| The Chocolate Alchemist |
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Page 1 of 2 At Kakawa Chocolate House, Mark Sciscenti re-creates a tasty history of everyone’s favorite confection  THERE SHOULD BE CANDLES burning in skulls, cobwebs as large and dense as pillowcases, or—at the very least—a cold, eerie wind howling outside. A brew is being concocted that is so strange and otherworldly that it makes the potion in Macbeth’s witches’ cauldron seem like a milkshake made by ambitious Girl Scouts. No thin mints here, I’m afraid.Mark Sciscenti—scientist, herbalist, academic, chocolatier, and alchemist—hovers over a large mixing bowl filled with dark, bittersweet chocolate diluted with steaming water and, to his guests’ horror, ladles cup after cup of reddish-orange ancho chile powder into the liquid. After tasting it with a teaspoon and chewing it like one would a fine wine, he announces, “It needs more chile.” He shovels in still more of the spice, plus agave nectar and Mexican vanilla, then offers his wary visitors a taste. It’s the deep, rich intensity of the chocolate that greets the taste buds first, followed a couple of beats later by the bite and heat of the chile powder. It’s not sweet by the standards of most chocolate drinks, but the agave and vanilla successfully marry the two seemingly incompatible sensations. Although the chile heat dissipates, the chocolate lingers, from the tip of the tongue to the back of the throat. “Really high-end chocolate,” says Sciscenti—who uses only blends that contain a high percentage of criollo, which makes up just 1 percent of the world’s cacao production—“will have this lingering flavor that you can taste 30 minutes later.” Over the past few years, the New Mexico native has been winning hearts and palates with his interpretations of drinking-chocolate recipes from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, 16th-century Europe, Colonial America, and modern Mexico. Sciscenti began mixing drinks in his home kitchen for special events (he once ladled out the liquid to 500 people in the course of an hour) but moved the operation to his Santa Fe chocolate shop, Kakawa (the pre-Mayan word for cacao), three years ago. He has since relocated the shop to a homey casita just a couple of blocks from New Mexico’s capitol building. His is the only business like it in the world. The son of archaeologists, 47-year-old Sciscenti was raised in the desert Southwest on a diet devoid of television or sweets. He was 15 when he first tasted chocolate. His confectionary epiphany came seven years ago when his partner, Kathleen Potter, bought him a book called The True History of Chocolate, by Michael and Sophie Coe. “I was fascinated by what the Mesoamericans were drinking,” he recalls. “They didn’t have dairy or sugar, but they had all these great spices, and they had chiles.” |
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