Satipo
by Shattell
Impact
NYC has its Flatiron Building & Iquitos, Peru the so-called Iron Building -- a structure designed by Gustave Eiffel (might’ve heard of him) & sent up river in the late 19th century. It landed in Iquitos, well short of its intended destination (La Paz, Bolivia) because, according to legend, the boat captain, realizing the trip up the Amazon would take another 6 months of strenuous jungle navigation, dumped the load there. The Iron Building has served variously as a hotel & a club, & is now broken up into shuttered storefronts + a few bars.
Besides that, Iquitos contains several dozen mansions, many now inhabited by the Peruvian military, a few turned into hotels, & others simply abandoned in varying degrees of disrepair. Often incongruously covered with imported Portuguese tile & filled with fine French furniture, the houses are all that remain of the rubber / robber barons who grew fanatically rich until 1911, when rubber tree seeds were transplanted to Indonesia to be cultivated without the jungle chaos.
For the Amazon can be hot, humid, muggy, ugly, & putrid smelling in places; Iquitos in particular. Add dangerous, full of thieves, con artists, & ayahuasca… the latter dispensed by shamans in nature’s hospital: after a purgative of a spiritual cleansing (vomiting & diarrhea), imbibers of this brew tune into 6 straight hours of “Forest Television” (aka hallucinations) during which the “patient” meets the “mother” in the plant, in the form of a snake, who answers questions about the meaning of life.
Promise.
Virtually guaranteed by Alan Shoemaker, author of Ayahuasca Medicine: The Shamanic World of Amazonian Sacred Plant Healing, a regular (2,200 times & counting, or roughly 2x/week) whose other mission is to unionize shamans in the jungle.
This bar hails from pretty deep in the Amazon. It’ll have users experiencing trails before & after it hits the skids where, evidently, those barons left behind a few seeds where the rubber hits the lone road in the middle of it… which turns down the technicolors without entirely shutting them off.
Besides that, Iquitos contains several dozen mansions, many now inhabited by the Peruvian military, a few turned into hotels, & others simply abandoned in varying degrees of disrepair. Often incongruously covered with imported Portuguese tile & filled with fine French furniture, the houses are all that remain of the rubber / robber barons who grew fanatically rich until 1911, when rubber tree seeds were transplanted to Indonesia to be cultivated without the jungle chaos.
For the Amazon can be hot, humid, muggy, ugly, & putrid smelling in places; Iquitos in particular. Add dangerous, full of thieves, con artists, & ayahuasca… the latter dispensed by shamans in nature’s hospital: after a purgative of a spiritual cleansing (vomiting & diarrhea), imbibers of this brew tune into 6 straight hours of “Forest Television” (aka hallucinations) during which the “patient” meets the “mother” in the plant, in the form of a snake, who answers questions about the meaning of life.
Promise.
Virtually guaranteed by Alan Shoemaker, author of Ayahuasca Medicine: The Shamanic World of Amazonian Sacred Plant Healing, a regular (2,200 times & counting, or roughly 2x/week) whose other mission is to unionize shamans in the jungle.
This bar hails from pretty deep in the Amazon. It’ll have users experiencing trails before & after it hits the skids where, evidently, those barons left behind a few seeds where the rubber hits the lone road in the middle of it… which turns down the technicolors without entirely shutting them off.
Appearance 4.6 / 5
| Color: | cream-rouge |
| Surface: | very attractive bar-magnet |
| Temper: | blinding / Pralus-worthy |
| Snap: | big poppy |
Aroma 8.9 / 10
cream (the theme) cheese in a variation on a grilled cheese sandwich
so bending, flexible, supple... bamboo & ferns under a vanilla-like (but not quite) Peru balsam that finally exhales roasted cocoa
so bending, flexible, supple... bamboo & ferns under a vanilla-like (but not quite) Peru balsam that finally exhales roasted cocoa
Mouthfeel 8.2 / 15
| Texture: | hard wax / latex |
| Melt: | forever |
Flavor 38.4 / 50
quick attack chocolate -> fruit side (the apricotish pitomba) -> smoked wood chips on the verge but shy of bitter insurrection because rubber bounces off it, in so doing destroys the profile & dumps it into a wax trap -> roasted cocoa + hickory in an attempt to stage a comeback -> light fruit (the pineapple-inflected cherimoya) -> coffee with cream ending
Quality 14.1 / 20
Wow, such promise & quest for glory. A bar bookend by fab-flav. The extremities dashed however by a fat butter midsection.
