee -another ingredient that has traveled the long and violent road of colonial commodities, but that is a story for another time.