Chocolate in Context

Zingerman's Chocolate 6, with Whipped Cream

2009-10-26T22:30:00.002-05:00

A very, very, very special thanks to Duff, the Chocolate Lady from Ann Arbor, Michigan. In the last of six inspired posts, she takes Chocolate in Context to the Zingerman's Roadhouse:

The Magic Brownie Sundae is the chocolate dessert you must order when you go to Zingerman’s Roadhouse. Although the choice will be difficult (there are lots of great house-made desserts on the menu), do not waver. When your server asks you if you saved room for dessert the answer should be a resounding "Yes!" followed by: "I would like a Magic Brownie Sundae."

The Magic Brownie Sundae is built around the iconic Magic Brownie from Zingerman’s Bakehouse – a no-nonsense, dark chocolate brownie with toasted walnuts that many people swear by. First, the brownie is warmed (sigh). Then, it is covered with scoops of fluffy, wonderful vanilla gelato from Zingerman’s Creamery, a generous dousing of house-made Scharffen Berger chocolate sauce, whipped cream and toasted pecans.

You and your dinner-mates will probably react like five-year-olds when you see the sundae arrive - breaking into silly grins and squirming in your seats. You might even shriek! Something about the whipped cream piled up just looks like fun – like the dessert of your childhood dreams. But no matter how childish you might feel when initially faced with the most perfect dessert on the planet, when you take your first bite you will quickly realize that this is a very grown-up treat.

Zingerman's Chocolate 5: Zzang!

2009-10-18T16:27:00.003-05:00

I wonder if it's possible to use the word "penultimate" without sounding pretentious. I'll give it a shot. Herein, I give you the penultimate installment of chocolate advice from Duff Anderson at Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan (Duff's final contribution to Chocolate in Context will run next week):

Although Charlie Frank has been making Zzang! bars at Zingerman's Bakehouse for a few years now, he just recently launched his own company – Zingerman's Candy Manufactory. This newly minted company is the eighth business in the Zingerman's Community of Businesses.

Announcement of the Zingerman’s Candy Manufactury is clap-your-hands, dance-at-your-desk news for all of us devotees of full-flavored confectionery because it means that great candy/combination bars are going to get a second run at the American palate.

There are a slew of candy bars out there, but there really aren't any great ones. Charlie and the Zingerman's Candy Manufactory are out to change that. Charlie wants "to make candy the original way, like it was 100 years ago." This means great ingredients, small batches, and traditional techniques.

Currently, Charlie is making three candy bars – the Zzang! Original, the Ca$hew Cow and the What the Fudge. While all three are super tasty, the Zzang! Original is my favorite. Fluffy honey nougat, a generous scoop of Spanish peanuts, muscovado brown sugar caramel and dark chocolate. This is something you Need. To. Eat. This. Year. In Ann Arbor, you can find Charlie's candy bars for sale at Zingerman's Deli, Roadhouse, Creamery and Bakehouse. Don't live in Ann Arbor? Do not despair! The Zzang! bars are available through Mail Order, and at a growing number of retailers around the country.

Zingerman's Chocolate 4: Darling Clementines

2009-10-13T00:10:00.002-05:00

I bought three hundred dollars worth of groceries last week, including an entire tempting box of clementines. I must admit, though, Duff Anderson's latest chocolatey recommendation from Zingerman's is a bit more tempting:

Zingerman's Mail Order: Chocolate covered Clementines from Italy

The ultimate indulgence at Zingerman’s Mail Order this time of year is the box of Chocolate Covered Clementines from Italy. One of many foodstuffs that Zingerman's imports from Calabria - a southern province known for hot peppers, preserved figs and great citrus – the arrival of the clementines is especially exciting for chocolate lovers because they are candied and covered in chocolate (Gasp!).

You read it right. These fresh Italian clementines (the darling of the citrus family) are soaked in a bath of simple syrup, cut into quarters, then dipped in dark chocolate. Since the whole fruit is candied, peel and all, the clementines end up sweet and perfectly bitter. Each chocolate covered clementine wedge is the size of a large chocolate truffle, eatable in one bite or two. If you are trying to avoid a mess, I suggest one bite (they are very juicy).

The chocolate covered clementines are available October-February only. Have a friend whose family hails from southern Italy? Tired of the polite, French candied orange-in-dark-chocolate combinations and want something that will dribble down your chin? Wondering what you can contribute to the holiday parties coming quickly around the bend? A box of crazy-good clementines from Italy is the answer. Call Zingerman's Mail Order at 1-888-636-8162 and order a box today!

Zingerman's Chocolate 3: Hot Cocoa Coffee Cake

2009-10-04T15:42:00.003-05:00

Zingerman's Chocolate Lady Duff returns with yet another seasonal suggestion from the Midwest:

The hot cocoa cake is one of a triumvirate of unbelievably good coffee cakes made by Zingerman’s Bakehouse. Available all year long, this is (in my opinion) the not-to-be-missed chocolate goodie at the Bakehouse.

Neither as well known as the Magic Brownie nor as flashy as the Hunka Burnin’ Love chocolate cake, the hot cocoa cake is easy to overlook. But from one chocolate lover to another I tell you: This is it – the must-have chocolate dessert at the Bakehouse.

I love the hot cocoa coffeecake for three reasons:

1. It is the ultimate day-night dessert. You can definitely get away with ordering a slice in the morning to go with your coffee, but you can also serve it warm with fresh whipped cream to discerning dinner guests. It is unassuming, yet impressive.

2. It’s got body, baby! It has all the texture of a moist, dense coffeecake with big chunks of chocolate baked throughout. Let me tell you, running into one of those chunks is pretty fabulous.

3. It isn’t just sweet, it is flavorful. The Bakehouse uses great ingredients like real butter, fresh eggs, natural cocoa powder (from Scharffen Berger), real vanilla and a dash of espresso to give this cake lots of great flavor.

The good news is that if you try the hot cocoa cake and love it, you can try the Bakehouse’s other great coffee cakes, too – Sourcream, Lemon Poppyseed, Gingerbread (fall/winter) and Summer Fling (spring/summer). All the coffee cakes are available by the slice at the Deli, Roadhouse or Bakehouse and available in a cute mini (nosher) bundt cake or a full (fresser) bundt cake online at www.zingermans.com!

Zingerman's Chocolate 2: Dark Chocolate Gelato at Zingerman's Creamery

2009-09-27T12:01:00.003-05:00

It's a cold and rainy fall weekend in Pittsburgh, but some friends of mine countered the impending gloom last night by cranking up the ice cream maker and inviting people over. The folks at Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, do exactly the same thing every day.

In the second of several installments from the Midwestern foodie giant, Zingerman's Chocolate Lady Duff returns to recommend:

In addition great fresh cream cheese and goat cheese, Zingerman’s Creamery's (est. 2001) unbelievable Sicilian-style gelato. My favorite is the Dark Chocolate. It is super dense and not too sweet, like perfectly chilled chocolate mousse.

Gelato is ice cream’s distant Italian cousin - variations in the ingredients, process and serving style of gelato give it a unique texture and flavor. At Zingerman’s Creamery, we use milk from a local dairy – Calder Dairy – to make each batch of gelato. With great milk as the first ingredient in the Dark Chocolate Gelato, we’re already off to a good start! Then we add a hefty dose of natural, unsweetened cocoa powder from Scharffen Berger, a little sugar, give it a spin in our single-batch gelato machine and voila! The best chocolate gelato this side of The Pond.

Zingerman’s Creamery and Zingerman’s Deli stock the Dark Chocolate Gelato year-round, so you can stop by and try a spoonful anytime. But here is the real news. During the month of February – and February only - the Creamery makes a bunch of extra special chocolate gelati. Chocolate Balsamic Strawberry, Turtle, Rocky Ride, Chocolate Heat... I look forward to February all year just for the arrival of these flavors. And for me to say that I look forward to the fourth of six long months of winter in Michigan should give you an indication of how great these chocolate gelati really are! Maybe you want to strategically plan a mid-winter visit to Ann Arbor?

Zingerman's Chocolate: El Rustico Askinosie Bar at Zingerman's Deli

2009-09-20T23:26:00.004-05:00

This has been a long day. In fact, it's already 12:30am. That's frightening, since what still feels like tomorrow promises to be an even longer day. So I think I'll turn things over post haste to Duff Anderson from the foodie haven Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her official title is "Chocolate Lady."

