artisanal thinking

This blog began as a means to disseminate information about the process of making chocolate. It’s purpose was not only to share, but to provide a medium for me to think and refine my skills and process, and to plan a method of right action for the future. I have now approximately figured out how to make chocolate at a microscopic scale, therefore my recent posts have strayed from the principal aim of careful deliberation on the technical aspects of that endeavor. This again is such a wayward post, and my first true probes into the murky waters of apologia, however, the aims, though separate, are auxiliary to the original—together in a more abstract purpose, thoughts about technique and technology, which appear to me as two perpendicular axes to walk. The choice of what to become, artisan or outsourcer, is currently what I slowly ponder.

The genesis of this story was a meeting earlier tonight of this year’s Farmers’ Market vendors (and yes!, you may count me among them) where a sensitive nerve of mine received an electric pinch. This year is the first that folks with food stamps (here, they are tracked with a debit-like LINK card) can shop at the market. After the meeting, one colleague, I do not know who, asked the market director, “Has anyone raised the moral question of letting low-income people shop at the most expensive venue in town?” I wasn’t asked, so I didn’t respond, the director however, did beautifully, which I will relate in the argument below. But first, what statements are we refuting? I think the vendor was making two assertions, first, that the only place feasible or even appropriate for impoverished people to meet their dietary needs is at a ‘poor’ store like Wal-Mart. Behind this perceived necessity lurks the idea that ‘cheap food is bad food.’ The only way to eat cheaply is to eat poorly. Healthy food, in this case cast as the fresh, local and organic fruits, vegetables and grains available at the Farmers’ Market are, by nature of their quality, expensive to the point of being out of reach to one eating on a budget. The offering of such plutocratic fare to impoverished individuals the complainant finds highly offensive.

The market director’s response to the first idea was impeccable—all that is happening is that the suite of grocery options available to LINK card holders is being increased; one additional door opened. A tenet of the USA: no one is under duress to spend their money at this market. Similarly, no one should be forced to spend their money at Wal-Mart, which is what disbarring LINK from every place such as the Farmers’ Market would ensure. Viewed through this lens, the mandate that LINK be spent only at approved locations seems totalitarian and vague.

The more fundamental claim, and one that, with data, I will refute to the most bitter ends of the earth, is that the cheapest way to eat, the single option imposed by circumstances on the poor majority is to eat processed, eat the prepared food that’s offered and suffer the consequences of an unhealthy diet. To the adage, ‘cheap food is bad food’, I would agree, given the addendum, ‘to those ignorant or unwilling to prepare it themselves.’ Cheap, healthy food is within everyone’s grasp, if they take the time to make it in their own kitchen. It can be delicious too if they have a zeal for experimenting with recipes and flavor enhancers. It can be organic too, if they cook meals whose calories derive primarily from root vegetables and grain rather than meat. It can even be meat, if they buy the forgotten cuts (Jacob’s Ladder?!).

Consider Breakfast. As a processed food shopper at Wal-Mart, I’ll likely buy cereal; Cheerios cost $5/lb. I trade off between eating oatmeal or yogurt & fruit for breakfast, consider the former. Bulk organic oats and sugar cost at most $2/lb. Bulk organic raisins & peanut butter cost at most $4/lb, but at most 1/4 of oatmeal is made from these flavor enhancers, adding only $1/lb to the price of oatmeal. I can experiment with other things, spices, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom; or coffee, chocolate, apples…used in small quantities, all for similarly cheap or negligible prices. I can easily make a variety of culinarily interesting organic oatmeals for about half the price of Cheerios.

If anything should put my theory to the test, it would be the McDonald’s dollar menu. This is really bad food, but is it cheap? The best value I can find is the ‘McDouble’, which at a third of a pound, costs…$3/lb; it contains 390 calories for $1. But basing my whole 2,000 calorie/day diet on McDoubles, I would be spending $150/month on food. I beat that mark as an undergrad, can Urbana’s market?

