Heirloom & Fine Flavour Cacao Beans
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Very few cacao traders actually make chocolate with the beans they offer.
Very few chocolatemakers dare to share their ingredients with others.
We offer you the same fine-flavour beans we use in our own chocolate.
Each cacao is the winner of much acclaim from the fine flavour industry.
We are offered a lot of samples at Solkiki and we request even more.
If we find the magic in a cacao, we understand that is great for customers, but it's a really big deal for the future of the farming communities, the forests and the actual cacao too. So we take every sample seriously and only work with exceptional cacao grown and traded by skilled and devoted farmers in the right way.
When buying via Solkiki you can be assured you are supporting the longterm future of fine flavour cacao from a team of actual chocolatemakers. We have rejected a lot of cacaos that appear on the market elsewhere; sometimes our process and philosophy don't work with a cacao. We use the best and sell the same. We deeply understand the quality of our cacao, because we are hands-on makers.
You can also buy our cacao butter. Undeodorised. Natural. A good fat. We've tasted over 60, we use one that's in a league of it's own: redefines cacao butter.
Full sacks start at £12.50/kg, reducing with multiple sacks.
Shipping for full sacks is around £15.
Our cacao is in the UK, customs cleared, quality verified by Solkiki, sourced direct by Solkiki, impeccable and head-ache free :) Collect in person if you want.
Resealable foil pouches for upto 20kg
Grain pro or jute for sacks (Maranon 50kg, Esmeraldas 68kg).
Want to learn a lot about fine cacao with almost boundless potential flavour profiles? Choose the delicate, sensitive and complex Maranon.
Want to get a quick start with more forgiving cacao, choose Esmeraldas - deep chocolate, Chuncho - tangy fruit or Malagos - biscuit caramel.
Very broad profiles! But just to offer you an idea of the basic spectral character of each cacao ^^
Why is RAW a misleading term?
Cacao needs to be fermented and dried before it is transported. Cacao is a fermented food - it is dead: not raw.
During fermentation, temperatures exceed the cutoff widely accepted for a food to be considered 'raw'.
Same thinking applies to sugar: you can't evaporate cane/beet/coconut/agave/etc juice at 'raw' temperature.
After fermentation the cacao is sundried... in the Tropics!
It is then bagged up and stored in a sealed metal box called a shipping container - more accurately an OVEN ;)
Because 'Raw' is not legally controlled and is a misleading term, abused in the world of chocolate, so we avoid it.
Ask your purveyor of raw chocolate what they mean by the term RAW. It's commonly understood to mean the ingredient is alive, and never experienced heat over 42c. Raw chocolatemakers, raw chocolatiers, raw remelters and raw reconstitutors all have their own ideas, so ask them what they mean.
We have seen more and more people selling RAW HOT CHOCOLATE... wow!