This is the first of several installments reporting on the state of chocolate at the various Zingerman's location around Ann Arbor (including the famous Deli, the Bakehouse, and the Creamery). I'd like to especially thank Duff for sending her report from the front during a hectic Jewish Holiday sandwich-making extravaganza (while, she tells me, she was also working on Zingerman's annual Paella Party).

I give you, Duff:

Last February, Zingerman’s Deli and Askinosie Chocolate launched El Rustico Chocolate Bar, inspired by the traditional foodways of the vanilla-growing regions of Mexico. We named it El Rustico – the rustic one – a Mexican style chocolate bar with delicate bits of whole vanilla bean.

There isn’t anything else like this bar out there in the chocolate universe right now. I proclaim this with a little bit of a proud-mommy complex (I helped develop it) but mostly as a completely objective observer!

We did no conching and very little refining on this chocolate, which gives it a really nice, crystalline texture. We are using Askinosie’s bean-to-bar Soconusco Mexican cacao to make El Rustico, partly because there is much great choco-history in that region (the Aztec’s sourced their cacao there) but mostly because we love its flavor!

But we didn’t stop there. We decided to sprinkle the bar with tiny morsels of super supple, hand-chopped (by yours truly and a very patient chef at the Deli) whole vanilla bean. Now, using whole bean vanilla (including the pod) in a chocolate bar – to amp up both flavor and texture – is crazy and delicious. So crazy and delicious, in fact, that no one else is doing it.

Askinosie Chocolate and Zingerman’s Deli are about to begin production on the next batch of El Rustico (the first batch sold out!), so you should see it back on the Deli shelves sometime in October. The bar will also be available online at www.askinosie.com.

Virginian Chocolate

2009-09-06T17:48:00.003-05:00

In July, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists engaged in an ongoing debate on the Association for the Study of Food and Society listserv about the definitions of and differences between the words criolla and criollo. One respondent argued that both are (differently gendered) versions of the same adjective derived from the Portuguese Brazilian crioulo, and someone else surmised that "criollo in general refers to someone born in the Western Hemisphere to parents who came from Spain" while "criolla refers to grapes (aka 'mission grapes') brought to California (and other places in the Western Hemisphere) by the Spanish in the 16th century and planted there for the purpose of wine-making." My own contribution to the conversation was that

As high-end chocolate becomes more mainstream, marketers like to draw attention to criollo cacao beans (as opposed to forastero and trinitario beans, though, as several people have already mentioned, cacao plants are naturally genetically intermixed) as the "purest" and "finest" cacao--that is certainly an oversimplification. A couple of facts that challenge/complicate that characterization: 1. Juan C. Motamayor has actually proposed that there are ten rather than three "genetic clusters" of cacao, in his paper "Geographic and Genetic Population Differentiation of the Amazonian Chocolate Tree (Theobroma cacao L)" (http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0003311), and 2. My own experience in rural Guatemala was that people used the term to refer to cacao that came from trees that were wild and that they believed to be of inferior quality (whether that cacao would turn out to be genetically "criollo" is not clear to me), as opposed to "hibridos," known hybrids (often introduced in the 1940s or 50s, I believe, by the United Fruit Company) that they understood to be superior.

Implicit in my argument is is the assumption that the word the chocolate industry is concerned with is criollo, not criolla.

Brothers Tim and Matt Gearhart either disagree or are misinformed. Quite possibly, they simply don't care about semantics. The signature bon bon at their Gearhart's chocolate shop in Charlottesville, VA, is the "Criolla": a ganache of El Rey couverture and Shenandoah cream, combined with cacao nibs. The Gearharts treat chocolate the way that winemakers in the Jeffersonian stomping ground of the "Monticello Region" that surrounds Charlottesville treat grapes--they turn out a good product without self-consciousness or pretension.

In addition to the Criolla, former Marine cook Tim Gearhart makes fifteen other confections (Matt handles the business end), including maple pecan candies, an earl grey bon bon I'd like to make another trip for, and an orange-, cinnamon-, and ancho chile-infused ganache that borrows a lot of its flavor from the Green & Black's Maya Gold bar. The second Gearhart's location is scheduled to open in Richmond later this month.

Grad School Chocolate: Down and Dirty Sacher Torte

2009-08-06T15:13:00.005-05:00

This is the life of a graduate student: I sit in front of this computer trying to catch the juice from a farm-fresh peach topped with mascarpone and honey before any combination thereof drops onto the expensive camera that I've neglected for at least six months, which I've connected to this computer now so that I can finally upload those backlogged photos, load it up anew, and use some of those new photos on this blog. I have no doubt that this objectively appears to be a pretty sweet deal to the guy who's been climbing around on my roof all day re-laying neglected bricks on my crumbling chimney. But it is subjectively quite arduous for me. I have mentioned that I'm working on my MFA thesis. Long, long days of procrastination. Less time perfecting the production of this blog. But a fellow grad student breezed through town last weekend and helped me whip up one of my favorite desserts in under an hour: Sacher torte. I pulled a recipe from the February 2002 issue of Bon Appetit out of a pile, but the original recipe calls for several hours of baking, assembly, and general patient waiting. Here's the grad student version:

Buy a "Pound Plus" bar from Trader Joe's.
General Note: I move into my final year of graduate school a big fan of the local Trader Joe's. Twice in one week, I have ended my morning run (a new, productive development) at Trader Joe's where I bought supplies for lunch (today: a box of quinoa, a guacamole kit, and some tofu: in a recipe vaguely inspired by 101 Cookbooks, I cooked the quinoa with some ginger and some of the jalapeno from the kit, then topped it with cubed avocado and tofu and some soy sauce and sesame oil). But I digress. Even before I was a fan of Trader Joe's, I was a fan of Trader Joe's private label chocolate--I've liked the stuff since I saw it at the San Francisco Chocolate Salon. (I'm not sure who makes it, but they do a good job.) Allow me to stand on a soapy chocolate box for a moment: talk of chocolate has become very elevated in the past 24 months, but I find it helpful to think that there are three large categories of chocolate: bad, good, and really damn good--when you have the time to spend thinking about the nuances of the flavor profiles and the money to pay for it get the really damn good stuff, otherwise eat good chocolate and enjoy it. Trader Joe's sells you over a pound of good chocolate for about four bucks.

When you get home, preheat the oven to 350. Melt about two thirds of the Trader Joe's bar in a double boiler (it helps if you're doing this on a hot day and the chocolate is already soft by the time you get home)--once it's melted remove it from the heat. Then prepare two nine-inch-diameter cake pans (or the closest thing to it) by buttering them, cutting out two rounds of baking paper to insert inside each pan, and buttering over the paper (I suppose you could skip this step if you don't have the paper--just butter the pans really well). Then separate 8 eggs, leaving both the yolks and the whites in large mixing bowls. Whisk the yolks together with a stick of butter melted in the microwave (cooled slightly, if possible) and a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Add a large pinch of salt to the egg whites and beat them with the appropriate electric device, then gradually add 3/4 cup of sugar and keep beating until the whites are stiff but not dried out. Quickly whip up a cake batter by alternately folding portions (about 1/4 of the total in each portion) of the egg white mixture and sifted portions (again about 1/4 each time) of 1 cup of sifted flour into the chocolate, until everything is combined. Dump the batter into the pans, dividing it as evenly as possible, then throw the pans in the oven. Bake for 20 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean.

Make sure you have some good jam on hand, for later.

Now, throw together a glaze by mixing about 2/3 of the remaining Trader Joe's chocolate, 1 and 1/2 cups whipping cream, 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar, and about 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of light corn syrup in a pot and bringing the mixture to a boil; then reduce the heat to a simmer and keep it going for five minutes. Whisk an egg in a bowl, pour in a bit of the chocolate mixture, whisking continuously, then add the contents of the bowl back to the pot; keep the glaze-in-progress over low heat, whisking, until it thickens but doesn't boil. Remove from heat. Add a cavalier dash of vanilla extract, whisk. Don't worry about cooling the glaze.

Twenty minutes should have gone by by now, so pull the cakes out of the oven. Since you're not going to cool them, they might be puffy and/or lumpy, but you're going to assemble a layer cake that looks a bit like a hamburger--ah, well. Invert the first cake (so that the flat, bottom, side is facing up) onto a cake plate or a regular plate. Smear a lot of jam on top. Wriggle the second cake out of its pan so that you can place it, flat/bottom-side-down on top of the other cake. Pour the glaze over the top with as much grace as you have the energy for--it's okay if you have a glaze puddle on the plate, but spoon or sponge some off if it starts to overflow.

