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A chocolate bar with a green leaf inside.
Courtesy Casa Bosques

Has Casa Bosques Created the Most Incredible Chocolate Bar Ever?

Aileen Kwun

November 30, 2019
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Rafael Prieto, creative director of the New York City– and Mexico City–based studio Savvy, and the founder of Casa Bosques and Casa Bosques Chocolates, tells us about hoja santa, the special aromatic herb found in his latest concoction.

You’ve been making chocolate for nine years now. How did you start?

I love chocolate. I was traveling in Europe, tasting and trying different chocolates, and it was interesting because Belgian chocolate, for example, is called Belgian chocolate, but the cacao comes from other countries. So I got curious about this traveling line of cacao. Later, when I was back [in Mexico], designing a restaurant, I randomly met and started talking with a pastry chef, asking, “Where do you get the chocolate for this cake?” The conversation went on, and then it just clicked in my mind that I wanted to make chocolate. We got our first beans in Mexico, and from there it has been an exploration of different flavors.

Tell us about your latest ingredient, the hoja santa leaf. Where does it come from, and how does it taste?

I discovered hoja santa a bit late, because I’m from the north [of Mexico], and hoja santa is from the south—Mexican cuisine is very regional. I think I was 17 when I had my first one. It has this almost anise taste to it, but at the same time it’s bitter. Hoja santa is very important in Mexican cuisine, but it’s always one hundred percent in savory dishes, in moles, teas, all sorts. It has a lot of spiritual and healing connotations, and represents a lot about our connection to the cosmos, ancient folk knowledge about energy. It is used for general well-being, a way to detoxify, protect your immune system. (And, in theory, it’s anti-inflammatory, but, you know, bloating is not such a thing in Mexico—that’s more of an American concern.)

Last winter, I was in Oaxaca, eating this specific quesadilla that had hoja santa, and I thought, Man, I need a chocolate with this. Hoja santa is a living thing, and I didn’t want to grind it or dry it like another ingredient, because then it loses its power. In the finished bar, a whole leaf is embedded and partly exposed in the middle of the chocolate—that took us, like, seven months, to get the leaf at the perfect balance of dried and slightly crystallized with sugar, for a little crunchiness.

From where do you source your cacao?

I always get it from different countries, but I wanted to make this one very Mexican, and I knew there was this ranch growing white-bean cacao. For a cacao bean to be white means that it’s very special and pure; nothing has happened to the field, no pollution, nothing.

You tend to feature uncommon flavors. How do you decide which ingredients to experiment with?

Pink peppercorn was the first one that I did, because I was very curious about mixing chocolate with different spices and flavors. The second was fleur de sel, then the third was rosemary. For the fourth one, I was living in Kuwait for a while, working on a project, and did one with cardamom, as a reminder of the Turkish coffee and tea they drink there.

Depending on where I’m traveling, the chocolate for me is almost like a journal. I taste something interesting, and then try to turn those flavors into a bar with something that resonates.

# Food# North America# New York# Plants# Nature# United States

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Each of us has our own individual way of following the changing of the seasons, a private choreography in relationship to the calendar. For interior designer and prop stylist Olivia Sammons, the produce available from the farms, orchards, and markets near her family’s Hudson Valley home marks time for her, leading her forward through the year. “I spend so much time thinking about food,” she says. “What I’m going to eat, where I’m going to find it, which orchard has the best blueberries.” This focus led her to create the new zine Is My Favorite Flavor, which just launched its first issue, appropriately titled Summer! Is My Favorite Flavor, at the design-focused Head Hi bookshop and café in Brooklyn.

Photo: John C. Hawthorne. Courtesy Alex Tatarsky.

culture

Alex Tatarsky on Art as a Means to Live Out the Absurd

It’s late August, and I’m walking on Grand Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s one of those summer evenings that’s cooler than expected, a pleasant foreshadowing of fall. I’m on my way to discuss compost with the artist Alex Tatarsky, and as I head east from the subway, I pass through the dense, networked scents of the edge of Chinatown: the briny tang of fish markets, the sweet snatch of a fresh egg waffle from a rolled ice cream shop, the yeasty cloud that floats around the famous bialy shop. Approaching Abrons Art Center, where Tatarsky is doing pick-up rehearsals for an out-of-town run of their show Dirt Trip, this close-packed olfactory landscape opens up into something with more space: a faint vegetal whiff from a small vacant lot, the not unpleasant chemical tang from a passing truck, and beyond these, the smell of a certain rot rolling in from the East River.

Courtesy Blue Note Records

culture

An Album of Cover Songs Honors the Legacy of Leonard Cohen

Though nearly six years have gone by since Leonard Cohen’s passing, the long shadow cast by his legacy as one of the 20th century’s most esteemed and idiosyncratic singer-songwriters shows no signs of lifting from the public’s imagination anytime soon. From the enveloping warmth of “Suzanne,” to the high drama of “Hallelujah,” to the chilling minimalist and gospel juxtaposition of his swansong “You Want it Darker,” Cohen managed to constantly reinvent himself, leaving behind the rare achievement of a musical body of work whose most impressive moments exist across eras.