artisanal thinking

This is ostensibly a chocolate blog, so my fourth batch and third set of bars from the Panama stock is where we may begin. Last week I was itchy because of the lack of beans, but they came eventually…and last Friday 5 from 25 pounds of Panamanian beans flew from my porch to the oven. I consider roasting to be the most artistic component of the chocolate making process and the area where I can most affect the final flavor of the chocolate. There are different directions to be explored in roast-space—as a novice, I get lost. Experts vary not just the final temperature they take their beans to, but also the way in which they get there, the ‘roasting curve’. Witness Graph A for an example of the science behind the deceptively simple act of applying heat to seeds. Note, that image was pulled from an article entitled, “Ruling the Roast: Reflections on Roasting Fundamentals” which appeared in Roast Magazine. With its own journal, one can tell that roasting is serious business.

My technique is improving, or at least, changing. When I first started out, I was consistently over-roasting my beans, bringing them near 300F, in the 280F range, I was getting comments on the lovely… smokiness of my nibs. Each iteration since the first, I have been lightening the roast, experimenting now with taking the beans just until the point that the husk easily peels off in my hand. As I roast less, less acidic compounds are burned off, possibly resulting in a more ‘astringent’ chocolate. We do this, however, in hopes of allowing more of the flavors and characteristics of the particular bean we’re roasting to make it through to the final chocolate.

So then, for my sixth cacao roast, I brought the beans up to only 250F, when I noticed that the husk became significantly easier to peel, and the flavor peaking at a nutty high. There were actually two batches in this roast! I’ve been scaling up my process slightly, and am now roasting about 6 pounds of cacao at a time. As an example of how we rely more on our personal sensory information than electronically sensed information, the first batch in the oven took twenty minutes to get to the point of nutty husk detachment, whereas the subsequent batch took only ten. This indicates the two roasting curves were distinct (pre-heated oven vs. not), however, since I combined the batches later, I can’t tell which makes a better chocolate!

Motivated by two ends, I again increased the length of the grind, currently at 26 hours. Since we are roasting lighter, and therefore more acidity is left in the beans, we may need more time to conche the chocolate. Recall conching is the long heating process, for me between 130-140F, that evaporates out bitter and acidic compounds from the melted chocolate. In addition, I still am getting a coarse texture to my chocolate, so I would be extending the grind anyways. Some have commented that they appreciate the earthy feelings that come from a little cacao coarseness, but irregardless, I want to know how fine it is possible for me to make chocolate. To increase the tension and shear between the granite rollers and slab of the melangeur, I bought a couple of 1″ key rings and have been using them as a shim in the hardware that holds down the rollers. The hope is to prevent ‘hard’ particles like crystals of sugar from hitting and bumping up the rollers, but by maintaining high tension, we’ll keep the rollers at a constant distance from the slab and increase grinding efficiency. Unfortunately the nut holding this assembly down is partly made of plastic, and if I go too far tension wise, this thing could break off, leaving me to have to buy a custom machined (and expensive!) aluminum replacement… The pictures above show the progression over 26 hours from more coarse to less coarse… but still coarse!

I also got some friends to come over after the grind to take a video of the tempering process, but unfortunately, the batteries in the camera I provided went dead after about 20 seconds. After tempering and demolding the bars with my would-be videographers, I invited everyone over for a chocolate wrapping party! We worked from about 10:30pm to 1am cutting foil and paper, wrapping bars in both, and labeling each by hand! A bottle of wine was passed around, and even though it was free labor, I think people really enjoyed themselves. I was also pleasantly surprised with how well the hand-drawn wrappers look, but am still planning on fixing a design and printing those in the future.

The final result—the flavor of these bars is a little more acidic, maybe more fruity and floral than the previous Panamanian batch, and I occasionally detected some caramel or dairy notes. I would venture that the slightly increased complexity was due to our different roasting technique. A friend suggested to me that we keep around a library of past bars, just so that we may make better such comparisons, but six pounds of chocolate really doesn’t last very long, ya hear?