That beginning & ending hardly surprising since Satipo in some respects put Peru back on the chocolate map when Josef Zotter unleashed his beast of a feast day bar sourced from there.
Years ago he sent a couple samples to the C-spot® which were freely distributed to the self-appointed "cocoa cartel" at chocolate shows & conferences in a li'l game called 'Name that Origin'. They stumbled & bumbled way off course because prior to then Peru was synonymous with dirt or detritus. The most astute reacted with glee & awe, extolling even the Nibs from whence it came.
Before long they flocked to Peru in praise of its diversity. Ever so the cautious, the cartel played it safe & stuck to the well-traveled circuit in the country's northern niche. A spate of bars from Piura ensued. Few ventured south; fewer still to the inland jungle down there. Their loss since this region clearly inheres with some endowed cacáos -- Bonnat's Cusco & Morin's Chanchamayo -- encroached upon lately though by the dreaded CCN.
Lima resident & Shattell GM Lisi Montoya made the hard-scrabble trek to retrieve these beauties from a clutch of small stakeholders. Harvested with traditional methods, mainly by women, one their non-certified but de facto organic plots (who really needs to pay organizations that pass out stamps & stickers anyways). Lisi labels this a "Criollo" -- perhaps more a conceit to native indigenous cacáo than to the varietal.
Apparently she feared that bitter finger. So instead of processing it thru, smoothing it out in the conche, she choose to butter it over. An understandable if inadvisable compensation for craft under development.
Make no mistake however: whatever their pods are called, these women tend to some cacáo with good bones & instincts. Let's hope they shirk the breeders & their NGO minions hawking "new & improved" hybrids.
Reviewed November 7, 2013
That beginning & ending hardly surprising since Satipo in some respects put Peru back on the chocolate map when Josef Zotter unleashed his beast of a feast day bar sourced from there.
Years ago he sent a couple samples to the C-spot® which were freely distributed to the self-appointed "cocoa cartel" at chocolate shows & conferences in a li'l game called 'Name that Origin'. They stumbled & bumbled way off course because prior to then Peru was synonymous with dirt or detritus. The most astute reacted with glee & awe, extolling even the Nibs from whence it came.
Before long they flocked to Peru in praise of its diversity. Ever so the cautious, the cartel played it safe & stuck to the well-traveled circuit in the country's northern niche. A spate of bars from Piura ensued. Few ventured south; fewer still to the inland jungle down there. Their loss since this region clearly inheres with some endowed cacáos -- Bonnat's Cusco & Morin's Chanchamayo -- encroached upon lately though by the dreaded CCN.
Lima resident & Shattell GM Lisi Montoya made the hard-scrabble trek to retrieve these beauties from a clutch of small stakeholders. Harvested with traditional methods, mainly by women, one their non-certified but de facto organic plots (who really needs to pay organizations that pass out stamps & stickers anyways). Lisi labels this a "Criollo" -- perhaps more a conceit to native indigenous cacáo than to the varietal.
Apparently she feared that bitter finger. So instead of processing it thru, smoothing it out in the conche, she choose to butter it over. An understandable if inadvisable compensation for craft under development.
Make no mistake however: whatever their pods are called, these women tend to some cacáo with good bones & instincts. Let's hope they shirk the breeders & their NGO minions hawking "new & improved" hybrids.
Reviewed November 7, 2013