The Sacher torte was absolutely delicious--only a few more hours of staring blankly at the computer before I can serve up the leftovers. I'm going to run downstairs right now to take pictures of what remains of the cake. I'll include one at the top of this post. And I'll even upload a selection from those months-old neglected photos to the new Chocolate in Context Facebook page.

Enjoy!

Pittsburgh to New York: Pickled Chocolate

2009-07-16T06:13:00.004-05:00

I was almost inadvertently in New York this past weekend, and though Amy Rosenfield of the local-to-me-now-in-Pittsburgh shop Mon Aimee Chocolat had some good Brooklyn chocolate suggestions (Nunu, Liddabit, Fine and Raw, the Mast Brothers) and I stumbled upon the West Village headquarters of the smoke-and-mirrors operation Pure Dark (with overstuffed chairs, products of unnecessarily mysterious provenance, and meaningless slogans like "Chocolate Harvested from Nature"), I found myself eating many more pickles (pickled peppers at the Spuyten Duyvil, horseradish pickles at the DUMBO farmers market) than chocolate bars, so it seems only fitting to run this leftover interview with Rick Field of New York-based Rick's Picks about pickles and Pittsburgh. (I have little recollection of how or why Rick and I got into this conversation and whether or not any of it is true, but, then, I'm interested in the themes of truth and memory in nonfiction writing.)

Emily: Let’s go, tell me about the pickle hat.

Rick: It’s not covered in chocolate, though.

It’s alright, give it a try.

Alright, so I went to a wedding in Pittsburgh. It was an interesting weekend. There was a convention of muscle, um, body builders there, all covered with cocoa butter.

Mm.

So every time we went down in the elevator, we experienced these enormously overdefined people with gross cappuccino-colored skin, all greasy and basically naked. We needed some relief, and we went to Pittsburgh’s noteworthy vintage and used clothing arena and I was fortunate enough to find a beautiful large green felt hat, which was a good thing for me to find because I am in the pickle business...

A pickle impresario, some might say…

Yes, and I thought that this hat could be something that I could really become known for. So I wore the hat for the balance of the weekend and received many compliments and enjoyed wearing it. Sunday, I returned to the Pittsburgh airport after the wedding was over in a cab, and was somewhere between consciousness and sleep for most of the cab ride, and got out of the cab, paid the guy, went to check in, got to security, and realized I’d left my hat in the cab.

Aaaah!

So, of course, since it wasn’t a business trip, I didn’t have a receipt, so I called the cab company—I believe it was Ace Cab of Pittsburgh—and asked them if they knew where my hat was. They said, “well, did you get a receipt? Do you know what cab it was?” And I said “no, I don’t.” I said, “good god, man, you must put out an APB to all cabs! Find the green hat.” And about two minutes later somebody called back and said that they did have my hat in their cab and they would return it, but the hat had to come back to the airport at human pricing. So I agreed that the driver would turn the meter on and my hat was brought back to the airport for twenty-eight dollars, thirty with tip. And I recovered my hat and it was a very happy ending. And that’s the story of how a thirty-dollar-wedding-weekend-hat became a sixty-dollar-wedding-weekend-hat.

Can Anyone Write a Better Chocolate Book than Sophie Coe?

2009-07-09T23:06:00.004-05:00

I met with one of the members of my thesis committee yesterday, and she told me that "you've done enough reading. It's clear. You don't have to do any more. Please stop." I'd just turned in forty pages chronicling my adventures and misadventures with chocolate in Guatemala--forty pages which referenced Richard Rodriguez, Joan Didion, Daniel Chacón, and, of course, Sophie and Michael Coe. In my experience, any magazine article, quirky novel, or scholarly monograph about chocolate inevitably draws on the culinary-historical-archaeological synthesis in the Coes' The True History of Chocolate. That's because the culinary-historian-and-archaeologist couple, who drew the title of their book from Bernal Díaz del Castillo's The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, were meticulous about going back to and making sense of the primary texts about the chocolate-related intersection of European and American cultures: Díaz, Thomas Gage, Fray Bernardino de Sahugún. Marcy Norton, a historian at George Washington University, sets out to build on or redirect that true chocolate history in Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. The pairing is less familiar to our modern minds than coffee and cigarettes, but Norton's concern is that the two new-world products cacao and tobacco migrated to and transformed the old world simultaneously. "The question that drives this book," she explains, is, "What, exactly, did it mean for Europeans--bound as they were to an ideology that insisted on their religious and cultural supremacy--to become consumers of goods that they knew were so enmeshed in the religious practices of the pagan 'savages' whom they had conquered?"

Norton's attempt to intertwine the cultural and psychotropic stories of cacao and tobacco is compelling, but the book often seems to be an amalgam of already studied and published facts. She doesn't have a terrible amount of evidence to suggest that the link between the her two colonial commodities was anything more than theoretical, and her comparisons are often strained and repetitive. In the absence of a more concrete relationship, the book might have benefited from more creative juxtapositions. For example, Norton mentions that "[w]hen Indians on the island of Hispaniola (probably) offered Columbus a bouquet of dried tobacco leaves, it did not stimulate great excitement," but she misses the opportunity to draw a connection to the explorer's similarly blasé response to cacao. In The True History of Chocolate, the Coes write that "the first European encounter with cacao took place when Columbus, on his fourth and final voyage, came across a great Maya trading canoe with cacao beans amongst its cargo," and they later provide an account of the contents of the canoe (including the cacao beans or "almonds") written by Ferdinand Columbus, the explorer's son:

For their provisions they had such roots and grains as are eaten in Hispaniola, and a sort of wine made out of maize which resembled English beer; and many of those almonds which in New Spain are used for money. They seemed to hold these almonds at a great price; for when they were brought on board ship together with their goods, I observed that when any of these almonds fell, they all stooped to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen.

The definitive history, it would seem, is the Coes' history. Even Norton suggests, in a footnote to her introduction, that "[f]or a synthesis on pre-Columbian chocolate, see Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (London: Thames and Hudson 1996), 11-104." She goes on to mention that "[s]ince the publication of the True History, there has been a boom in pre-Columbian chocolate studies, well represented by the contributions in Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao."

I came home from my meeting yesterday and read a good portion of the Chocolate in Mesoamerica anthology, edited by Cameron L. McNeil (who references the Coes in her first paragraph), which includes specialized articles about the Sonconusco region of Guatemala and about the uses of the alien-spacecraft-like cacao-relative pataxte. But then I did stop reading--I had to, in order to start writing.

Novel Guatemalan Chocolate: Who Is Carlos Eichenberger?

2009-03-29T14:28:00.004-05:00

Well, for one thing, he's the guy who gave me a ride from Guatemala City to my old hometown of Antigua the day after I spoke about this blog at the first (annual?) symposium on cacao hosted by the organization FundaSistemas in December of 2008. The focus of the conference was how to increase the tonnage of cacao exported from Guatemala by a factor of at least several hundred and thereby speed up economic and political development in the country. That's a process I would be fascinated to observe, but I'm reluctant to suggest that I have either a position to take regarding how to do it or expertise in advising anyone else to take up such a position. I am always happy, though, to talk about the nuanced implications of producing and consuming the materials in the developing and developed world that fuel the (increasingly international) small-scale artisanal chocolate industry.

I've been doing a lot of research in Guatemala over the past year on exactly that subject, though I haven't written much about it. In the midst of conducting a Top Secret Project about the Revival of Chocolate in the Ancient Maya Birthplace of Chocolate, I found that there were several other people doing the same thing. But, as I've mentioned recently, being the first person to the story isn't all that important to me. The literary world's general reverence of Proust, for example, (whom I still have not actually read) has little to do with the notion that he was the first person to remember things past. So, I figured, if other people want to talk about chocolate in Guatemala, let them have at it.

That said, I might as well speak up from time to time. So here goes: Carlos Eichenberger, of Danta Chocolate, is producing a bean-to-bar chocolate in the country of origin, in this case, Guatemala. When I met him at the symposium last year, he was buying beans through a broker. I introduced him to the owner of a farm called las Acacias in the Guatemala/Mexico border area often referred to (among chocolate fanatics) as "Soconusco" (Shawn Askinosie produces a Soconusco bar). I haven't had a chance to try one of Danta's Acacias bars yet, but I've had Carlos's chocolate and I've had las Acacias beans. Both are some of the finest specimens of their kind. The combination is a novelty worth writing about: Danta mentioned on the Chocolate Life, Danta mentioned in El Periodico.

