Exciting Discovery: White Cacao Beans

Ace! NewsFlash

Pods of Nacional cacao beans attract not only chocolate lovers.

DAN PEARSON was working in northern Peru two years ago with his stepson Brian Horsely, supplying gear and food to mining companies, when something caught his eye.

“We were in a hidden mountain valley of the Marañón River and saw some strange trees with football-size pods growing right out of their trunks,” Mr. Pearson said by telephone last week. “I knew nothing about cacao, but I learned that’s what it was.”

It was, he would learn after sending samples of seeds and leaves to the Agricultural Research Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, one of the rarest, most prized varieties of cacao.

“The DNA of this material is pure Nacional,” said Dr. Lyndel Meinhardt, a scientist with the service. “These are very rare.”

Until the early 20th century, Nacional, a member of the Forastero family, one of the three main genetic categories of cacao, was widely grown in Ecuador, then the world’s largest cacao producer. But it succumbed to disease, which even cross-breeding could not resist. Some Nacional still grows in Ecuador, though most is not pure. At least one chocolate company, Kallari, says it uses it in blends.

But with the help of the Swiss chocolate expert Franz Zeigler, beans that Mr. Pearson and his stepson buy are being made into slabs of pure Nacional chocolate. “The magnitude of this find is bigger than anything I have known,” Mr. Zeigler said.

The chocolate is intense, with a floral aroma and a persistent mellow richness. Its lack of bitterness is remarkable.

One reason may be that Nacional cacao has a rare and precious characteristic: some of the beans are white, not the usual purple, and those from the Marañón Canyon are about 40 percent white. White beans, which Dr. Meinhardt said have fewer bitter anthocyanins, produce a more mellow-tasting, less acidic chocolate. Dr. Meinhardt said white beans are mutations that happen when trees are left undisturbed for hundreds of years.

A cacao pod is filled with sweet, whitish, viscous pulp embedded with seeds. Inside these seeds are the beans. You cannot easily tell which pods or seeds will have white beans, but Mr. Pearson said, without revealing more, that he has figured it out.

Chocolate made from 100 percent white beans is extremely expensive. (When roasted the beans turn brown and they are unrelated to “white chocolate.”)

Cacao is thought to have originated in the rain forests at the source of the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers and then gradually dispersed northward. What surprised Dr. Meinhardt the most about Mr. Pearson’s cacao was that it was growing at an altitude above 3,500 feet, while cacao rarely grows above 2,000 feet.

In the canyon, 186 farmers are growing pure Nacional. The beans are transported to a town several hours away, where they are dried, fermented and roasted, then sent to Lima and shipped to Switzerland. The chocolate is processed there by a company recommended by Mr. Zeigler, which Mr. Pearson did not want to name. The beans are made into what they call Fortunato No. 4, a 68-percent bittersweet couverture, a high-butterfat chocolate that’s easy to use.

They have 15 tons of it in slabs. A company in Switzerland and one each in Germany, Canada and the United States (Moonstruck Chocolatier, of Portland, Ore.) are making candies and bars with the chocolate.

At Moonstruck, the exclusive American retailer for the chocolate, Julian Rose, the chocolatier, is coating pure Nacional beans with pure Nacional chocolate. These will be introduced this weekend at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, and are sold as Fortunato Tumbled Beans at moonstruckchocolate.com ($12 for 3.5 ounces; bars of Peruvian Fortunato are $12 for 2 ounces). Mr. Rose said the flavor of this chocolate is so refined that it does not need vanilla, commonly added to chocolate, to round it out.

At the Institute of Culinary Education in New York, Michelle Tampakis, the director of advanced pastry studies, said the chocolate was extremely smooth when melted, with a full-bodied, nutty flavor that was not bitter.

Mr. Zeigler, who visited the canyon with Mr. Pearson last year, said he had a “Jurassic Park feeling” about the experience. “And the discovery of the white beans tops the whole thing,” he said. “I have no doubt this chocolate will be up there with the very best in the world.”

NYT 11 Jan 2011

*** Ace! is a member of the EducationUSA global educational advising network affiliated with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. We provide free EducationUSA counseling services to students in the northern provinces of Thailand; our faculty of U.S.-trained Test Prep Experts can help you with cost-effective result-driven training programs for SAT-1, SAT-2, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, GED, AP, IB, TOEIC, IELTS etc http://acethai.weebly.com ***

Budget Cheap & Chic NYC Hotel Trend

Ace! NewsFlash

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The public area at the Pod, which opened three years ago with 345 rooms averaging 100 square feet.