It is getting to be early in the morning, so it is time to wrap this initial post up, but let me note that this subject is not new, and some are singing my chorus, but the adage persists. Here are two items from the Champaign landscape. First, beating me to every punch, This Little Piggy already posted about the controversy over Olympian drive and our Urbana mayor’s untactful comments which attempted to cast local purveyors of artisan cheese as out of touch with the hoi polloi who cannot afford their cheese or farmstead dinners. Behind the mayoral assertion was the assumption that their good food was in opposition to those who out of necessity ate cheaply or poorly, who ate at the food bank. Not all of the arguments, however, are reactive, responses to perceived untruths. One that gives me the greatest amount of hope is our local food coop’s ‘Food For All’ program. They actually designate specific actual food ingredients (not prepared/processed foods) in the store as ‘Food For All’, take lower margins on them, and give people the recipes to make them into meals on a low budget. One plate at a time, they give people the knowledge to assert that for them, ‘Cheap Food is Delicious Healthful Food I Just Cooked Myself!’

Recently, when I haven’t been thinking cacao, I’ve been drinking it. I’ve been steeping myself in two new beverages, cacao tea and chocolate milk. Very appropriate, this, since the practice of drinking chocolate predates the eating of same by a couple millenia! Before reporting my own beverage machinations, I’ll relate some of the interesting history I’ve drunk from my recent reading, The True History of Chocolate by Sophie & Michael Coe (thanks to my sister and brother-in-law for this!).

Theobroma cacao, the tree from which the cacao bean comes, is thought to be native to the Amazon Basin—spread throughout Central and Meso-America by early humans. We can trace the cultures that used cacao by testing ancient pottery for the presence of Theobromine, an alkaloid found in cacao. This alkaloid has been detected in delicate drinking vessels, dating to before 1400 BC, of the pre-Olmec civilization known as the “Barra”, located on the Pacific coast of Chiapas in Mexico and neighboring Guatemala. The picture at right shows another early American vessel, holding not hot chocolate, and these Cornell researchers think possibly not even the cold cacao froth popular with later American, Montezuma, but perhaps an alcoholic drink from the fermented fruit pulp of the cacao tree!

Ritualized cacao drinking among the elite classes of early American society unites the civilizations of the Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs. Mayan pottery, such as the piece at left, dated to about 500AD, found in the tomb of an aristocrat at Mayan site, Río Azul, contains the two instances of Mayan Glyph for cacao, and has tested positive for theobromine. Another, known as ‘the Princeton Vase‘, dated to around 750 AD, depicts a woman pouring, from a height, a cacao drink from one vessel to another—the earliest depiction of this method of raising foam in drinking chocolate.

In addition to pictorial evidence, texts, such as the Popol Vuh, a Mayan creation myth, reinforce cacao as a fixture in early American culture. In particular, it references cacao as among the food stuffs found by certain gods used to create the body of man. No specific Mayan recipes for cacao based drinks survive, but it is likely that they combined ground cacao with ground Maize to make a gruel, and with any number of spices and flowers used as flavorings.

It was the Maya, at Guanaja, who introduced Europeans, through Columbus, on his fourth voyage, to cacao beans. Ol’ Chris may have brought some of these ‘almonds’ back to Spain, but they were initially disliked and forgotten. In America, the Aztec civilization both carried on the Mayan customs of drinking cacao and finally fixed cacao in the minds of Old World denizens. The Mayans may have drank cacao as both a hot and cold beverage, but the Aztecs were firmly cool imbibers. They too valued most the heady foam that could be produced by alternate pourings from distant vessels. Similar flavorings were used—Maize for lower class chocolate, for the lords, honey, peppery annatto, dried ground flowers and chilis, a prized flower known as hueinacaztli (I can’t find much info on this, besides what is repeated from the book I’m repeating from!), vanilla flowers, and spices similar to black pepper or anise. Much of what we know about the Aztec cacao rituals comes from Spanish observers, primarily the writings of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, but also from an unknown soldier of Hernán Cortés, who remarks of chocolate:

This drink is the healthiest thing, and the greatest sustenance of anything you could drink in the world, because he who drinks a cup of this liquid, no matter how far he walks, can go a whole day without eating anything else.

