Bâton de Cacao

Didier now grows almost 5 hectares of cocoa in French Guiana. On his plots, he plants Guyana, an endemic variety discovered in 1985 by the military near the source of the Oyapock river. The origin of this adventure? A childhood dream and a tenacious taste for chocolate.

My mother used to give me chocolate with a piece of bread when I got out of school. I ate it with relish, and I still do. I always told my mother that one day I'd make chocolate.

Today, he tends his 200 cocoa trees with patience and determination. Didier doesn't try to control everything.

I can't impose anything, I give a direction, but after that it's the land and the climate that decide, and I work with that. If there's cocoa, I make it; if there isn't, I wait.

His chocolate is pure, 100% cocoa. It took him three years to find the recipe. He also explores other flavors and does everything himself, right down to fermenting the beans:

I also make fish chocolate: sweeter, and less powerful. It's pretentious to say that, but I think my chocolate is very good, and everyone who tastes it thinks it's very good too. The seeds ferment in crates, the temperature rises, and it's during this fermentation, which lasts 4 to 5 days, that all the chocolate's tastes and aromas are created. If I miss fermentation, I miss my chocolate.

Saül's visitors often come to see his production. He shows them the process, from tree to bar. And sometimes they come back the next morning.

I show them the flower, the pod, the processing, and the bar at the end. So they like that. And some of them will come back the next day for breakfast with cocoa from here, Creole chocolate, eggs with cocoa nibs - it's really a specialty of mine - and then some coup poissou juice.

His project? To produce three tonnes of chocolate a year.

It's not much, but it's a childhood dream.