Did you ever think you might enjoy a bar of chocolate and experience more than gustatory pleasure? That you might also feel outright virtuosity, contributing to wild bird conservation in your consumer choice? Huh? There’s a connection? I’m not making this up?
Nope! Right now you can buy, and more importantly, EAT two different single-origin chocolate bars, the Pink Sea Salt from Raaka Chocolates in Brooklyn, NY, and the Zorzal Comunitario from Dandelion Chocolates in San Francisco, CA, made from Smithsonian Bird Friendly® cacao sourced from Zorzal Cacao in the Dominican Republic. Not only that, you can BAKE Bird Friendly® with Raaka’s single origin semi-sweet Classic Dark Baking Chocolate, also sourced from Zorzal. All chocolate mentioned in this post is organic, vegan, gluten free and transparent trade.
I report this to you as someone interested in conscientious consumerism, because birders, readers, friends, my parents and sisters, whoever you are reading this and if you like chocolate, you gotta eat. You may as well consider spending your money on something that brings you pleasure and specifically aids in preserving wild bird habitat in the Americas.
Like coffee, cacao can be grown in a forested environment. This practice of retaining shade cover of native trees over crops is called agroforestry. Agroforestry can support native biodiversity and produce livelihood for farmers. The Bird Friendly® certification assures at least a 40 percent tree cover for coffee and now cacao. Conventional cacao production typically has zero to 10 percent shade coverage. You can imagine the dearth of biodiversity accordingly, a sprawl of monocrop scorched by sun.
Now imagine a cacao farm draped in trees, the trill of birdsong throughout the canopy, the rich cacao growing in this environment, the farmers getting a fair price and the divine chocolate produced as a result. Admittedly, saying your sweet tooth or baking habit is Bird Friendly® signals greater purpose, right? I am not kidding. And it’s fun using the Bird Friendly® moniker throughout this post. Either way, the repetition is getting into your head, and you will now consider it!
How does it taste?
Me holding up a Raaka Classic Dark Baking Chocolate medallion. They are 71 percent bittersweet cacao, good enough to eat as-is! Also made delicious brownies.
I speak from experience in assuring you this stuff is delicious. Not only me, but my friends who’ve sampled these goods with me; we loved the chocolate in its various forms, and I took notes! Here’s what they said:
Dandelion 70 percent lightly roasted cacao Zorzal Comunitario bar (eaten as-is)
“You only need a segment to taste its complexity, letting it dissolve in your mouth,” said SW of the Zorzal Comunitario bar. He likes that the bar is in breakable segments, perfectly portioned for said dissolution. “It dissolves in a creamy way, “ said another taster, LK. “You have this rich chocolate sheen coating the inside of your mouth as it melts,” she said. Both SW and LK taste the chocolate-covered cherry bite of the bar. “The burst of the cherry,” said LK. “It’s the flavor not the texture.” Fourth taster, IN adds, “I can taste a faint smoky flavor in the aftertaste, too.” The lightly roasted element, perhaps?
Raaka 71 percent unroasted cacao Pink Sea Salt bar (eaten as-is)
“It’s exactly what you’d expect when it says sea salt,” said LK. “And nothing about it is unconventional for a dark chocolate bar in spite of it being unroasted and vegan. I can’t pick up on the unroasted.” SW observes that it’s thinner than other bars of its kind on the market, and not segmented. Its artfully molded facade at unwrapping evokes a panorama of cacao-growing hills. Its thinner heft makes it easy to break into segments for savoring. I like its lingering salty aftertaste, the salt adding a bite to the sweetness and cutting the slight bitterness of the chocolate.
Raaka 71 percent unroasted cacao Classic Dark Baking Chocolate (eaten baked in brownies)
After eating one of the medallions straight out of the bag, I decided to test these in brownies. I further decided on this vegan brownie recipe from author Sam Turnbull. Raaka advertises its chocolate as vegan, so I was thinking maybe the pared down flavors of the rest of the ingredients in a dairy and egg free recipe would bring out the chocolate more?
I used baking cacao powder from Raaka (currently unavailable; you can use another cacao powder of your choice) and the full amount of semi sweet Classic Dark Chocolate where the recipe called for chocolate chips.
Raaka Chocolate’s Classic Dark Baking Chocolate medallions. They are semi-sweet and sourced from Smithsonian Bird Friendly® certified Zorzal Cacao.
These brownies were on the fudgier side, and it’s hard to say if it was the chocolate or the recipe that my friends raved about, so let’s assume both: “That’s the best vegan brownie I have ever eaten!” said SP. “I can taste complex richness. I’m enjoying the aftertaste,” he added. “That brownie doesn’t taste vegan, that’s for sure,” said CR. “I’m used to something vegan being like a facsimile of what it’s supposed to be. This tastes like a straight up brownie with conventional ingredients.” CR assumed all bar chocolate contained milk, even dark chocolate. “I would not normally buy a vegan chocolate bar if it was advertised as such. I imagine it wouldn’t taste as good,” she said. Both she and SP commented on the appealing syrupy essence to both the brownie’s texture and taste. Yum!
SP and CR didn’t taste either of the bar chocolates, nor the baking chocolate in its medallion form, but it’s not a stretch to think they will after tasting those brownies. And SW, LK and IN are now familiar with the Bird Friendly® label from our fun tasting sessions. They’re all thinking about the lingering taste, the time with friends, and (maybe?) the association with a shade-touched, bird-song serenaded cacao farm.
Like these cozy, purposeful moments of sharing, Bird Friendly® eating chocolate will always be a special occasion treat. It is not inexpensive, and it cannot be mass-marketed. We will never see Bird Friendly® certified cacao via Lindt or Hershey’s, for instance; Bird Friendly® cacao will be the ingredient of independent specialty chocolatier companies like Raaka and Dandelion.
The cacao trade is complex and multi-layered and much of the existing cacao-growing landscape cannot be Bird Friendly® certified in its current state, nor can those landscapes be rehabilitated to meet the standard. And Bird Friendly® only applies to the cacao—not any other ingredient in the chocolate (albeit the cacao basically IS the chocolate). So let’s get this market growing! Here are those links again:
Dandelion Chocolates Zorzal Comunitario
Raaka Semi-sweet Classic Dark Baking Chocolate
And here’s an extra item, which we didn’t taste test but which contains Zorzal Bird Friendly® certified cacao:
Thanks for reading and thanks for considering your consumer choice to support wild bird conservation efforts! I’ll be sharing more about Bird Friendly® cacao across media, and want to cover other eco-certified food labels that promote biodiversity in working landscapes. This is the world we live in, and we can manage accordingly with our consumer choice.
If you would like to read more about wild bird conservation-supporting efforts in agriculture, read my stories about the wine growing industry at Audubon and consumer choice for buying wine and considering birds on my website.
And please know this not a sponsored post. I do not have affiliate relationships with any of the companies mentioned here. I maintain a conflict-of-interest-free status in my journalism in order to bring you information you can take as sincere. I do not rule out one day sharing affiliated links, but at present, none of these are.