At a boutique hotel near the exclusive shops and hangouts of New York’s meatpacking district, a bellman, polite and formal in the classic uniform of burgundy trimmed in gold, pushed open a rich wood door for a guest the other day. Beyond it was a carefully designed space with luxury touches: high-thread-count cotton sheets, large flat-screen television, bathrobe and spa sandals.

Ace

20 West 29th Street

LOOK Updated, rock-star S.R.O., as in single-room-occupancy hotel

LOBBY SCENE Hipster S.R.O., as in standing room only

ROOMS 260 total, 87 under 200 square feet

PRICE $209 to $599 a night

BONUS POINT Private bathrooms in all rooms

Pod

230 East 51st Street

LOOK Playful minimalist

LOBBY SCENE Snacking with laptops

ROOMS 345, all under 200 square feet

PRICE $89 to $279

BONUS POINT Side jets in some shared rainhead showers

Jane

230 113 Jane Street

LOOK Miss Havisham rides the “Darjeeling Limited”

LOBBY SCENE Friendly restaurant, soon-to-be-exclusive bar

ROOMS 200 total, 123 under 200 square feet

PRICE $89 to $300

BONUS POINT Free house-bottled water in rooms

Columbus Circle Hostel

120 West 60th Street

LOOK Traditional youth hostel

LOBBY SCENE Check-in and bag storage

ROOMS 90 beds, four to a 250-square-foot room

PRICE $20 to $40

BONUS POINT Those prices

“Your presidential suite,” the bellman announced. Except that this was the Jane, a restored residential hotel rising over the West Side Highway, and the “presidential suite” was one of its standard single rooms. Reminiscent of a high-class train cabin, it was tiny: all of 50 square feet, just big enough for a custom-made twin bed and a shelf.

And at $89 a night, no one was complaining. “It’s like having a virtual Manhattan apartment,” said Peter Griesar, 41, a regular guest, noting that the rough cost of a month’s stay — $2,670 — was not a bad deal for a West Village address. “The price is right, the neighborhood’s great, and who spends time in a hotel room in New York anyway?”

In a city where space is at such a premium that bragging rights are measured in square feet, small is getting big. An expanding clutch of hotels like the Jane offer cramped sleeping quarters on the cheap, often with shared bathrooms and bunk beds, to budget-minded travelers seeking a dash of style along with their savings.

There is the Pod, which opened three years ago with 345 rooms averaging 100 square feet. The hotel, on East 51st Street, has been such a success, said Richard Born, one of the owners, who is also a partner in the Jane, that he is planning a second Pod in Manhattan.

The British chain Yotel, known for sleek capsules that travelers rent by the hour at European airports, is opening its first center-city hotel on West 42nd Street next year. In a nod to the American love of large, executives said, its 669 rooms will be bigger than usual, though still tight: 170 square feet rather than 108. “In the old days, the bigger the space in a hotel, the more luxury you had,” said Simon Woodroffe, the chain’s founder. “But very, very rich people stay in reasonably small spaces on luxury yachts, and very, very rich people travel in extremely small spaces on Learjets.”

Pocket lodgings have long been a staple in Asia and Europe. And boutique hotels in New York have been luring guests to good-looking but less-than-spacious rooms since 1984, when the Morgans hotel opened, promising affordable luxury, contemporary design and a lobby that doubled as a social destination. “Why would Cher stay on 37th and Madison in a 200-square-foot hotel room with bad plumbing?” Mr. Born said of the hotel, which was started by the club impresarios Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell. “Because she was Steve’s friend and Steve created a cool environment.”

But these new hotels are even smaller, almost like chic youth hostels, said Lalia Rach, dean of the Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University. The emphasis on style over space — one way to make the economics work for a budget hotel in an expensive urban center, Dr. Rach said — appeals to out-of-towners who want to feel like New Yorkers, right down to fleeing a shoebox to experience the city’s culture and nightlife. “This is attractive to a very large market,” she said, referring to travelers ages 16 to 30. “They want to live the destination, not live the hotel.”

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At the same time, the theory goes, these hotels need to be destinations for the locals — or at least to feel as if they could be — for guests to sense that they are tapping into the real New York. So Yotel, whose futuristic rooms feature purple mood lighting and private monsoon showers, plans to turn part of its fourth floor over to a restaurant, bar and 20,000-square-foot outdoor patio.

