Cuban cigars with coffee and chocolate notes, Colombian coffee with a hint of tobacco, a coffee infused Ecuadorian chocolate truffle - Latin America is the melting pot for three of the most alluring and fascinating stimulants around.
Coffee and chocolate are often paired together thanks to the overlap between their growing regions and similarities in their flavor notes. Both coffee and cacao share a huge flavor profile - over 600 aromatic compounds in cacao and more than a thousand in coffee! And the two plants' similarities don't end here.
Chocolate's main ingredient cocoa comes from Theobroma cacao, also known as ‘fruit of the gods’- an oval fruit called a pod which grows directly on the plant's trunk and comes in red, yellow, purple and other mixed colors, with each pod contains 25-50 cocoa beans, surrounded by pulp. Approximately 10 pods are necessary to produce 450 grams of cocoa beans. As a comparison, coffee beans come from red coffee cherries that produce only two beans per cherry.
Cocoa and coffee flourish in the cocoa belt, along or near the Equator in Latin America, the tropics of western Africa, Asia and India. South America's lower Amazon is cacao's original home, yet now it grows best in equatorial Africa. And coffee originally comes from Africa and Arabia (in Ethiopia and Yemen) but now the bean grows best in South America.
Coffee and cacao both stimulate via alkaloids, caffeine for coffee and theobromine for cacao. So both beans contain significant amounts of antioxidants - cacao more than coffee.
Havana tobacco is widely renowned as the flavorful leaf of the the Cuban cigar, so distinctive and unique because it is made entirely from Tabaco Negro Cubano (Cuban black tobacco), a straightforward descendant of the tobacco plants that Columbus reported more than five hundred years ago. These plantations are protected from the sun by a thin cloth to give the leaf a soft and smooth texture, with the lower leaves giving a lighter wrapper and the upper leaves a darker wrapper used for a wide range of Cuban cigar varieties.
Cigars are associated more with coffee and when trying to match cigars with coffee, similarities in taste must be considered. Balance is the key to a good pairing, as you do not want to overpower one flavour with another. Therefore, a light roast coffee should be paired with a milder, sweeter cigar, and a dark roast coffee would match better with a full-bodied, stronger cigar. With such a vast range of coffee and cigars available in Latin America, specifically in Cuba for the latter, the pairing options are limitless. And while you're at it pop a chocolate truffle or two in the equation for good measure.
