# Cacao Nibs

> <p class="rte-p"><span>Criollo cacao from Chuao on Venezuela's coast, fermented in wooden boxes, sun-dried and cracked into nibs: dark, crunchy and faintly bitter, chocolate before sugar ever touched it.</span></p>

Price: 20.00 USD · in stock

## About
Whisk a spoonful into hot water and you are drinking chocolate the way it was first drunk: bitter, dark and unsweetened. These nibs are criollo cacao, the milder of the two principal cacao lineages, prized over the hardier forastero for its complexity rather than its yield, and grown on smallholdings in Chuao, a village on Venezuela's coast reachable only by boat or a mountain trail.The beans are fermented in wooden boxes, sun-dried on woven mats, then lightly cracked into small, dark fragments, unsweetened and unrefined. The Maya and later the Aztec drank cacao rather than eating it, reserved it for nobility, priests and warriors, and used the beans themselves as currency. Their bitter, spiced xocolatl gave us the word chocolate. Long called the food of the gods, it comes to you here whole and minimally processed.DetailsCriollo cacao nibs, unsweetened and unrefinedGrown on smallholdings in Chuao, VenezuelaFermented in wooden boxes, sun-dried on woven matsHow to useSteep a tablespoon in hot water and whisk it for an old-style drinking chocolate. Or eat a few nibs plain, slowly, to taste the bean before anyone improved on it.A bitter, ancient pleasure for your pantry shelf.