Chocolate Month: February Musings

2009-01-29T10:06:00.010-05:00

I started the year by looking simultaneously backward and forward. Such a back-and-forth glance is an expression not only of my general inability to catch up but of the inherent tension at work here between journalistic and imaginative instincts. Put another way, novelty is overrated while renewal (while nearly impossible) is inspired. So, for the second month in a row, I will attempt to reinvigorate resources from years past.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Tim McCollum at Madecasse, asking about their "tree-to-bean-to-bar" chocolate made in Madagascar. My response is that I savored each carefully packaged and labeled sample that Tim sent but I undermined the scientific tasting process by indulging myself in them before bed, letting the 63-70% products mingle among the books on my nightstand. I will say that I agree with all of the characterizations of the chocolate that Tim included in his letter to me: the not-yet-released 75% is more subtly roasted (and thus packs a more nuanced flavor) than the currently-available 75%, and the 67% is the most impressive of the lot. If asked to give my own analysis, I would say that the 67% has a flavor that unexpectedly suggests raspberries. However, I'm reluctant to take that kind of tastes-like cataloging any further today. My reasons lie in the conclusion to the ekphrastic essay by poet Mark Doty Still Life with Oysters and Lemon:

What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing.

Metaphor expands, embodies creativity. Clinical explanation reduces, boils down insight to keywords. To call my taste experience "raspberry" is the opposite of rendering the inchoate, ineffable sensory experience of tasting in metaphor. I would rather say it sent me moving through a viscous somnambulance. You can invent the raspberries on your own.

I've received a number of other tidings since the beginning of 2009, among them, word of stalwart Valrhona's naming of San Francisco chocolatier Michael Recchiuti as their American chocolate "ambassador," timed to the release of what I understand are some brand new blends and bars. (Recchiuti, along with a lovely Guatemalan cacao farmer named Neto Porras and several other chocolate professionals in several countries, no doubt has come to the conclusion that I'm either deeply disturbed or deeply ungrateful since I've been utterly out of touch since our last meetings--please accept my apology, guys--I was just looking for the right words.) Amano has a new chocolate (in new packaging) too: it's called Jembrana. The sultry New Orleans chocolatiers Sucre sent me an early Valentine: a box packed with half a dozen ganache-filled hearts. And Ten Speed press sent up a flair about their new publication, called Give the Bitch Back Her Chocolate. It's a series of word-and-vintage-image pairings, most more sleazy than seductive, and I hope you won't make such a very direct connection between this writer and that title, but the collection give me a wonderful image to ruminate on.

As I take another look back, I recall that Scharffen Berger (whose Ibex logo has served as my muse cast in chocolate) announced its sale to Hershey within days of me starting this blog over three years ago. This post is timed to the news that Hershey will close the beloved Berkeley plant. I mourn the loss absolutely, but prefer to focus on smaller pleasures. Like metaphors that may or may not include raspberries.

New Year, Old Bread, Claudio Corallo Chocolate, and Coconut Oil

2009-01-01T10:38:00.004-05:00

A while ago--I can't remember exactly when, but I can tell you it was another year--a man who had recently left his family's scrap metal business to pursue a career as a scrap metal sculptor asked me what I wanted in life. "I want to always have new experiences," I said. "And I want to have a constant sense of who I am and what I'm doing."

"Are you listening to yourself?" this guy asked me. "How can you always be doing something new and be constant?"

By harvesting contraction, I suppose. And by recognizing the human willingness to become trapped in such contradiction. I'm leery of announcing that I want anything in particular for or from the year 2009 (and yet this very writing suggests that I am somehow compelled to announce that very thing), but what I want hasn't changed much since that conversation with the sculptor: change, consistency. And, in fact, I have the same plans for Chocolate in Context, as the blog moves from 2008 into 2009. I'll still be writing about chocolate as it relates to cooking, travel, society, pleasure, pain, and other things. I'll make announcements, changes, regular updates, irregular updates. I'll rest comfortably on what I've already done, and then do something uncomfortably different.

As you, reader, look forward to everything new in 2009, you'll no doubt have to rely on a couple of things that are old as well. As you begin to think through that contradiction, I recommend that you whip up a batch of Lunatic French Toast, developed by Robinson Crusoe-esque chocolate maker Claudio Corallo (he lives on the volcanic African islands of Sao Tome and Principe). The recipe calls for coconut oil (which gives the breakfast dish a wildness that's almost symbolic) and "old-ish bread," which you may have left over from 2008. Claudio Corallo's US distributor, James Clark (whom I interviewed a few months ago) generously shared the recipe:

Lunatic French Toast
1 Egg
1/2 cup milk
Slices of old-ish bread
Coconut oil or butter
Your favorite Claudio Corallo Chocolate

Directions:
Whisk the egg and milk together. Heat a heavy skillet and melt some coconut oil or butter in the bottom. Soak your bread in the "custard" and fry gently on both sides over low to medium heat. When each slice is done, remove it from the pan and place on top a piece of chocolate the size of a pat of butter

After a minute or so, the chocolate should be melted enough to spread over the top of your French Toast. You won't need any syrup. If you are using the 100% cacao, you might enjoy sprinkling a tiny bit of granulated sugar on top. Now think about it: your bittersweet chocolate is less insulin-y than a gob of syrup would have been, you have protein from the egg...nutritionally you're set, and if you used coconut oil, you're jammin'. But obviously nobody eats French Toast because it's good for you...

Revise and Conquer: Chocolate Heroes and Heroines

2008-11-14T13:19:00.008-05:00

George Saunders, MacArthur Genius Award winner and a liberal-minded quick-witted model citizen of the 21st century, has written that "the best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker." In the optimistic (despite this semester's "narrating war and protest" theme) and frenetic freshman composition courses that I teach at the University of Pittsburgh, I obsessively quote Saunders, along with the heady and graceful poet/memoirist Patricia Hampl ("it still comes as a shock to realize that I don’t write about what I know, but in order to find out what I know"), and I present revision as the divine route to, if not salvation, at least understanding. At the beginning of the semester, I tell my students that "revision is much more than copy-editing--it is an informed return to a piece of writing, an opportunity not only to refine but to reconsider your writing." Toward the end of the semester (that is, right now), as projects get longer and questions get more complex, I emphasize that "while writers often approach revision as a way of looking back, revising can also be about looking forward."

I don't always follow my own advice. In the free-wheeling rant I posted on this blog a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'm not writing very much right now. What I do write, I don't tend to revise. This semester, I tend to give my work a quick scan, followed by a long sigh, and then I send it off to where it needs to go (this website, a professor's mailbox, an editor's inbox), hoping I won't have to look at it again any time too soon. But what would have happened if I had reread and revised my post about "Barthes and the Chocolate Man"? I might have found that my philosophical bafflement over Roland Barthes was actually the key to a provocatively original analysis (anyone similarly hoping to turn frustration into epiphany may want to consult the heartening textbook for introductory classes much like the one I'm teaching The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, by Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori and Patricia Donahue). I also might have concluded--perhaps more importantly, in this context--that my comment that "while food industry insiders find chocolate to be the greatest thing going, I'm finding the conversation to be a bit banal" was incomplete, worthy of more elaboration. I could have said, instead, that the oversaturated market makes the search for transcendent experiences in chocolate more challenging.

But there are, of course, transcendent experiences to be had. That is, there are still heroes and heroines in the chocolate world. Last weekend, I made my annual trip to the Annual New York Chocolate Show, where I discovered a chocolate-outfitted Wonder Woman, a new(ish) California chocolatier named Christopher Michael (and Food & Wine magazine reports on yet another one: Eclipse Chocolat), and several old friends and allies, including Jeff Shepherd of Lillie Belle Farms, who told me that my purchase of his new "Red Velvet Almonds" would go toward his daughter's college education.

And I've gotten--in addition to bogus chocolate tablets imprinted with PR slogans--some terrific chocolate samples in the mail in the past couple months. Alan McClure of Patric Chocolate sent me his latest 67% and 70% mircobatch Madagascar bars--the stuff is currently more expensive than Valrhona and it's not (yet) as good as Valrhona, but Alan is dedicated enough to get there. The utterly unpretentious staff at Michel Cluizel's US outpost sent me the company's new 85% and 99% "ganaches" (or ganache-filled bon bons), packed tightly into a handy little box that's no bigger than a pocket reference book--the ganache itself was a bit too dry and grainy for my tongue, but the little box is an absolutely delightful marketing feat.

