Organic Guajillo Chilies from Dartmouth

June 3, 2009

Local farming celebrity Eva Sommaripa has been growing guajillo chilies from seed on her small farm in Dartmouth, Massachussetts for Taza. When they're ready, they'll be dried, pulverized, and mixed with sugar and cacao to make our Guajillo Chili Chocolate Mexicano. But that's not even the best part.
Taza Chocolate generates practically no waste in the production of our chocolate bars. This may be hard to believe, but it's true. Any bars that don't turn out just right are melted and reformed. All of our ingredients are used whole, and nothing is discarded. Anything that doesn't meet our quality standards is recycled or added to mulch mix.
And when we roast and winnow cacao, the shell is separated from the nib which is used to make chocolate. What do we do with the shells? Sometimes they are purchased by tea blenders to make a cocoa-flavored tea, other times they're used by brewers to make a chocolate beer, and occasionally we donate them to local community gardens to use as mulch.
But perhaps the most interesting way to repurpose the shells and fines from our production is giving them to Eva Sommaripa. Eva is famous among Boston chefs for her superior herbs and flowers. She's an intense, enthusiastic woman in her mid-sixties, still farming every day and growing delicious organic produce. Eva uses the cacao shells - widely considered some of the best ground cover there is - as fertilizer for the Guajillo Chilies she's growing for us. Once the chilies are ready, we'll have them dried and ground up, and then use them in our chocolate bars. It's a beautiful thing, a perfect circle of local, sustainably produced food.
Read more about Eva Sommaripa in Edible Boston and the Boston Globe.