Food Tours · Tour

Temper Your Own Bar on Marble, in the Cacao House

Three and a half hours, and there is more in it than in most full days. It starts the Colombian way, with hot chocolate and cheese in it, which sounds wrong and is not: the cheese melts into strings and Colombians have been doing this for a very long time. Then the cacao itself, from the beginning. You toast the beans, peel them by hand, and there is a short meditative cacao ceremony, which is closer to the pre-Columbian use of the plant than anything in a shop. A spicy ancestral cacao shot follows. You grind the nibs into chocolate liquor, the paste that all chocolate starts as. There is a chocolate hand exfoliation, which is exactly what it sounds like and leaves everyone smelling extraordinary. You make bobos, the artisanal Colombian chocolates. You drink a flavoured cacao water. And then the technical part: tempering 62% dark chocolate on real marble, which is how it is actually done and which is the difference between chocolate that snaps and chocolate that smears. You mould and top your own bar and take it home. The rum cacao cocktail finishes it. Four or five cacao drinks and bites along the way, your own workstation, an apron, all the utensils, moulds and toppings, Wi-Fi, and somebody photographing you so you do not have to. Up to fifteen people, in English, at the Cacao House in Laureles, and it works in any weather. Wheelchair accessible throughout. Transport is not included; extra bars can be made for a fee.