King Criollo

You’ve mastered the finer points of cappuccino and caffe latte; you may have opinions on French press versus drip. With a Starbucks on nearly every retail corner, the coffee thing is beyond trendiness; it’s part of the landscape.

But which do you like better: the criollo or the forastero?

Few among us know that those two are types of cocoa beans, let alone that the criollo, like coffee’s arabica bean, is considered the best bean by chocolate purists, while the forastero suffers, like the robusta bean, from a mass-market reputation.

“It’s a bulk bean,” said the chocolate expert with a slight sneer as she described the forastero. The dining room of Los Angeles’ Campanile restaurant overflowed with chocolate lovers gathered for a 3 1/2-hour chocolate seminar sponsored by the International Assn. of Women Chefs and Restaurateurs.

And what was amazing was that the audience patiently endured more than two hours of lectures and cooking demonstrations, even knowing that somewhere in the room waited dessert--an assortment of chocolate treats from great California restaurants, including Rockenwagner, Citrus, Patina, Fenix, Border Grill and Spago, as well as chocolate tarts from cookbook author Flo Braker.

Of course, everybody gobbled the sweets at the end of the event, but the information was the best part; they were especially mesmerized by a talk on the fermentation process of chocolate by food scientist and author Harold McGee. Is this the age of the brainy foodie?

In the last few months, we’ve been to seminars well-attended by passionate amateurs of balsamic vinegar, of tomatoes, of bread. Connoisseurship in California these days is about more than collecting the 15 most expensive Tuscan olive oils or the 27 best 1982 Bordeaux--it’s about knowing why something is good and how it got that way: growing heirloom tomatoes from seed, nurturing your own sourdough starter, making omelets from eggs laid by your own hens. Instead of taking cooking classes, we’re taking ingredient classes.

And that’s why a few days before the chocolate event we were again at Campanile, packed with cheese enthusiasts that time, to hear the comments of the experts from the London cheese shrine, Neal’s Yard. Bacteria counts in milk were discussed, as was the proper degree of humidity for optimal cheese storage.

Large cheese wheels were passed around the room for adoration by the crowd, many of whom reverently reached out to touch the rinds as if they were holy relics. Larger-than-life photos of small-farm cheese makers--the saints of cheese fighting the evil of homogeneous mass-market products--were held up for approval.

Our favorite: a certain Mrs. Appleby, with forearms the size of Popeye’s, who still makes her Cheshire cheese daily at age 82. If we want to be sure that cheese like Mrs. Appleby’s will still be around when we’re 82, some of us are going to have to learn how to make cheese for ourselves.