Other Hand-Made Projects and Excitements

I wanted to use this blog to showcase other fun things made by hand. Non-virtually, I had a great opportunity to do so at last Saturday’s first Urbana-Champaign Mustache Ride, put on by cool people from The Bike Project! A couple of moths ago I heard about a great way to keep your face and neck warm while walking from yours to your neighbors shed in the middle of dreary Icelandic…or Illinoisan…winter—the ‘Beard Cap,’ by Icelandic design team Vik Prjónsdóttir! But who wants to trudge all the way to NYC and dispense with $135 buying this sardonic design? Especially if you have free time, five needles for knitting and some primo Merino Malabrigo yarn! Certainly not I. So I resolved to knit up my own version of this awesome hat (better than these other imitations!), and after a false start and some failed experiments to give the back some ‘hair-like’ texture, I finished the alpha release of Daniel Harry Schreiber, Beard Cap Maker of Urbana, IL…’s Beard Cap!

Then, while picking vegetables at the new student farm, a bike coop-er mentioned the mustache ride and I knew I had to show up with my hat. There was an alleycat race/ride, which is a sort of bike obstacle course, where locations, but not routes are given, and you have to ride to each, in any order, following your own shortest path, then at every location, you do some silly thing. The hook for this ride was that everyone must wear a real or fake mustache…with facial fiber competition before the race. As you can imagine, I was a favorite in the fake’stache competition, coming in second place behind the gent on your right. The mustache ride was great, especially because it was the perfect opportunity to show off the independently knit beard cap.

YMCA Dump and Run Finds

The final piece of excitement last week (at least in the context of this post), was the YMCA ‘Dump and Run’/free sale. The day after the mustache ride, with a new friend I had met there, I went to the U of I Stock Pavilion to see if the YMCA was offering anything of interest. To my surprise, I found several chocolate molds or things which could be used as such. The first set were two trays of plastic molds, much like what I’ve ordered online to mold my bars, but the shapes in these are special. Each slot is a circle with the bust of a cute little cat holding a Halloween pumpkin, with the lid of the pumpkin on the cat’s head—precious. I’ve been calling these the cat-moon molds, and used them both to mold some of the Panamanian batch #4. We also found some pink and yellow egg-molds which are supposed to be used for jello, but I think will work fine for chocolate. To use them, you close the two halves, and pour melted chocolate through a hole in the top, hopefully if it doesn’t stick and you get a big, solid egg shaped chocolate. And finally, we found some silicone muffin cups. I think I won’t need to use these, and I haven’t yet used the egg molds, but I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough molding capacity, these are my backups.

While walking around another part of the free sale, I found a wallet size photograph on the ground and turning it over, discovered an especially hilarious love note. This has nothing to do with chocolate, and I hope no one is offended by my posting this here, however I really feel the urge to spread not only love of chocolate, but also love of cloven-hoofed animals, especially those which provide us with such delicious milk (whose powder can be used to make chocolate!)—viva la cabra!

My body is addicted to the craft of chocolate making. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to make chocolate, and haven’t had any personal chocolate in my possession all week. I was supposed to receive 25 lbs of Panamanian, 10 lbs of Peruvian beans, plus a needed increase in my molding capacity on Tuesday, but it seems the boxes were slow to ship, and I am only just receiving some beans today, and more molds on Monday… With proper timing, I can roast several batches of beans this weekend, begin grinding them Sunday, and be tempering as the new molds (hopefully) arrive Monday. Previously my batches have been about 3 pounds each, but with more molds, I can increase to about 6 pounds. As I scale up, each phase of the process will eventually become a bottleneck and I’ll have to augment each in turn—this weekend, I’ll be going to buy another steel bowl for winnowing, and more baking sheets for roasting.

On another front, a friend of mine may be interested in doing some wrapper design! It will be good for her portfolio, because the design will actually be used, good for me of course, and we will all end up with more chocolate in our coffers. For all the designers reading this blog, if such a deal would interest you too, please get in contact! Finally, many friends have been expressing interest in being involved with part of the process. Though it would be wonderful, I’m not exactly sure whether people want to sit around with me, say while waiting for beans to cool so we can crack them into nibs and then perform the somewhat labor-intensive process of winnowing… So we’ve hit upon (well stole) the idea to hold some chocolate wrapping parties. After demolding the next batch of bars, we’ll invite over friends, unscrew some beer and wine, and get together to clothe our bars in foil and love.