Looking back is useful, helpful, necessary. So is looking forward. Sometimes, you can take your work, rearrange it, make it work better. And sometimes, you have to break the whole structure apart. One of the most vindicating moments of the last month was when a bunch of guys (mostly roboticists and nuclear power plant engineers) whom I invited over to play poker took it upon themselves to forcibly demolish the Axe chocolate tablet.

Barthes and the Chocolate Man

2008-10-30T11:17:00.005-05:00

My decision to start this blog was arbitrary. I liked chocolate, I talked about it in ways (both high and low) that other people didn't seem to, and I had a lot of free time. I imagined that, perhaps more than taste-testing the substance itself, I would write about obscure things peripherally related to chocolate. If the blog had taken that trajectory, I might have sat down sometime over the last month and written about the ludicrous commercial I saw at the cinema, for the new chocolate-scented Axe body spray. I might have written about how--perfectly timed with my viewing of the ad in which women flock to and then consume parts of a man who appears to be made of chocolate--I received an email from a publicist for Axe, telling me that "more than 70 percent of women around the world ranked chocolate as more irresistible than shopping, jewelry or even sex. Based on this insight, AXE created new AXE Dark Temptation, both a bodyspray and a shower gel for guys that is as irresistible as chocolate." (That publicist sent me a box of samples several weeks ago, and I only this moment realized that the box contained not only the shower gel, which I have been using on myself, and the body spray, which I have not, but also an enormous block of chocolate on which the above PR slogan about women, chocolate, and sex is printed.)

However (as regular readers of this blog must have noticed) I've spent the past month writing nothing at all.

Perhaps the reasons for my silence come not from chocolate at all but from an existential crisis about the act of writing itself. But, read another way, that crisis has everything to do with chocolate. At exactly the time that I started this chocolate blogging endeavor a few years ago, the (artisan/artisanal/high-end/origin/high-cacao-content/call-it-what-you-will) chocolate industry and the business of writing about it mushroomed from a sideline fascination into a full-fledged cultural phenomenon. So instead of writing about chocolate-laced advertising campaigns, I started to write about individual pieces of candy, their flavors (or lack thereof), and the importance (or lack thereof) of their cacao percentages. And people read this stuff and wrote back, and I, in turn, kept up the dialogue by writing yet more about the subject. (Even during the month when I wrote nothing here on Chocolate in Context, Imbibe magazine deemed me an expert on the subject--though you'd have to find a hard copy October issue to read it.) Lately, though, while food industry insiders find chocolate to be the greatest thing going, I'm finding the conversation to be a bit banal.

In my mind, the (at least pre-financial-meltdown) astronomical growth of the specialty chocolate market has resulted an extraordinary increase in the production of mediocre chocolate, or products that employ artisan techniques yet have neither the taste nor the generally laudable creativity of the first wave of contemporary American chocolate makers. On my last trip to San Francisco, I asked the astute Seneca Klassen what he thought about all of this. He answered that

There's a fundamental problem with the whole concept of artisan chocolate making at this time, and that is that one of the components that I generally associate with artisanal processes is that they're intergenerational, and that there are skills that are passed down from person to person. And that's been erased over the past hundred years of chocolate's history because of the industrialization of the product. So there aren't people to go ask how to do this stuff. So what does artisan mean, then? So we're at the point where anybody entering this pursuit has to basically start from scratch and cobble together what knowledge they can, however they can, and hopefully build relationships over time that improve that body of knowledge. But it's a pretty weird set up because basically we're all fishing in the dark, trying to achieve really high quality, amazing things, but the results are radically different. And that's only within the small community of people who really give a shit. There's a broader community of people who just want to be able to more effectively market and label their products.

The Axe Chocolate Man is just such a person. I am meant to infer (though this is certainly not what I or anyone watching this ad would actually feel) that this (artificial) image of a man made out of (artificial) chocolate is sexy, or somehow sexier than sex. I'm not talking about chocolate anymore. I'm talking about some kind of body spray that's not made of chocolate and doesn't even smell like chocolate, but rather smells like the very distinctly non-artisan artificial aroma that, as a result of those hundred years of industrialization in the food industry that Seneca referred to, Americans now associate with chocolate. Well, isn't this what I set out to do with this blog anyway? To make sense, as a chocolate fan, of representations of chocolate? Perhaps. But what's the point? "[T]his is the point:" writes Roland Barthes, whom I take entirely out of context, "we are no longer dealing here with a theoretical mode of representation: we are dealing with this particular image, which is given for this particular signification. Mythical speech is made of material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication: it is because all the materials of myth (whether pictorial or written) presuppose a signifying consciousness, that one can reason about them while discounting their substance." Here, I might have been inclined to lapse into an anecdote about my-only-partially successful attempt to fill up my empty writing hours with reading hours and about how I found Barthes's Mythologies to be some combination of useful and baffling. Such an anecdote would have allowed me to wrap my self-deprecating characterization in a bit of classy prose in which I dismiss my inability to apply my reading of Barthes to the Axe ad in anything but the most coincidental of ways. I might have done that, except that, in his essay "Blind and Dumb Criticism" in the same book, Barthes asks,

...But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic? To understand, to enlighten, that is your profession, isn't it? You can of course judge philosophy according to common sense; the trouble is that while 'common sense' and 'feeling' understand nothing about philosophy, philosophy, on the other hand, understands them perfectly. You don't explain philosophers, but they explain you.

Why be a critic, indeed? I don't know, man, but I think it's a question worth my time to figure out. And that might take another month (or more) of not writing about anything. For the moment, I'm resolved to sit here a bit bored and a bit baffled, reading the enormous chocolate tome presented to me by the Axe Chocolate Man. ("Eighty-two perfect agreed that chocolate is a temptation that is hard to resist," it tells me.)

Robert Steinberg

2008-09-24T11:28:00.004-05:00

Robert Steinberg, the San Francisco physician whose own diagnosis of lymphocytic leukemia propelled him into the chocolate business (and eventually into founding Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker with John Scharffenberger in the 1990s), died this week.

In the 2006 cookbook The Essence of Chocolate, Steinberg wrote that

Since we began Scharffen Berger, I've received many letters from people who are coping with an illness of some sort. Whenever I can, I write back. Many of the letters praise my openness about my leukemia as "courageous." But I don't see myself as courageous. Cancer is such a charged topic in our society, it's easy for an illness to become sort of a dynamic event, but not very easy to shrug off the kind of stigma we assign people with cancer. To talk openly about my illness is simply to talk about an integral part of my being. It's kind of hard for me to imagine trying to direct a conversation away from the topic without being closed and mysterious in a way that is foreign to my sense of self. Being open about my leukemia also lets me acknowledge what I know for sure from my years of practicing medicine: every one of us has challenges to face. The deeply felt and beautifully written letters that have been sent to me connect me to people in an unusually personal way. For those who have asked me how to approach life with an illness, I can say this: there are no useful generalizations, but to the extent that your illness and life circumstances allow, try to be yourself and understand that in accepting who you are, you are likely to become more accepting of others. It may not be readily apparent, but that sort of compassion is a reward in itself.

In a tribute on the Scharffen Berger website today, John Scharffenberger wrote that

The chocolate world has lost a great visionary, and I lost a good friend.

I met Robert Steinberg as a friend and neighbor in Mendocino County. It was later, however, as his patient, that I came to recognize his focused and thoughtful intellect. These powers of analysis and investigation set him apart from any doctor that I had encountered and became the basis of my absolute trust in his judgment and taste.

Among many others, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and Serious Eats have run obituaries.

Rushing to Get to Slow Chocolate

2008-08-28T07:57:00.005-05:00

It's Thursday morning, 9am. I find myself stuck in an airport. I'm hoping that I'll get out of Pittsburgh, through Chicago, and on to San Francisco without too much trouble. I'm also hoping that all of that will happen before 6pm West Coast time, so that I can show up on time for the Chocolate Forum, taking my place on a panel next to (clockwise from the top left) Alan McClure of Patric Chocolate, Seneca Klassen of Bittersweet Cafe and Bittersweet Origins, Alex Whitmore of Taza (pictured with his cofounder Larry Slotnick), Art Pollard of Amano. Formal and informal talks about chocolate will continue throughout Labor Day Weekend in the Bay Area, since Seneca from Bittersweet is heading up a chocolate pavilion at the frenzied Slow Food festival, and he's also planning to cap the whole thing off with a chocolate roundtable at the Fort Mason building in the San Francisco Marina area.