True enough, as anyone whose made hot chocolate made with actual bars of chocolate or ground cacao beans, rather than partially de-fatted cocoa powder, knows that it is an incredibly rich, almost syrupy thing, owing to the balance of fat and solids in the cacao bean. One must show temperance and take care not to drink large quantities at once, lord knows how Montezuma reportedly drank 50 cups of cacao per day(!), or feel regret later when walking all day, trying to work off the calories and indigestion from this energy a-bomb.

Garden Mulch or…

From the New World, cacao was eventually adopted, sweetened and loved in the Old. For some time it was primarily a food that was drunk, until the process of refining it into bars was perfected, but let us toss inhibition, return to that ancient tradition and experience different methods of imbibition. As I may have mentioned previously, the cacao husks that are winnowed from the nib are not used, due to their poor flavor and texture, in making chocolate, but either discarded, composted, or sold as mulch (ed: from linked website—Q: Why is cacao husk better than other types of mulch? A: Smells better!). Or…it can be made into tea!

I think I first heard the idea when seeing a bag of some Yogi tea advertising chocolate and cacao husks listed as an ingredient. Ha! that’s a byproduct, I thought, and…something I should try. I now see that other gourmet tea manufacturers use husk, and one, MEM tea is even partnering with Taza chocolate to use their husk.

So now after winnowing, I’ve been filtering out the big husk pieces with a wire mesh, and saving them in large bags to replace my afternoon Irish Breakfast. As would be expected from something that is purposefully removed because of its lack of flavor contribution, cacao tea is a fairly timid, mild beast. The flavor is reminiscent of chocolate, but it is not overpowering in any sense. Aroma, however, is where this tea is really interesting. It gives of a heady scent of the ‘baking brownies’ smell, that one gets when roasting cacao. Half the pleasure of drinking this tea is the inhale before the sip. I enjoy it in English style, sweetened with just milk and seek it when something light and thin is preferred, in contrast to the following cacao beverage (or meal!).

Thick Chocolate

About a month ago, I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was into espresso equipment, making coffee under proscribed rules in an attempt to perfect the cup and had made a pact with myself to someday get a lever-press espresso machine. Then, lo and behold! a beautiful 20-year old espresso machine was bestowed upon me, a gift from this friend who had recently upgraded his equipment. I’ve since been enjoying a cappuccino every morning, perfecting my milk foaming technique to make the perfect thick hot chocolate, feeling inspired by a recent resurgence in interest in ‘traditional’ hot chocolate, notably that coming from Bittersweet Cafe. Over in Oakland, they are making small cups of rich chocolate, from what I remember (it was three years ago that I went there), using an espresso grinder’s doser to measure cocoa powder into water or milk, a milkshake blender to stir and homogenize the slurry, then the steam wand of an espresso machine to heat and foam.

More recently, yesterday, I did have the chance to do more research and stopped into Chicago restaurant, Xoco, where I didn’t get a chance to sample their food, but did drink their chocolate. They are using similar equipment and processes to me to craft ‘bean-to-cup’ chocolate, again attempting to rediscover Mesoamerican past in thick chocolate blended with water and spice. Mine was thick, with jewels of fat on top to prove that their actual chocolate—ground cacao, rather than powder was the ingredient, but I did notice it lacking the characteristic head that our Aztec woman pictured near the top is taking such care to form.

I of course am questing to make this, and with my new espresso machine, all I needed was some chocolate and milk (I’m trying milk for now, taking the final plunge to water sometime in the future). In the past, I would clean the cacao grinder by first heating milk and running it in the mill, to loosen and dissolve the final residue of chocolate that is impossible to scrape out. Then I would pour out this authentic thick chocolate and finish cleaning it with hot water. Of course, I can’t drink the whole cup in one day, and so in my fridge I found some saved chocolate, milk with 100% Madagascar. I also sacrificed authenticity by adding a teaspoon of sugar, not sure that I wanted the straight bitter beverage. With the chocolate already in solution, I foamed the whole mixture with the steam wand of the espresso machine, and coming to 160F, had a nice thick head of foam.