Concluding Projections; Now, Reflections

At a potluck yesterday, it was noted that from ‘artisanal’, we can deduce that:

as in, anal retentive—an OCD manifested in craft as: concern with detail, with perfection in process and with the quality of the outcome. A nice observation I think, which left me wondering what else this title could inspire? With some enumerative help…doggerel:

As an artisan, I, begin my poem, alias, rant. Like Dickinson, truly, I sing an aria, slant. A pall covers all, a salt rain, that is industry. The disrupting bullet, a slain art we revive. Craft! In the Satan lair we cause a anal stir, a alter sin, our crime. For, we reject standardization, diversity of flavor and experimentation, our end. We produce quality achievable only in slow, small batches: the mascot of our art, a snail. Opposite that is a liars tan, branding those obsessed with economies of scale. Of craft, I may not be a natal sir, but slow comes illumination, the will to take part in a nasal art. I, though thin, I snarl at a king. This is my artisanal thinking.

My, what a difference a week makes… For, this past Wednesday, August 12, 2009, after having wrapped them with foil, sheathing them with a paper band and labeling each bar by hand—I took my chocolate to the market. Our local Caffe Paradiso, that is, where I arranged a cardboard box with a bag of sample squares then stocked it with three small and six large bars. Truthfully, two small bars, since I had sold one to a very awesome gentlewoman waiting outside with me for the coffee house to open. The day previous to this, I had already made my first sales to friends and fellow grad students around the building…but Wednesday was a milestone achieved by taking what I consider on the path towards finished, polished bars, with taste, texture and packaging that I am proud of, and selling them on the ‘open market’ to folks who have no vested personal interest in me. In fact I satisfied a personal life goal of mine to make and sell some useful, functional product. How empowering chocolate has been in the past week!

Muralists on the Prowl at the Media, Independent

Another apex of the previous seven days was a fantastic and philosophical community art project. Chris Hampson has been preparing a medium-size concrete wall located on the back side of the Independent Media Center for a collaborative mural painting party/project. The wall was fluidly changing before finally settling down with a black background and about sixty square white ‘canvases’ arranged throughout its length. Last Friday it was a canvas—a group of citizens descended Saturday evening, with beats, buckets and brushes… naturally, I brought samples of fruity batch #2… we painted the wall frenetically, in some manners fragmented and individual, but at the same time fundamentally social, collaborative and altogether beautiful. Yesterday a friend and I walked back over to the IMC and took a sequence of pictures that I tried to stitch together into a composite photo of the completed mural. It’s not a perfect representation, especially with a car inconveniently in my line of sight, but the purpose is just to give you a taste, hopefully you will view the mural in person.

see the full panoramic image

Heartbreaking Collaborations of Staggering Genius

Layer upon layer, this week kept stacking excitement and community interaction. Returning to Paradiso Wednesday night to close out my box of chocolate, I found that all but two large bars had sold (I think people really prefer the size of the smaller bars…). I was extremely pleased with my success, being an unknown chocolate maker and inspiring people to take a chance, however, what could I do with the two that remained? I decided to give one to the marvelous people who work behind the cafe counter, and seeing my artistic friend Fred sitting outside the door, I offered him a trade. Asking Fred whether he had any pieces of art to exchange for my last squares of Panamanian chocolate, he responded that he had the perfect drawing to barter. Thus the following day I received one sixth of a larger drawing of his, ’space/time progressions’, which you see pictured to the top-right of this post—I clearly got the better end of this deal. It is also worth pointing out that this satisfies another personal goal of mine—to barter for an item with payment other than currency.

In a last triumph of Champaign-Urbana community, I later checked my email to find that one fellow who had picked up a Paradiso bar sent me a message about the chocolate he was eating! I was astounded at the feeling of closeness and directness my market experience engendered and I took some time to revel in the fudgy bite of humanity:

Very nice. I think its grain is a little coarser than I get in Lindt or Vosges or other big commercial makers, which makes for a slightly fudgier bite — I guess this is a product both of the grinding and the sugar? The beans are great, very bright and cherry-y.

I’m really glad I picked it up, and I look forward to trying more!

Most certainly I look forward to providing the populace with more chocolate. Currently I am waiting for my second shipment of beans to come in, this time 35lbs! Hopefully by the end of next week we can do this again.