(Photo of Alan McClure by LG Patterson)

The Great Guatemalan Pataxte Experiment

2008-08-23T22:10:00.007-05:00

I spent five weeks this summer in Guatemala, moving from cacao farm to cacao farm, and spending the requisite downtime in my old hometown of Antigua. Martin Christy of SeventyPercent.com also blogged about his adventures in Central American cacao this summer (we crossed paths), and he does a good job of sticking to the facts, rather then moving into the kind of "esoteric and quasi-philosophical" writing (as one of my family members put it last night) that I tend to do. But I do have one story worthy of some fairly straight-forward news reporting: Pataxte.

"Pataxte" is a local name for theobroma bicolor, a largely uncultivated cousin of cacao, whose oddly textured pale green pods could be props for alien brains in a B movie. Guatemalan chocolate makers sometimes replace some of their cacao with pataxte to bring down their costs. The stuff doesn't have a very glamorous profile locally, but international chocolate makers have been buzzing about the possibility of making candy with theobroma bicolor, since the seeds are pure white. When I drove to the coastal department of Retalhuleu with my friend Fernando (who was buying hand-peeled cacao beans for a new confection he's making at his Fernando's Kaffee in Antigua), cacao farmer Genaro Maldonado (a man with a careful hand at grafting cacao trees, knowledge of fermentation that he picked up in Honduras, and a generally phenomenal sense of how to lay out an orchard) cut down a couple of pataxte pods for us to experiment with. Back at Fernando's place, I enlisted the help of Josh Sermos, an American transplant who's whispering rather loudly about starting a bean-to-bar chocolate company in Guatemala, to process the stuff. Josh's plan was to churn out a pataxte bar, a project that was (arguably) so novel that it was worthy of a video:

A few days later, our foray into pataxte processing had yielded a couple of handfuls of semi-fermented, slightly burnt white beans. Josh wasn't confident that he was the man to grind, conch, and mold our microbatch of pataxte after all. I popped a roasted, peeled, pataxte bean into my mouth. It tasted vaguely like Passover matzo, which is to say that it didn't taste like much. Fernando and I had to come up with something creative.

Well, it turns out that, with a little salt, pataxte makes a decent mid-afternoon snack.

Obama Chocolate: Campaigning with Good Taste

2008-07-27T12:05:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama and his wife Michelle are known for being genuine, and they seem to genuinely like artisanal chocolate. The salted caramels from Fran's Chocolates in Seattle have become an edible symbol of the campaign, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's culture blog reports that owner Fran Bigelow is an avid Barack supporter. Carly Baumann of Cosmic Chocolates in San Francisco also has a sweet spot for the candidate, and Obama is one of her "Cosmic Icons" (along with Oprah, Al Roker, Madonna, Bono, and Snoop Dogg). And while the New England chocolatier Larry Burdick may appear to be impartial with a special election collection for each candidate (Arizona Citrus, Hot Pepper Tequila, Peanut Butter, and Kentucky Rye for McCain vs. Hawaiian Pineapple, Kenyan Coffee, Kansas Corn Crunch, and Tennessee Sour Mash for Obama), he has in fact hosted Obama campaign events in Walpole, NH, where his factory and one of his L.A. Burdick shops are located (the other is in Cambridge, Mass). In a 2007 article in The Walpolean, Burdick praised Obama's approach to health care and employment benefits and then stated that "He’s got my vote based on the amount of chocolate he eats!"

Chocolate Think Tank: Fancy Food Show Interviews

2008-07-18T16:30:00.004-05:00

Chocolate maker Steve DeVries (left) operates according to the slogan "100 years behind the times." In the context of DeVries Chocolate, that means, returning to preindustrial artisan methods. But in a larger context, the phrase is perfectly suited to my own life because it suggests mindful work, patience, and sometimes just simply running behind schedule. So a full three weeks after the event, here are excerpts from my conversations with Steve and some of his colleagues at the annual Fancy Food Show in New York:

DeVries Chocolate
Tell me about the chocolate meeting yesterday?

Steve DeVries, founder: It was a meeting of the FCIA, Fine Chocolate Industry Association. Art [Pollard, from Amano] was there, and Shawn [Askinosie, from Askinosie Chocolate] was there, and Alan [McClure, from Patric Chocolate] was there, and Larry [Slotnick, from Taza] was there, and I was there, and Gary Guittard [from Guittard ] was there. Frederick [Schilling, of Dagoba] was there. So that was seven or eight small chocolate makers. And Gary is not a small chocolate maker, but he’s like fourth generation! I mean, I don’t even know what my grandfather did for a living! You know, and he’s probably working with some of the same equipment as his grandfather.

So here’s a question, do you want to get bigger and distribute more, or do you want to maintain this equilibrium between small production and high quality that you have? Because it’s kind of cool.

Steve: Well, I can only speak for myself, but I really am trying to work with being able to do as good a chocolate as... I’m still in the process of learning what good chocolate means. The chocolate that we’re dealing with today is really the result of 100 years of industrialization that I don’t necessarily think was good for chocolate itself. In the plantations, there was 100 years of unlimited competition between cocoa growers, and they were just beat to death. Cocoa prices in the 1950 were like forty cents a pound. We saw those same prices in the late 1990s! People said "Don’t worry about quality, give us quantity." So, I mean, everybody’s going to be different. We cannot compete with the big companies on quantity. So it’s obvious that you’re going to have to stay with better quality. For me, it kind of all started with the heavy anomaly of bringing cocoa beans back from Costa Rica, roasting them in my oven, and grinding them. It was a rustic chocolate but there was a complexity of flavor that I’d never tasted in chocolate before. So the starting thing was "how could this possibly be? There’s companies with a couple hundred years' experience, multi-million dollars, and they’re flat compared to what I’m tasting here."

--

Grenada Chocolate Company

Can you tell me, why did you start the chocolate company, why chocolate, and what’s the distribution chain?

Mott Green, founder: Okay, well, I lived in Grenada for many years, just tinkering around, growing food on this mountainside, living in a bamboo house. I fell in love with cocoa trees and processing cocoa, at the time in a very simple way, which I learned in Grenada, actually--just to make a beverage, what they call "cocoa tea" in Grenada. And I fell in love with Grenada too. And I saw the whole cocoa crop in decline, and all of my cocoa-farmer friends were hardly getting anything for their cocoa, despite the fact that it was getting exported at some of the highest prices in the world. Because they were exploited and because the economy of scale of growing cocoa in Grenada is difficult. And for one reason or another, it went further into decline and the government kind of let go of agriculture. So over the years I developed this dream of making a small-scale, homemade chocolate factory right in Grenada, as a radical way to revolutionize the connection between growing the bean and the finished, highest-value product. And I had that dream for a long time, and then in '99 started researching and picked up a tinkering partner named Doug. And we went to his place in Oregon, and we started building machines and learning to make chocolate on a small scale. And over the years ended up a combination of antiques and machines that were sort of designed for other things and homemade machines, and then after years of work with kind of a shoestring startup, the budget took us to September of 2001, when we started the company. And we’ve been growing slowly. We went organic in 2003, thanks to the connection of a big cocoa farm down the street from the chocolate company, called Belmont Estate. And we helped them certify organic, to create the first organic-certified cocoa in Grenada. And we more recently started a cooperative, and now we have five organic farms, and every year we're trying to get more organic farms so we can grow. Our growth is very slow because we have to literally go through all the work of certifying one farm at a time, and we want to stay organic. As far as the distribution chain, it’s been really limited, we’ve only until now exported a small percent of what we’ve made. And we’ve made until recently about ten tons a year. And now all of a sudden we’re making thirty tons a year. And we’re going to export probably about two thirds of that. So things are changing. So far, we’ve just sent small air cargo shipments to people like Steve, our distributor here in Manhattan, and to a guy in California, a guy in Oregon who does some web sales, a couple of specialty shops in London. Very isolated little distribution. The reason we’re here [at the Fancy Food Show] is that we’re just getting to the next step where we’re, in a month, going to send out our first container, with probably about seventy-thousand bars, and stockpile that with an importer, and actual connections will start hopefully with regional distributors, and then we might start to get into a little bit bigger markets like Whole Foods and more places around the country. So we’re really in transition.

--

Taza Chocolate

Tell me about the chocolate event yesterday that everyone's talking about.

