Last year Venezuelan chef, María Fernanda Di Giacobbe won the inaugural Basque Culinary World Prize for her tireless efforts in helping to improve the Venezuelan culture through gastronomy.

With this year’s nominations being processed, The Staff Canteen spoke to the pioneering chef to find out more about how her projects have helped the citizens of Venezuela, what winning the Basque World Prize means to her and why having the ability to cook is more important than being a chef.

“They were experts at making iconic sweets…I was lucky to be raised in a family full of people that cooked,” Maria said recalling how her father and aunties taught her how to make Venezuelan sweets whilst she was growing up.

In 1990 the family opened their first restaurant and at one point managed 16 small cafes throughout Caracas. But due to the national oil strike in 2002, which destroyed most of the country’s economy, they were forced to close all but one of the restaurants.

Around this time Maria set off to Barcelona to attend a chocolate exhibition, a trip that would change her life, unbeknownst to the chef at the time.

She said: “I was surprised to see how these prestige chocolate label brands showed pictures of Chuao (the Venezuela producer zone) as proof of their quality. In their talks, Italian chocolatiers told how Venezuelan cacao was one of the best in the world.”

She added: “I went back to Venezuela, and with the family restaurants closed I had the aim of transforming my life and starting a bomboneria where we could share this famous cacao that was highly prized and yet quite difficult for others to get hold of.”

Soon after Maria celebrated the grand opening of her first stand-alone chocolate shop, Kakao in her hometown of Caracas. Inspired by her family’s confectionary background, the sweet shop paired the prized Criollo cacao beans with childhood candies such as candied fruits and jellies.

“To eat them is to have a mouth filled with wonderful flavours - traces of our fruits, liquors, spices, from a whole range of traditional and new recipes.”

This, in turn, inspired a new project aimed at promoting the Venezuelan cacao tradition by working with cacao producers and chocolatiers. This new venture, Cacao de Origen, would greatly help the citizens of Venezuela whose economical state was in tatters.

“This multi-layered enterprise aims to preserve the vast diversity of Venezuelan cacao and to produce unique chocolate products from ‘Bean to Bar’.”

She added: “the cacao has been central to our evolution as a country and is a major part of our identity as citizens. It’s everywhere in our stories, culture and religion.”

At a time when unemployment was at its lowest, Cacao de Origen gave Maria the opportunity to help teach the women of Caracas about chocolate production so they could become their own entrepreneurs.

She said: “Invigorated by new skills, they, in turn, fanned out to their wider communities and taught other women what they’d learned.”

She continued: “The possibility of this domino effect, and then seeing it begin to happen, spurred me on to open and develop Cacao de Origen as a training space that teaches women how to transform cocoa beans into chocolate.”

Starting out with a few chocolate workshops in Barlovento and Altos Mirandinos, with around 30 women and a few men, the venture soon began to grow. Working with culinary schools and universities, thousands of women now work in the profession with most of these making a living as their very own businessperson.

“Together we opened more and more spaces for the cacao and the chocolate, including investigation, experimentation and elaboration, conversations, and debates. They have allowed a deepening of our chocolate industry and created opportunities for the present and the future of Venezuela,” explained Maria.

It’s this evolution that has helped many from a poverty-stricken country support their families which, in turn, ultimately led to Maria being nominated for the prestigious Basque Culinary World Prize. A competition that celebrates those that have created a positive impact on society through their entrepreneurial work.

“In Venezuela, we are tremendously thankful to the Basque Culinary World Prize for the trust that they are giving us. We will carry the light, brought by this Prize, to hundreds of entrepreneurs, producers and chocolatiers, and turn it into schools, enthusiasm and work.”

Maria was selected from a group of 20 finalists to win the prize which is judged by some of the most renowned chefs in the world including Joan Roca, Ferran Adrià, Dominique Crenn, Heston Blumenthal and Massimo Bottura.

But how has winning The Basque Culinary World Prize helped Maria and the Venezuelan community?

Maria explained, “Winning the prize has merged several areas of our activity allowing us to move cacao and chocolate more freely across Venezuela.”

She continued: “Winning the prize has also brought our endeavours to the attention of a global audience and that is beneficial for raising awareness, creating demand and opening up global markets for the future.”

Nominations for this year’s prize have already come to a close but who will follow in Maria’s footsteps?

When asked what she values right now in the gastronomical community, Maria simply said: “It’s not important to be a chef, what matters is to be a cook.”

>>> Read more about The Basque Culinary World Prize here

By Michael Parker

@canteenparker