milk sourced at origin for chocolate
What grows together goes together, as the old adage goes.
When bean-to-bar origin-made chocolate companies source all of their ingredients from the country of origin, you can expect a fresh, delicious product that helps support multiple communities in that country. While in Ecuador I got to visit a dairy farming community in the village of Turucucho, in the mist-enrobed Andes.
The cows, mainly a mix of Holsteins and Swiss Browns, are purely grass-fed, grazing in open fields on a varied diet of grasses, flowers and herbs that make for rich, fatty, flavorful milk.
The cows are hand-milked twice a day in the field, gathering and waiting patiently for their turn. The milk is collected by the bucketful into a milk can, and transported to the nearby collection center in the village.
Since the cows are freely roaming in a field and not penned up in a barn, their back legs are tied so they don’t decide to take a stroll while they are being milked. This does not hurt the cows, they looked calm as they stood and chewed their cud or grazed while they were milked with swift, deft hands.
Most of the milk arrives by horseback or motorbike, and sometimes by pickup truck.
Each can of milk is tested for contaminants before it is accepted and added to the collective vat. The flavor is rich and earthy, and used in milk and cocoa-butter white chocolates.
The pure quality of the milk matches the beauty of the surroundings.
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