Alex Whitmore, co-founder: A bunch of us new bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturers, more artisan chocolate makers, in the United States, we all tried to get together and gather. And it’s kind of the first time that it’s happened that we’ve all been in one place and we all wanted to talk about maybe forming some sort of an organization or trying to work together to really make people aware that this whole movement of new chocolate-making exists, that we’re really different from all the other chocolate that’s out there. So that’s the big reason that we all got together. And then there’s all sorts of other reasons, like dealing with various issues of cocoa-bean sourcing, and all the stuff that we all have to do on the farm level or otherwise. And this is something that happened 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago, with the craft brewing industry for the beer guys. I mean, when they first started out, there were all the big breweries. And then there were like a few little guys making amazing beer. But they weren’t being recognized. So they all banded together and really generated awareness of what craft brewing was. And that’s sort of what we’re trying to achieve ourselves.

Alright, so what’s happening next?

Alex: Well, we don’t quite know what’s happening next. We had a very productive meeting. We took a lot of notes. And we’re all going to stay in communication over the coming months. And hopefully we’re going to regather again out in San Francisco at the end of the summer.

--

Claudio Corallo Chocolate

James Clark, US Distributor: People are discovering that chocolate has distinct flavors depending on where it’s from, and how it’s processed, and who grows it, and everything else. Claudio’s chocolate is one of two, maybe three, companies in the world that actually do a plantation-to-bar operation.

Who are the other ones that you know of?

James: There’s one in Madagascar, and then El Rey in Venezuela.

I’ve read about Claudio Corallo in Mort Rosenblum’s chocolate book, but I’ve never seen the chocolate anywhere. So that’s changing, I take it?

James: Yep, Yep.

Where is it available and how are you facilitating that?

James: Well, because we’re physically located on the West Coast that’s where we started distributing. We have several shops in Seattle, wine shops, specialty cheese shops, obviously specialty chocolate shops. Also in San Francisco, Portland, you know, those areas. We have one in DC now. The New York market we’re finding difficult to break into.

I think it’s a funny market.

James: Yeah, yeah, it is. Fickle market. So we’re not quite established here in New York, but we’re working on it.

And you can buy the stuff online?

James: Yeah, there’s a couple of websites actually. There’s claudiocorallo.com, which is done by Claudio, that’s more informative about the whole process. And then there’s claudiocorallochocolate.com, which is the e-commerce site, and you can buy it online.

Boston Chocolate: The Best and the Most Generous

2008-06-21T10:38:00.004-05:00

"I have to find Lee Napoli," I said as I walked out the door of my old roommate Paige's apartment in Boston last Saturday. I'm not sure how I expected to find her, since I all I knew was that her less-than-one-year-old chocolate shop was in the South End, as was the apartment I was walking out of. But I guess the fates were smiling on me that morning because as we walked down Tremont Street we came right up to an easel sign advertising the ChocoLee shop around the corner on Pembroke.

Paige and I walked in and found Lee hard at work, wearing her James Beard Award chef's jacket. I told her that someone at Boston University's gastronomy program had insisted I come to sample her confections. I decided not to mention that I was the keeper of a chocolate blog--it seemed a bit superfluous on a Saturday morning.

"What are you making?" I asked. They were Earl Grey bon bons, and Lee (a self-taught pastry chef and founder of the Professional Pastry Guild of New England) graciously began to explain the concept of infused ganache, but I already knew that the bergamot perfume that Earl Grey brings to dark chocolate makes that kind of bon bon one of my favorites. "Ohh, can I have one?" I asked with just a streak of teenage girl. Lee dipped two squares of ganache into a pot of tempered chocolate, waited a few seconds for them to set, and drizzled white chocolate over the top. She waited a few more seconds and offered them to us.

I asked Lee whom she thought the best chocolatiers in the area were. "The best chocolate in Boston is right here," she said, "there's no one else." I laughed. "I say that jokingly," she said, "but I do believe it." And a week later, after trying what was on offer at competitors like the new Aroa on Washington Street, I believe it too.

I asked Lee how much we owed her, and she said not to worry about paying for two little pieces of chocolate and sent us on our way. Paige and I were headed to the chocolate buffet at the Langham hotel. To get there, we had to follow the route of the annual Boston Gay Pride Parade, which was delightful--I'd forgotten that Massachusetts, with civil rights advocacy and health insurance for everyone, is such a wonderful place to live. The Langham buffet(with its frilly yet average desserts) is really better suited to teenage girls than chocolate bloggers--the best part of it was Paige being such a good sport in taking me there.

As usual, I ran out of time before I could do everything, but I did find my way to the Taza factory across the street from a commercial laundry facility in Somerville (near Cambridge). I'd tried their signature "stone ground" chocolate bars before but I'd always thought the unconched chocolate was just a gimmick, an attempt to do something different that sacrificed one of chocolate's greatest European innovations (conching is what transforms gritty chocolate into the smooth stuff that you can roll around your mouth). But co-founder Alex Whitmore (in between answering my questions about cocoa butter, pesticides, and antique machinery) explained that Taza's goal is interact more fully with cacao's places of origin than their competitors, not only by developing strong relationships with growers (they pay above the Fair Trade price for beans) but by creating a product that stays close to traditional recipes for preparing cacao. That's why Taza uses small molinos (grinders) from Oaxaca and turns out an unconched product. "I think we make the best Mexican chocolate in the world," Alex told me, "but I'm sure many people in Mexico would disagree." I'm not so sure--I tried the discs of vanilla- and cinnamon-flavored drinking chocolate intended to be blended with milk or water, and not only did I prefer them to Taza's chocolate bars but I preferred them to any drinking chocolate I've tried in Mexico or Central America.

By the time Alex and I had finished talking, it was about one in the afternoon. I had a flight to catch at three. I think Alex's partner Larry Slotnick asked if I was crazy and I think I said yes. So I helped Larry pack up some samples he was about the mail to Minnesota, I got into his car, breezed by one of the farmer's markets where Taza staff sell chocolate and meet customers one-on-one, and then rode back to the South End with Larry, who generously dropped me off at Paige's front door.

Some Day We'll Find It, the Praline Connection: Candy and Other Indulgences in New Orleans

2008-06-13T06:50:00.002-05:00

Five days is not enough time to spend in New Orleans. Five days is especially not enough time when you've curated a comprehensive collection of Cajun and Creole food suggestions from chefs, critics, and chocolatiers, and when you're visiting the city with every other hungry participant in the Association for the Study of Food and Society conference. I arrived, put down my bags, met a few of my colleagues, and announced my plans to head straight to the Praline Connection. I received a chorus of "that's just a candy store" replies. I believed otherwise, but it didn't seem polite to argue, so I followed a buoyant group of young sociologists and agronomists to Coop's, a cheap eats hub known for its rabbit jambalaya. Over the next several days, I also made it to Petunias in the frenzied French Quarter for spicy pain perdu (with so much sausage that I turned the leftovers into lunch while I was locked up in the hotel editing my conference paper), Iris in the neighborhoody Carrollton area (for sublime foie gras, beautiful snapper, and some kind of cocktail that included New Orleans rum, Campari, and prosecco), holes in the wall like Cafe Maspero (for muffulettas) and Johnny's (for Po Boys), and a privately catered crawfish boil amidst the mountable dinosaurs and Marilyn Monroe statues at Mardi Gras World. New Orleans foodie insiders recommended that I meet resilient B&B owner Patty Marino (of Bijou) and Slow Food organizer Poppy Tooker, but there just wasn't time.

Still, I did meet Mischa Byruck from the sustainable food organization Market Umbrella, who, after asking what I was interested in, got on the phone to an exgirlfriend and announced "I'm hosting this group of culinary tourists and they want chocolate!" She sent me to Magazine Street, toward Bittersweet Confections and Blue Frog--unfortunately, holding to the Big Easy's Catholic roots, both shops (along with many others) close on Sunday, the day I decided to visit. But down the block at Sucre, I got a hearty Southern welcome from food blogger Blake Killian of Blake Makes, owner Joel Dondis, and Joel's lovely wife Gretchen. Joel brewed me a cup of tea, pushed a plate of ethereal macaroons in front of me, and then invited me into the kitchen to sample chef Tariq Hanna's latest experiment at combining chocolate with the untranslatable bayou flavor known as "nectar."

And before the five days were out, I'd walked from the French Quarter towards the Bywater, passing the NOLA Rising free public art event, and finally settling in for lunch at the Praline Connection--not just a candy store. They had catfish, they had ribs, they had collard greens and mac and cheese, they had red beans and rice, they had gumbo--and, with the help of Howard, my uncle from Lafayette, Louisiana, I ate all of it.

