Casa cacao Chocolate nougat with almonds

In 2020, with «Casa Cacao», Jordi Roca (pastry chef at Celler de Can Roca, a 3 Michelin star restaurant owned by the Roca brothers, Joan, Josep and Jordi), realizes his dream, not to open a simple chocolate factory, but a place where you can study, work cocoa and taste chocolate. Jordi Roca with Casa Cacao does not just want to produce chocolate, he wants to create culture: to explain to those who love chocolate that there are many varieties of cocoa and that there are many ways to process and consume it. The idea behind Casa Cacao is to embark on a journey that begins on the plantation and ends in the hands of those lucky enough to taste Casa Cacao's chocolate. Casa Cacao, located in Plaza Catalunya, in the center of Girona, is a boutique hotel, consisting of a hotel, a boutique, a chocolate atelier, a café. Casa cacao is not just a hotel, it is also above all a chocolate laboratory having to process the cocoa turning it into chocolate, and a boutique where you can buy and taste the products of the chocolate shop. On the upper floors of Casa Cacao, there are fifteen rooms and a splendid terrace with a breathtaking view over the old town of Girona, where guests can have breakfast or enjoy all the cocoa products produced on the ground floor, where the reign of Jordi Roca. On the ground floor of Casa Cacao there is the chocolate factory, the open laboratory, the bar, the shop. Large windows allow you to observe the work of the laboratory where starting from the cocoa beans are made chocolate bars, chocolates, drinks (hot and cold), and many other chocolate-based products, of course. Opening Casa cacao required a lot of study, research and commitment. Jordi Roca, has traveled around the world in search of the finest aromatic cocoa beans to be skilfully processed to transform them into a superb chocolate. The cocoa beans selected by Casa cacao come from plantations in Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, India and the Dominican Republic. Jordi Roca's team has totally immersed themselves in the world of cocoa. Jordi Roca and his collaborators selected the finest cocoa beans by visiting the best cocoa plantations cared for by growers from small communities in Peru, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. In the plantations, the Casa Cacao team learned many details about the fermentation and drying process of the cocoa beans directly from the women and men who continue to produce it with ancestral methods, such as the community of Awajun in Peru that collects the cocoa fruits that they grow wild in the Amazon, and the Arhuacos community in the Sierra Nevada in Colombia. Casa cacao, buys the cocoa it uses to produce its chocolate directly from the farmers, without intermediaries, remunerating them fairly. Jordi Roca's goal is to enhance the different nature of cocoa beans and to enclose it in chocolate bars and other products that enhance the characteristics of each variety of beans. Each origin shows one of the thousand faces of cocoa. The differences in the soil in which it grew, in the climate that influenced its growth, in the work of the farmer on the soil and on the plant and the differences in fermentation and drying are perceptible in every single creation of Casa cacao.