Room Mate Grace, on West 45th Street, originally the QT, has a swimming pool with a bar in the lobby. The Ace, on West 29th Street, attracts such an artsy throng that its lobby can resemble a nightlife mini-mall, with list-toting men guarding entrances to the hotel and the various eating and drinking spaces inside. Alex Calderwood, who opened the Ace last year, said he conceived the lobby as a living room for the neighborhood where guests and New Yorkers could mingle.

Perhaps no place embodies that spirit more than the Jane, where guests can, by design, overhear a long-term tenant placing bets over a pay phone in the hallway, brush their teeth with others in the communal bathrooms, or drink and dine with West Village locals downstairs at Cafe Gitane or the lobby bar. The hotel, which plans to expand its hangout spaces with an outdoor patio and a rooftop bar, is designed with an artfully distressed, Old World Eastern opulence; a stuffed monkey in a fez hovers over each end of the bar. A lounge known as the Ballroom is temporarily closed, but in its heyday, the waiting line stretched down the block, annoying the real New Yorkers living nearby. At busy times, some people would take a room for the night just to gain entry, said Sean MacPherson, a co-owner.

On a recent weeknight, the lobby bar played host to a small crowd of mostly New Yorkers as Laurence Passera, a photographer from London who declined to give his age, took advantage of the lull. A regular guest, he said he loved the single berths. “I even had a girl up there,” Mr. Passera said. “Fantastic.”

Uptown, the Pod has created a world of its own. Decorated with a cheerful minimalism — think Ikea meets Devo — the emphasis is on D.I.Y.: there is no restaurant or bar, but guests can bring in their own refreshments and congregate in the lobby, patio or rooftop garden. They can also use the hotel’s free WiFi and blog to connect for shared rides from the airport and drinks, meals and shopping in town. (“My friend and I are coming over to NYC from Brazil on April 10th and we’ll be there for a whole week,” read a recent message from Two Brazilian Dudes in the Big Apple.)

The entry-level rooms include stainless steel sinks and lights over the door, like those on an airplane, indicating when the bathrooms down the hall are free. The hotel attracts a mix of tourists, many from Europe, ranging from high school groups to middle-age couples on shopping vacations. One sunny morning, Harald Widemann, 52, and his son, Dennis, 22, of Hamburg, Germany, were on the roof, taking in the sweeping view. They are both 6-foot-4 but had no complaints about their pint-size room with twin bunk beds, even after their stay was extended for a few days by the Icelandic volcano ash. “I wanted to have a decent hotel with at least a minimum of comfort but not with too much space,” the elder Mr. Widemann said. “I don’t need 20 or 30 or 40 square meters” — the equivalent of 215 to 430 square feet — “when I’m using the room only for sleeping.”

Still, he said, when he visits with his wife, he will have to stay at the Hudson, near Columbus Circle where rooms start at a knee-skinning 136 square feet. “I need a bigger room for her luggage,” he said.

*** Ace! is a member of the EducationUSA global educational advising network affiliated with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. We provide free EducationUSA counseling services to students in the northern provinces of Thailand; our faculty of U.S.-trained Test Prep Experts can help you with cost-effective result-driven training programs for SAT-1, SAT-2, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, GED, IELTS etc ***

U.S. Government Unveils New Design for the $100 Note

Ace! NewsFlash

U.S. Government Unveils New Design for the $100 Note
Government to Currency Users: Know Its Features So You Can Know It’s RealU.S. Dept. of the Treasury/Associated Press

The redesigned $100 bill, above, has security features like microprinting, color-shifting objects and a 3-D ribbon.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (April 21, 2010) – Officials from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the United States Secret Service today unveiled the new design for the $100 note. Complete with advanced technology to combat counterfeiting, the new design for the $100 note retains the traditional look of U.S. currency.

“As with previous U.S. currency redesigns, this note incorporates the best technology available to ensure we’re staying ahead of counterfeiters,” said Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner.

“When the new design $100 note is issued on February 10, 2011, the approximately 6.5 billion older design $100s already in circulation will remain legal tender,” said Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Ben S. Bernanke. “U.S. currency users should know they will not have to trade in their older design $100 notes when the new ones begin circulating.”

There are a number of security features in the redesigned $100 note, including two new features, the 3-D Security Ribbon and the Bell in the Inkwell. These security features are easy for consumers and merchants to use to authenticate their currency.