I didn’t use any flavorings like chili or cinnamon, but this chocolate was delicious. Due to its percentage, the chocolate is available to taste, and due to the head, it was their to feel as well, this truly is hot chocolate, not just heated milk, as I sometimes think of thinner beverages. I did drink this in one sitting, and wanting to prolong the experience, even refilled half the cup with milk and foamed again. I think I found the perfect dish to make with extra 100% chocolate, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with water, spices, even smaller amounts of thicker chocolate, and maybe ditching the espresso machine altogether, finding a large vessel to go at it with my molinillo or find another and pour it between two, like apparently even Moroccans do with tea, to create something more than a drink, evocative of food, and good food this is, hot chocolate with head!

’twas back in old September that I first received a first burlap sack of cacao. As was mentioned last week, I’m growing geometrically, and have obtained two more sacks, now giving 300lbs of cacao at my disposal. Sneak peek—I’m working to establish a direct trade relationship with individual farmers in Guatemala to get 500kg (or more!). But the milestone passed that necessitates these new supplies is that the primary is spent—last Friday, I roasted up the last of my original Panamanian cacao!

Sep-Feb 15th is 5 months, about 21 weeks. Starting with 110lbs of cacao, I’ve been making chocolate at the rate of at least 5lbs/week, evincing my predicted production schedule. For the second set of sacks, I expect my production rate to increase proportionally with the cacao available. Therefore nearing my birthday in July, I should be rising to find the third installment of cacao and at least one more level of geometric expansion.

More so than say, the first dollar I made, this first burlap sack I’ve emptied is an emotional souvenir I’ll proudly display for years to come.

Reemergence of Paradiso Pairings

Those who’ve watched me grow from infancy will remember the samples of batches #1, 2 and bars from #3, 4 that I brought to Caffe Paradiso last August. Five and a half months elapsed with no chocolate option for the independent minded coffee drinker, but all that was remedied just two days ago, Tuesday February 16th, with a renaissance of Flatlander Chocolate on the counter of our Caffe. This time with better labeling technology, diversity of flavor and strength, increased awareness and recognition, the response was ebullient, brisk sales ensued, all were satisfied.

Tuesday, ten bars, split between Côte d’Ivoire and Dark Milk Salted Caramel, were brought in about 8am and I heard that by 11:30, none remained. Being otherwise occupied at the time, I didn’t replenish the stash with a second decemvir until 4pm, another four of which were history by the time they closed. Wednesday I brought eight bars (running low on supplies now), substituting Malagasy for Ivoire and found similar desertion in the evening. Today, finding myself lonely with a lack of salted caramel, I tested the waters with a double dark offering, Peru and Côte, this time finding a couple stragglers at 8pm when I took them home, but happy with a respectable seven sales. I will be taking a break tomorrow, as my stocks have dwindled, and I need time to replenish, but once my army regroups, we’ll return in full force to the Caffe, sacrificing ourselves, along with our sibling bean, Coffea arabica, to tongues, nostrils, and Urbana hearts.

Phatlander?

Fie, fie, how franticly I square my brand!

Not quite in an attempt to reference the 19c story of spatial transcendence, but rather to try and give what I consider a ‘true portrait of Illinois,’ I’m rechristening the brand: ‘Flatlander Chocolate’. To me, a boy who grew up in the hills and forests of California…prairie? plain? no, planes are what my region of the Midwest entails, the stamp I feel and what of it I own. For an enterprise which has as its goal, the experience of terroir, of tasting a place, through chocolate, I feel a sense of the place of production is paramount. This and a desire for transparency is the original reason I chose, ‘Daniel Harry Schreiber, Chocolate Maker of Urbana, IL’ to be my original moniker. A name which has as it’s virtue that it answers three important questions one has upon meeting a new individual—who are you? what gives you passion? where do you practice it? We hope the new still gives a sense of our motivation and origin, but more succinctly so. However, I do still plan to sign off somewhere on the bar my trio of responses, that I may be an open book to all.

Signing off, concisely, or not.
Daniel Harry Schreiber
Chief Chocophile
Flatlander Chocolate
Urbana, IL, 2010.