8 ideas: What you can do with our pure cocoa classic CRIOLLO!

Mmmhmm, so chocolaty, round, with full flavour! We love cocoa. Cocoa simply never gets boring. With its diverse flavours and its incredibly wide spectrum that allows us to play on the keyboard of taste buds together with other foods. And open doors to new worlds of taste. Our pleasure in this is reflected in our special assortment: 20 different cocoa creations have been realised by our manufactory so far. Among them are pure varieties such as Criollo or our Single Origin cocoas. In the kitchen and in the bakery, too, we are full of the joy of discovering new uses. With openness and joy, we plunge into this colourful world again and again. Cocoa is always good for a delicious surprise. With this vivid experience in mind, today we turn our attention to our pure CRIOLLO cocoa, one of the most popular Becks cocoaTM varieties. And introduce you to sweet and savoury delicacies refined with Criollo.

Historical

Food, payment and medicine – Criollo cocoa, one of the original types of cocoa, was already used in many ways by the Mayas and Olmecs in Central America almost 4,000 years ago. It was also highly regarded as a plant spirit in religious celebrations and rituals.

The most recent evidence of cacao used by humans is even older: in 2018, researchers excavating a settlement of the Mayo-Chinchipe culture called Santa Ana-La Florida in the southeastern highlands of Ecuador, in the borderland with Peru, discovered traces of cacao that are over 5,300 years old on vessels, tools, in ritual sites and tombs.

This and other findings such as genetic analyses lead to the conclusion that the cacao tree was not originally cultivated and grown in Central America first, as previously assumed, but in South America.