The blue 3-D Security Ribbon on the front of the new $100 note contains images of bells and 100s that move and change from one to the other as you tilt the note. The Bell in the Inkwell on the front of the note is another new security feature. The bell changes color from copper to green when the note is tilted, an effect that makes it seem to appear and disappear within the copper inkwell.

“The new security features announced today come after more than a decade of research and development to protect our currency from counterfeiting. To ensure a seamless introduction of the new $100 note into the financial system, we will conduct a global public education program to ensure that users of U.S. currency are aware of the new security features,” said Treasurer of the United States Rosie Rios.

"For 145 years, the men and women of the United States Secret Service have worked diligently to protect the integrity of U.S. currency from counterfeiters," said Director Mark Sullivan. "During that time, our agency has evolved to keep pace with the advanced methodologies employed by the criminals we pursue. What has remained constant in combating counterfeiting, however, is the effectiveness of consumer education initiatives that urge merchants and customers to examine the security features on the notes they receive."

Although less than 1/100th of one percent of the value of all U.S. currency in circulation is reported counterfeit, the $100 note is the most widely circulated and most often counterfeited denomination outside the U.S.

“The $100 is the highest value denomination that we issue, and it circulates broadly around the world,” said Michael Lambert, Assistant Director for Cash at the Federal Reserve Board. “Therefore, we took the necessary time to develop advanced security features that are easy for the public to use in everyday transactions, but difficult for counterfeiters to replicate.”

“The advanced security features we’ve included in the new $100 note will hinder potential counterfeiters from producing high-quality fakes that can deceive consumers and merchants,” said Larry R. Felix, Director of the Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing. “Protect yourself - it only takes a few seconds to check the new $100 note and know it’s real.”

The new design for the $100 note retains three effective security features from the previous design: the portrait watermark of Benjamin Franklin, the security thread, and the color-shifting numeral 100.

The new $100 note also displays American symbols of freedom, including phrases from the Declaration of Independence and the quill the Founding Fathers used to sign this historic document. Both are located to the right of the portrait on the front of the note.

The back of the note has a new vignette of Independence Hall featuring the rear, rather than the front, of the building. Both the vignette on the back of the note and the portrait on the front have been enlarged, and the oval that previously appeared around both images has been removed.

For a more detailed description of the redesigned $100 note and its features, visit www.newmoney.gov where you can watch an animated video, click through an interactive note or browse through the multimedia resources for images and B-roll.

*** Ace! is a member of the EducationUSA global educational advising network affiliated with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. We provide free EducationUSA counseling services to students in the northern provinces of Thailand; our faculty of U.S.-trained Test Prep Experts can help you with cost-effective result-driven training programs for SAT-1, SAT-2, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, GED, IELTS etc ***

Cold Stone Creamery Launches in Thailand - perfect timing for HOT season!

Ace! NewsFlash

Cold Stone Creamery Launches in Thailand
U.S. Embassy Helps Welcome Cold Stone Creamery in Thailand

Mrs. Sophia John, wife of U.S. Ambassador Eric John, joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service and Central Restaurants Group Co., Ltd. at the opening ceremony of Cold Stone Creamery, a premium American ice cream chain, at Bangkok’s Central World shopping center on March 29.

Mr. Thiradej Chirathivat, CEO of Central Restaurants Group, welcomed Cold Stone Creamery’s corporate representatives and promised his continuing commitment to providing Thai consumers with world-class products.

The Thai ice cream market is steadily growing and it is now valued at more than US$300 million. Thai consumers are already familiar with a variety of premium ice cream shops that have opened up over the years. This combined with the success of many other Central Restaurants Group partnerships, Cold Stone Creamery is confident that its launch here in Bangkok will be very well received.

Based in Scottsdale Arizona, Cold Stone Creamery is known for its rich flavors and a unique presentation style, which involves mixing different flavors (mix-ins) on a frozen granite stone to create one-of-a-kind ice cream to the customers. Cold Stone Creamery is already operating over 160 international locations, and Bangkok’s Central World outlet is only the first in ten planned to be opened here in Thailand.

*** Ace! is a member of the EducationUSA global educational advising network affiliated with the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State. We provide free EducationUSA counseling services to students in the northern provinces of Thailand; our faculty of U.S.-trained Test Prep Experts can help you with cost-effective result-driven training programs for SAT-1, SAT-2, TOEFL, GRE, GMAT, GED, IELTS etc ***