The Praline Connection is also a candy store. And I've heard murmurs that they take so much pride in their sticky pecan patties that they've sometimes contracted out to other factories (including at least one in America's chocolate capital of San Francisco) to ensure the best quality craftsmanship for their classic New Orleans confections. Howard bought a box of chocolate pralines for his daughters, but after that lunch, I was done eating for a while.

I might have left New Orleans--and this story--without ever tasting a praline. I came up with the title for my adventures in New Orleans before I'd lived them out. Don, the Omni Royal Orleans' concierge brought everything together for me. As I sat in the lobby of the hotel, ready to head to the airport with a handful of other well-fed gastronomers, Don brought out a plate of pralines from the kitchen--the chef's secret recipe.

(Photo of Mardi Gras World courtesy of Blaine Kern's Mardi Gras World and NewOrleansOnline.com. Photo of Joel Dondis, Emily Stone, Blake Killian, and Joel's wife Gretchen courtesy of Blake Killian.)

Back to Pittsburgh Chocolate: Greenhouses and Pink Flamingos

2008-05-30T18:53:00.000-05:00

In the course of a week, about half a dozen people emailed me about the Phipps Conservatory's chocolate exhibit here in Pittsburgh. So just as summer weather was setting in, I walked through Schenley Park to the glass house that is perhaps as famous for the collection of Chihuley sculptures leftover from a recent exhibit is it is for the rare plants that it houses. The current exhibit, called simply "Chocolate!" takes a playful approach to the botanical history of cacao, showcasing plants like the vanilla orchid and chocolate mint. There are a few odd things about the exhibit. First, the cacao tree that lives at the Phipps year-round gets scant attention. Second, official exhibit materials get some of the facts wrong, facts as important as the location of Ghana (the world's second-largest cacao producer) on a world map. And third, there is absolutely no connection between chocolate and the exhibit's central motif: pink flamingos.

The second thing is disappointing, gravely disappointing. The third thing, though, isn't that much of a problem. It might be an asset. I've never met a lawn flamingo that I didn't like.

Exhibit designer Michele Frey McCann puts it this way: "I needed a way to light-heartedly represent our obsessions. I was searching for someone (or something) to dive into colorful pools of flowers to candy coat the 'chocolate;' someone (or something) to dip fruits into a 'chocolate' fondue fountain; someone (or something) to immerse oneself into the pleasures of a 'chocolate' spa treatment; someone (or something) to represent one’s favorite 'chocolate;' someone (or something) to shower oneself in 'chocolate' flavors; someone (or something) to enjoy chocolate desserts in a 'chocolate' garden where the pavilion, table, chairs, and other garden ornaments are all made from 'milk chocolate' and many of the plants feature 'chocolate' in their names. And at that moment... a vision of pink flamingos sporting rubber garden boots popped into my head…from that point on, these awkward looking summer birds became the stars of the show."

Fair enough.

Notes from Under the Pile

2008-05-21T21:20:00.000-05:00

Earlier this month, I acknowledged that during the academic year I never watch TV yet constantly fall behind. For the past nine months, my filing system has been made up of a set of interconnected piles of paper. Well, the dark days--and both semesters of the 2007-2008 academic year--are over. I had one appointment today, only one, and it lasted only fifteen minutes. I don't have a single deadline to meet for another two weeks. Since I leisurely crawled out of bed about twelve hours ago, I've idled the day away by watching television (or episodes of TV shows that I rented from Netflix and wouldn't ordinarily admit to watching) and moving papers off the floor and into the two new file cabinets that I bought.

Here's what I found in the chocolate pile (pictured):

Volume 116, Number 21, of Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, contains an editorial by doctors Norman K. Hollenberg and Naomi D. L. Fisher warning that "If the [chocolate] industry wants us to use chocolate as a health food, then they will have to change their behavior. Specifically, what the world needs is a label on each package that describes the flavanol content of the chocolate. It should be obvious that the percent of cocoa, like the color of chocolate, does not represent a measure of flavanols at all."
The Grand Tier Restaurant at the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center will serve the Viennese signature dessert, Sacher Torte, from June 30 to July 3 in honor of The American Ballet Theatre's staging of The Merry Widow.
The April 19 issue of Britain's learned magazine The Economist reported on the latest San Francisco bean-to-bar company, Tcho, of which Wired magazine co-founder Louis Ressetto is co-founder.
Home Miami magazine reported the opening of an Argentine restaurant called Chocolate.
A spam-like website offered an earnest news item about the coming of a chocolate festival to the Portuguese town of Obidos in February of 2009.
The website of South Pacific-based Islands Business International magazine ran a piece in April about cacao growers in Fiji hoping to jumpstart a chocolate factory in the country of origin--they also hope to win support for a movement to display the cacao pod more prominently (apparently it already is displayed in some manner) on the nation's coat of arms.

Now back to watching television.

Escape to New York: Sleuthing Mast Brothers Chocolate Bars

2008-05-14T09:16:00.002-05:00

As I mentioned to my friend Emily Testa at an impromptu chocolate tasting last night, I have a couple of chocolate informants in New York. The first is Rob Valencia, who's weathering the financial crisis as Citigroup's official pastry chef. Rob pointed me toward the plebeian Treats Truck driven by Kim Ima, who took an eight-hour round-trip bus ride just to check out the compressed-natural-gas-fueled vehicle that she now uses to deliver sandwich cookies and five varieties of brownies to fans at various street corners in Manhattan and Brooklyn. My second informant is David Arnold, a free agent in the chocolate industry, who suggested that we meet at the Food Emporium Fine Chocolates shop on Third Avenue, which opened just after this year's New York Chocolate Show because the supermarket struck a deal to exclusively distribute the German Coppeneur line in the New York area. The shop now carries bars and confections from fourteen different countries, and David recommended that I pick up Swiss company Felchlin's Bolivian Cru Sauvage 68% 60h (which means that the sixty-eight-percent-cacao mixture is conched for sixty hours, an usually long time), something I likely wouldn't find elsewhere. I'm munching on some of this "savage" bar now--it's velvety, and to use language that's equal parts pretentious and goofy, orange creamsicle notes underscore the solid structure of the chocolate. Still, David and I agreed that the shop lacks all the romance of West Coast chocolate boutiques like Bittersweet and Cocoa Bella. And while the Food Emporium has found good customers on Manhattan's Upper Eastside despite the financial crisis, we worried that too many products on the shelves were stale or out of temper. According to my informant, if I went to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I might find a couple of guys who were doing something more inspiring: The Mast Brothers.

A former Jacques Torres employee and his amenable sibling, the Mast Brothers may be Brooklyn's first bean-to-bar producers. I started doing some research on the guys. According to their website, they sell their products at the Artists and Fleas market, which is open every Saturday and Sunday from noon to 8pm. I found that information on Sunday at around ten, so I decided depart the Upper Eastside and get on the L train to Williamsburg. Down the street from the insanely enticing Surf Bar on North 6th Street, I found the arty flea market. I made my way through a book dealer's impressive collection of contemporary fiction and a display of red velvet treats from the Kumquat Cupcakery, but I couldn't find the chocolate brothers. A jewelry maker pulled out a couple of Florentine paper posters advertising the Mast Brothers, but she told me the guys were only coming to the market on Saturdays because they're working on a new project. She referred me on to the Spuyten Duyvil Grocery in the Williamburg Mini Mall around the corner. I walked over, but the place didn't open until 1pm and I had to be back in Manhattan for brunch--it was Mother's Day. So I took the L back to Union Square, ordered an omelet, and then invited my mother to come back to Williamburg. She accepted, we returned to the grocery, met the proprietor, George, and picked up a Venezuelan 72%-cacao bar, a 60%-cacao milk chocolate bar, the toasted hazelnut and milk chocolate bar, and the punny "Wyeth and Berry" bar (named for two streets in the neighborhood, with dried cranberries mixed into white chocolate). A couple of days went by before I staged my impromptu tasting back in Pittsburgh. We liked the chocolate well enough, and the packaging--the same Florentine wrapping paper from posters without any official ingredient or nutrition info labels--were charming. But I can't claim any orange creamsicle notes. The stuff tasted like, well, the vaguely familiar result of an attempt to do something different with artisan chocolate. I keep turning back to the same story--when John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg brought their homemade chocolate to a Berkeley farmer's market, they were doing something new and inspiring. Now there's an entire micro-industry of micro-batch chocolate maker, and the Mast Brothers are competing with Amano, De Vries, Askinosie, Patric, and now Bittersweet Origins.

I hope they make it. Rumor has it the Masts are planning a shop on North 3rd street in Williamburgh.